ukraine@war

Welcome to Ukraine@War, where I will be writing about ultra-competitive Ukraine-style politics for the duration of Russia’s further invasion(s).

I’m an Irish journalist from New York City interested in shenanigans and Ukrainian macroeconomics.

I was born in the United States into an Irish family and traveled around the former Soviet Union with my father, who was a U.S. diplomat. I worked at USM-5 in West Berlin at the end of the Cold War (81-85), before Detachment A was disbanded, and the State Department. Later directed Merck & Co.’s Scientific Network in Russia and Central Asia and OSI/BSF in Minsk. Since 1999, I’ve been running long distances in Kyiv and working as a journalist.

I speak English, Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, German, Latin and sign language. I also do magic tricks.

I support the principles of Open Society and think a lot about the interplay between tentative theories (conjectures) and error elimination (refutation), subscribing to Karl Popper’s view that scientific knowledge advances toward greater and greater problems in a process very much akin to the interplay between genetic variation and natural selection.