Jens Siegert was born in 1960 in Germany, studied political science, sociology and economy in Marburg. From 1988 to 2001 he worked as a free lanced journalist. Until summer 2015 he was the director of the Moscow office of the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung, which he set up in 1999. He is an expert on Russian domestic and foreign politics and provided many publications about that, Russian-EU and Russian-western relationship and especially about Russian civil society issues. He published the books "Im Prinzip Russland - Eine Begegnung in 22 Begriffen" and "Wohin treibt Russland? Szenarien für die Zeit danach".