Religious Freedom as the Tip of the Spear of Comprehensive Security

Why does religious freedom matter in today's world? Ambassador Sam Brownback draws on decades of experience to explain why it is central to advancing human rights and strengthening global security. He also examines how Russia's actions and Ukraine's wartime challenges have brought new urgency and complexity to these issues. ---- Sam Brownback has spent decades in senior public service advancing human dignity, democratic values, and freedom of religion around the world. He currently serves as Co-Chair of the International Religious Freedom Summit and Chairman of the National Committee for Religious Freedom, leading global efforts to protect religious liberty and counter repression. From 2018 to 2021, Brownback served as United States Ambassador at Large for International Religious Freedom, where he worked across regions and faith communities to confront religious persecution and advocate for the rights of believers facing state repression. His diplomatic service built on a long legislative record focused on freedom, human rights, and the rule of law.   Previously, Brownback represented Kansas in the United States Senate from 1996 to 2011. During his tenure, he was a principal architect of the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998, landmark legislation that institutionalized U.S. advocacy for religious liberty worldwide, and the author of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000, the first comprehensive federal law to criminalize human trafficking and expand protections for victims. He was a commissioner with the Helsinki Commission from 1999 to 2010, serving as chairman from 2005 to 2006. While on the Commission, Brownback was outspoken about countering human rights abuses worldwide, particularly in Russia and North Korea. Earlier in his career, Brownback served in the U.S. House of Representatives representing Kansas's Second Congressional District and as Secretary of the Kansas Department of Agriculture, becoming the youngest person to hold that office. Honoring a term limits pledge, he left the Senate and ran for Kansas governor in 2010. He was inaugurated in 2011 as the 46th Governor of Kansas and was re-elected in 2014 before returning to national and international service. He is one of only six individuals in American history to have served in all four roles: congressman, senator, governor, and ambassador.  A native of Garnett, Kansas, Brownback was raised on his family's Linn County farm. He earned his undergraduate degree from Kansas State University, where he served as student body president, and his law degree from the University of Kansas. He and his wife, Mary, have five children and eleven grandchildren.    This podcast is hosted by Bakhti Nishanov and produced by Alanna Novetsky, in conjunction with the Senate Recording Studio.

On this week's episode, Bakhti sits down with Nastassia Rouda, director of Nasha Niva, a Belarusian media outlet operating in exile in Vilnius. Rouda discusses how she and her colleagues have used new types of content and social media to remain relevant and grow their audience inside of Belarus, even as Belarusians experience economic downturn and political repression. She talks about how she and other hosts on their network rely on humor to keep hope alive for a freer future for their country and maintain interest in free media among the millions of Belarusians of all ages who tune into their online shows.  --- Nastassia Rouda is the director of Nasha Niva, Belarus's oldest newspaper. Founded in 1906 upon Belarus's independence, the paper is best known for its role in preserving Belarusian language, culture, and art. The paper closed in 1914 as it became illegal to criticize their government during World War I and was re-established in 1991. In the 2010's, Nasha Niva moved online and became one of the most popular websites in Belarus. In 2020, following Nasha Niva's coverage of the Belarusian presidential election and subsequent protests, the KGB declared the paper an extremist organization, arresting reporters and forcing many others into exile.  Nasha Niva continues to operate from Vilnius, Lithuania and remains popular, especially thanks to their video content, which receives millions of views on YouTube and TikTok from Belarusians. In order to remain popular and relevant, the paper has innovated in a variety of ways since 2020, finding ways to evade censorship, recruiting young reporters, and developing comedic content. Nasha Niva's online comedy and satirical shows poking fun at Lukashenka and other political elites in Belarus are particularly popular. This podcast is hosted by Bakhti Nishanov and produced by Alanna Novetsky in conjunction with the Senate Recording Studio

On this episode of the Transatlantic, host Bakhti Nishanov talks to Georgiy Kent, who took an unusual detour after finishing his graduate program in May, biking over 4,000 miles across the United States to crowdsource funds for Ukraine. From the Oregon coast to Washington D.C., Kent interacted with hundreds of Americans along the way, engaging in dialogue about Russia's war on Ukraine.  ---- Georgiy Kent served as a Max Kampelman Policy Fellow at the Helsinki Commission, working on political and economic projects to hold Russia accountable for its ongoing war in Ukraine. He has worked at the Aspen Strategy Group, Harvard Kennedy School, Partnership for Public Service, and Atlantic Council. A graduate of Harvard College and Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), Georgiy specializes in security, economy, and state development in Europe, Asia, and post-communist societies. Today, he is an Associate for Research and Client Strategy at Political Alpha, a political risk advisory firm in D.C., but this summer he decided to hop on a bicycle and cycle across America to raise money for Ukraine. This podcast is hosted by Bakhti Nishanov and produced by Alanna Novetsky, in conjunction with the Senate Recording Studio.

Is the United States a nation state? Does it have a national identity? On this episode of the Transatlantic, scholar Colin Woodard discusses his early career experiences as a journalist in Eastern Europe and the Balkans at the end of the Cold War and how that work informs his work on national identity in the United States. He then talks about his current research uncovering what he describes as eleven distinct nations that make up the United States and how their clashing cultures and traditions have defined the country's struggle to form a national story and identity.    Colin Woodard – a New York Times bestselling historian and Polk Award-winning journalist – is one of the most respected authorities on North American regionalism, the sociology of United States nationhood, and how our colonial past shapes and explains the present. Compelling, dynamic and thought provoking, he offers a fascinating look at where America has come from, how we ended up as we are, and how we might shape our future. Author of the award winning Wall Street Journal bestseller American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America, Woodard has written six books including The Republic of Pirates — a New York Times bestselling history of Blackbeard's pirate gang that was made into a primetime NBC series with John Malkovich and Claire Foye – and Union: The Struggle to Forge the Story of United States Nationhood, which tells the harrowing story of the creation of the American myth in the 19th century, a story that reverberates in the news cycle today. His latest book is Nations Apart: How Clashing Regional Cultures Shattered America, released by Viking/Penguin in November 2025. He is the founder and director of Nationhood Lab at the Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy at Salve Regina University, an interdisciplinary research, writing, testing and dissemination project focused on counteracting the authoritarian threat to American democracy and the centrifugal forces threatening the federation's stability. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, a visiting scholar at the Minneapolis-based HealthPartners Institute and a POLITICO contributing writer. As State and National Affairs Writer at the Portland Press Herald and Maine Sunday Telegram he received a 2012 George Polk Award, was named Maine Journalist of the Year in 2014, and was a finalist for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting. A longtime foreign correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor, The San Francisco Chronicle, and The Chronicle of Higher Education, he has reported from more than fifty foreign countries and seven continents from postings in Budapest, Zagreb, Washington, D.C. and the US-Mexico border and covered the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and its bloody aftermath. His work has appeared in dozens of publications including The Economist, The New York Times, Smithsonian, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Newsweek and Washington Monthly and has been featured on CNN, the Rachel Maddow Show, Chuck Todd's The Daily Rundown, The PBS News Hour, and NPR's Weekend Edition. A graduate of Tufts University and the University of Chicago, he's received the 2004 Jane Bagley Lehman Award for Public Advocacy, a Pew Fellowship in International Journalism at the Johns Hopkins University School for Advanced International Study and was named one of the Best State Capitol Reporters in America by the Washington Post. He lives in Maine.   This podcast is hosted by Bakhti Nishanov and produced by Alanna Novetsky, in conjunction with the Senate Recording Studio.

Since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, it has also escalated a shadow war against the West. Using cyberattacks, destruction of property, arson, assassinations, and information operations, Russian agents sow chaos and fear, while probing and testing capabilities and responses in the event of a broader full-scale war. In a wide-ranging conversation, host Bakhti Nishanov talks to shadow war and energy expert Benjamin Schmitt about his experiences tracking Russia's sabotage attempts across the globe. They delve into Schmitt's quest to show the world how Russia's actions affect the lives and livelihoods of people throughout the West, a journey that has taken him from Chile to the Arctic to the Baltic Sea and beyond.  Read "Underwater Mayhem: Countering Threats to Energy and Critical Infrastructure Across the NATO Alliance and Beyond," here: https://kleinmanenergy.upenn.edu/research/publications/subsea-sabotage-protecting-energy-infrastructure-from-hostile-aggression/  --- Benjamin L. Schmitt is a senior fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, where he holds a joint academic appointment with the Department of Physics and Astronomy and the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy. He is also a senior fellow and the director of the graduate program at Perry World House. At Penn, Schmitt focuses on the project development and field deployment of the Simons Observatory, a new set of experimental cosmology telescopes and energy support infrastructure under construction at a high-altitude site in the Atacama Desert in northern Chile. In his joint role at Penn, he also pursues research and teaching with the Kleinman Center related to European energy security, critical infrastructure protection, export controls policies, and modern sanctions regimes. At Perry World House, Schmitt focuses on national security analysis focused on the transatlantic community and the Indo-Pacific, as well as emerging space security challenges. Previously, Schmitt was a research associate and project development scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, where he supported the technical design, project management, and deployment of novel instrumentation and infrastructure for next-generation experimental cosmology telescopes at the South Pole. For this work, he traveled to the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station in Antarctica in early 2020 and received the U.S. Antarctica Service Medal. Schmitt remains an affiliate of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and is also an associate of the Harvard-Ukrainian Research Institute. Schmitt is a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He is co-founder of the Duke Space Diplomacy Lab, where he is also a fellow of Duke's Rethinking Diplomacy Program. Schmitt is also a senior fellow for Democratic Resilience at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA). Previously, Schmitt served as European energy security advisor at the U.S. Department of State, where he advanced diplomatic engagement vital to the energy and national security interests of the transatlantic community, with a focus on supporting the resilience of NATO's eastern flank and Ukraine in the face of Russian malign energy activities. Schmitt has been an invited lecturer on energy, national security, and science policy at Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, Morgan Stanley Investment Management, the National Defense University, and more. He also regularly publishes in Foreign Policy, The Daily Beast, Newsweek, The Hill, Atlantic Council, and Harvard International Review. Schmitt regularly provides expert commentary for print, television, and radio, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Foreign Policy, NPR's Marketplace, BBC World Service, Slate, Vox, The Sunday Telegraph, Voice of America, Deutsche Welle, Bild Zeitung, Handelsblatt, and the Kyiv Post. Schmitt is a past recipient of the Government of Poland's Amicus Poloniae Award, has been honored as "Ukraine's Friend of the Week" by the Kyiv Post, and has received both Superior and Meritorious Honor Awards from the U.S. Department of State. Before entering government, Schmitt served as a NASA Space Technology Research Fellow while pursuing doctoral research in experimental cosmology at the University of Pennsylvania. For this work, Schmitt received both M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in experimental physics from the University of Pennsylvania. Schmitt has also previously served as a U.S. Fulbright Research Fellow to the Max-Planck-Institute for Nuclear Physics in Heidelberg, Germany. Schmitt is an Eastman School of Music trained classical vocalist with multiple leading operatic roles and solo concert performances on his resume. He is also a member of the United States Golf Association. Schmitt is a proud native of Rochester, New York. He resides in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. --- This podcast is hosted by Bakhti Nishanov and produced by Alanna Novetsky, in conjunction with the Senate Recording Studio.

For decades Western policymakers have struggled to understand the mindset of the Russian people and their leaders. This episode of The Transatlantic brings together two Russia experts who provide unique perspectives into the challenges American leaders often face when negotiating with Russian officials. Join James Collins, former Ambassador to Russia, and Wayne Merry, the officer in Embassy Moscow who authored a 1993 dissent cable predicting the adversarial turn of post-Soviet Russia, for a wide-ranging conversation about their combined decades inside Russia, a look inside the Vladimir Putin's world, and their thoughts on what will determine the future of Russia. -- Read E. Wayne Merry's Dissent Cable here: https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/32704-document-1-wayne-merry-dissent-channel-cable-american-embassy-moscow -- Ambassador James F. Collins is an expert on the former Soviet Union, its successor states, and the Middle East. Ambassador Collins was the U.S. ambassador to the Russian Federation from 1997 to 2001. Prior to joining the Carnegie Endowment, he served as senior adviser at the public law and policy practice group Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld, LLP. Before his appointment as Ambassador to Russia, he served as Ambassador-at-Large and Special Adviser to the Secretary of State for the newly independent states in the mid-1990s and as Deputy Chief of Mission and Chargé d'affaires at the U.S. embassy in Moscow from 1990 to 1993. In addition to three diplomatic postings in Moscow, he held positions at the U.S. embassy in Amman, Jordan, and the consulate general in Izmir, Turkey. He is the recipient of the Secretary of State's Award for Distinguished Service; the Department of State's Distinguished Honor Award; the Secretary of State's Award for Career Achievement; the Department of Defense Medal for Distinguished Public Service; and the NASA Medal for Distinguished Service. Before joining the State Department, Ambassador Collins taught Russian and European history, American government, and economics at the U.S. Naval Academy. -- E. Wayne Merry is Senior Fellow for Europe and Eurasia at the American Foreign Policy Council in Washington, DC. He is widely published and a frequent speaker on topics relating to Russia, Central Asia and the Caucasus, the Balkans, European security and trans-Atlantic relations. In twenty-six years in the United States Foreign Service, he worked as a diplomat and political analyst specializing in Soviet and post-Soviet political issues, including six years at the American Embassy in Moscow, where he was in charge of political analysis on the breakup of the Soviet Union and the early years of post-Soviet Russia. He also served at the embassies in Tunis, East Berlin, and Athens and at the US Mission to the United Nations in New York. In Washington he served in the Treasury, State, and Defense Departments. In the Pentagon he served as the Regional Director for Russia, Ukraine and Eurasia during the mid-nineties. He also served at the Headquarters of the US Marine Corps and on Capitol Hill with the staff of the US Commission for Security and Cooperation in Europe. He was later a program director at the Atlantic Council of the United States

In the years since it launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russia has subjected thousands of Ukrainian civilians to tortuous treatment in prison camps across the occupied territories. In this season premiere of the U.S. Helsinki Commission's podcast "The Transatlantic" Russian human rights activist Evgenia Chirikova discusses her experience searching for answers about what happens to those Ukrainians trapped in this system of terror and outlines the type of accountability she believes is necessary to bring the perpetrators of this abuse to justice. Watch Evgenia's two-part documentary investigation here: Prisoners. Part 1: Fates (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHldWCVigHM) Prisoners. Part 2: The System of Terror (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_K9Vy2AWGAg&t=2166s) Evgeniya Chirikova is a Russian environmental activist who rose to prominence leading a movement opposing the building of a motorway through Khimki forest near Moscow. She also played a prominent role in the 2011–2012 Russian protests following disputed parliamentary elections in Russia. She is currently based in Estonia. Evgeniya is the co-founder of the organization Support Net, which supports civil activism in Russia, helps Russian activists who face repression, and supports Ukrainian war refugees. Since 2024, she has investigated Russia's systems of terror in the occupied territory of Ukraine and cases of Ukrainian civilian prisoners. On July 1, 2025, she premiered her film, "System of Terror" in the European Parliament. For her active support of Ukraine in resisting the Russian occupation, she has faced five criminal cases in Russia on charges of "terrorism," has been arrested in absentia in Russia twice, was included on Russia's list of "terrorists and extremists," and was recognized by the Russian Federation as a "foreign agent." She has also served as a project coordinator, investigator, and journalist at the Open Estonia Foundation, and written articles for the Washington Post, La Tribune, de Volkskrant, the Atlantic Council, Postimees, and Activatica. Among other awards, she is a recipient of the James Lawson Award, Goldman Environmental Prize, and the Woman of Courage Award, presented to her by then-Vice President Joe Biden. She is a graduate of the Russian Academy of Economy and State Service and Moscow State Aeronautical University. This podcast is hosted by Bakhti Nishanov and produced by Alanna Novetsky, in conjunction with the Senate Recording Studio.

The Helsinki Commission's podcast is back! We are excited to be launching The Transaltantic, a podcast bringing you human stories across oceans, political divides, and intellectual traditions. Join our host Bakhti Nishanov as he talks to people behind the debates and developments shaping the struggle for freedom and security in the United States, Europe, Central Asia, and around the world. 

Transgender journalist Sarah Ashton-Cirillo, a U.S. citizen, joins host Alex Tiersky to describe her journey, first to Ukraine as a war correspondent, then her decision to enlist in the Ukrainian Armed Forces as a combat medic on the front lines, as well as becoming a high-value target for Russian propaganda, and the importance of pursuing the truth against a regime that thrives on lies.

The OSCE has been central to diplomatic efforts around Russia's war against Ukraine.  In this episode, Ambassador Michael Carpenter, U.S. Permanent Representative to the OSCE, discusses the ultimately unsuccessful diplomatic efforts to forestall Russia's full-scale invasion; the role of the OSCE in ensuring accountability for war crimes and atrocities; and the need to ensure Ukraine's victory and Russia's defeat.