Lesia Vasylenko

Lesia Vasylenko was elected to the Ukrainian Parliament, the Verkhovna Rada, in 2019. She is a member of the Ukrainian permanent delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe and has been president of the Bureau of Women Parliamentarians of the International Parliamentary Union since early 2021. As the chair of Ukraine’s Parliamentary Committee on Climate Change, Lesia leads efforts to advocate for more robust government commitments to de-carbonisation and an equal stance to economic and environmental development.

Lesia has been an outspoken critic of Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine since 2014. She is the founder of Legal Hundred, an NGO providing legal aid and support for war veterans, and she regularly provides her 300,000 Twitter followers across the globe with updates about the situation on the ground.