Tanya Richardson is an environmental anthropologist and associate professor in the Department of Global Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University. In 2008–18 she researched nature conservation and ecological restoration in Ukraine’s Danube delta and along its Black Sea coast. Since 2018 she has been researching the breeding, conserving, and trading of Carpathian honeybees in Ukraine and beyond. She has also written about a relict population of Danube newts displaced by the destruction of the Kakhovka dam. Her research has appeared in journals such as Geoforum, Current History, Ethnos, Science as Culture, Journal of Agrarian Change, and Canadian Slavonic Papers.

Arita Holmberg (PhD, Stockholm University) is an associate professor and senior lecturer in the Department of Political Science at the Swedish Defence University. She has published on security and defence transformation, military organizations, resistance, and, most recently, on animals and war. Her current research concerns the geopolitics of climate change, health crises, and animals, security, and war. Some of her recent articles have appeared in Geopolitics, Critical Military Studies, Critical Studies on Security, and other journals. Since October 2024 she has directed the cooperation initiative Campus Total Defence, which is an effort among 37 Swedish universities to contribute knowledge to civil and military defence.

Olha Matsko is a Ukrainian animal rights and environmental advocate and a long-standing member of the UAnimals movement. Since 2018 she has worked at the intersection of animal protection and public policy, with particular attention to the impact of armed conflict on non-human lives. Her professional experience includes coordinating large-scale advocacy initiatives, international campaigns, and cooperation with governmental institutions and international partners. She is currently engaged in international advocacy efforts addressing the environmental and animal-related consequences of Russia’s war against Ukraine, including the #StopEcocideUkraine campaign.

Julia Malitska (PhD, History), is a senior researcher at Södertörn University, Stockholm (Sweden), which published her doctoral dissertation as the monograph Negotiating Imperial Rule: Colonists and Marriage in the Nineteenth-Century Black Sea Steppe (2017). In 2019–2022, Malitska conducted a post-doctoral project on the history of vegetarian social activism in the late Russian empire, with journal articles published, including in Media History and Global Food History. She is a co-editor of Consumption and Advertising in Eastern Europe and Russia in the Twentieth Century (2023). Malitska’s current project, titled “To eat or not to eat: Human health, scientific knowledge, and the biopolitics of meat in Eastern Europe in 1860s–1939,” deals with the intertwined histories of food, scientific knowledge, and animals in the late Romanov empire and early Soviet Union.