The latest issue of Think Global People magazine is out now!

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“The past few years have been a whirlwind—geopolitical tensions, economic upheavals, and a pandemic that reshaped the world,” she says. “These challenges don’t just make headlines; they are the reality we have to deal with on a daily basis.”When thinking back to the start of her career journey, she could never have predicted the sheer complexity of what moving people across borders would mean today. The landscape of relocation has shifted dramatically, not just because of changing policies but because of the world itself—its conflicts and tensions that still dictate so much of daily life.Irina was born into a Jewish Ukrainian family in Moscow with strong family roots in Ukraine and Israel but left Russia at the start of the war in Ukraine. Now she runs a global mobility company from the UK but with a headquarters in Belgrade, navigating complex relocations across multiple continents, and leading a team of 180 people in the midst of geopolitical upheaval.“I grew up in the Soviet Union and as a child, remember seeing a long queue outside a shop, not knowing what was being sold, but instinctively joining it because if people were lining up, it meant something was available.“I must have stood there for two hours before my older sister showed up, and we finally discovered we were queuing for tights,” she says. “Our mother was unimpressed, but we were thrilled. It felt normal to us: we played outside, we adapted to whatever was happening.”For a brief window in the 1990s, there was a sense of real democracy in Russia—a time when everything felt possible. And then, just as quickly, it disappeared.Seeking to expand her horizons, Irina studied at university in Moscow, then spent two years in Sweden, some time in Israel, and then moved back and forth between Moscow and other places.  Her background is in languages and cross-cultural training, and her mother was part of the first Peace March between the US and the Soviet Union in the late 1980s. Back then, it was still the USSR, and she joined the group as a translator, the only one in her area who spoke English. Being part of a Jewish Ukrainian family in Moscow meant existing between cultures.“As a child, that experience brought American friends into our home—something that, in Soviet Moscow, did not go unnoticed. Police would come by, questioning why we had foreigners in our house.”

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