RADIO FREE EUROPE/ RADIO LIBERTY

I I I I

I I I I I I I

RFE/RL Staff

Jan MAKSYMIUK is Regional Analyst with RFE/RL Communications Division. He writes on Poland, Belarus, and Ukraine for the daily publication "RFE/RL Newsline" as well as for the analytical and information weekly "Poland, Belarus, and Ukraine Report" which he compiles. He occasionally comments on regional and international affairs to RFE/RL's Belarusian Service and RFE/RL's Ukrainian Service. Before joining RFE/RL in 1998, he worked as a monitor with the U.S. Government's Foreign Broadcast Information Service in Warsaw. Maksymiuk graduated in 1983 from Warsaw University where he specialized in structural studies in solid state physics.

Maksymiuk is primarily interested in transition processes in Central and Eastern Europe. His focus on Poland, Belarus, and Ukraine -- with each country being in a different stage of the post-communist transformation -- allows him to observe and compare transition patterns in various political and socioeconomic environments. Since the three countries share not only borders but also much history as well as a great deal of common and/or conflicting interests, Maksymiuk seeks to reveal and highlight the interplay of those historical affinities and antagonisms in contemporary relations between Warsaw, Minsk, and Kyiv.

Jan Maksymiuk was born in the northeastern part of Poland in a community of ethnic Belarusians. In 1989-1993, he worked as a journalist in the Belarusian-language weekly "Niva" (Bialystok) and participated in political and cultural activities oriented toward the development of the ethnical identity of Polish Belarusians under circumstances of Poland's nascent democracy. He is the author of a book in Belarusian about post-war Belarusian refugees in displaced person camps in West Germany, which he wrote on the basis of his six-month research conducted among Belarusian ethnic communities in the U.S. and Canada. He also produced a number of literary translations from Belarusian into Polish and from other European languages into Belarusian.