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Hello and welcome to Women of Balls,

where I, Katie Balls, speak to today's Trailblazers.

My guest today was born in the Midlands,

but has spent much of her life looking eastwards.

At college, a teacher had learned Russian and military,

so she took it up on the grounds that it sounded exotic. It paid off.

She went on to study Russian and French at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, and went to the country

as part of her year abroad at a time when the Soviet Union was falling apart.

On that trip, she flew to Uzbekistan for a dollar, but then got stuck there as nobody

knew how to operate independent

airlines. After briefs, there's a bartender at a pub frequented by the St. Petersburg Mafia,

she started in journalism of an internship at Bloomberg TV. She later joined the BBC's Russian

service before moving to BBC News and working in Moscow, Istanbul, Madrid and Havana.

Soon after the revolution in Kiev in 2014, she moved back to Russia and became the BBC's Moscow correspondent.

This August, she was expelled from Russia by the Kremlin, with her rights to report of the country revoked permanently.

Speaking to the Today programme, she said,

Many people I've interviewed in the past

have now left Russia for safety. I never thought for a moment that I'll be joining them on the

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