Our team

Pavel Sulyandziga is a founder and the President of the «Batani» Foundation. Since the late 1980th, he became a leader of the Udege indigenous people in the Russian Far East. From 2001 till 2010 he worked as a first vice-president of the Russian Association of Indigenous Peoples of the North (RAIPON). From 2005 till 2010 he performed duties of the member of the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues and from 2011 till 2017, he was a member of the UN Working Group on Business and Human Rights. Ph.D. in Economics.


Dmitry Berezhkov is an Advancement Advisor of the “Batani” Foundation. He is a representative of the Itelmen indigenous people from the Russian Far East. Since the late 1990s, he became a youth activist in the indigenous movement in Kamchatka. After that, he worked as a fundraiser of the indigenous peoples’ information center “Lach”, vice-president of the Russian Association of Indigenous Peoples of the North (RAIPON). In 2011 he moved to Norway and established there the consulting company “Arctic Consult” where he is working today as a director and as a chief editor of the Indigenous Russia website.


Irina Shafrannik is a Finance & Operations Officer of the Batani Foundation. Irina is a representative of the Selkup indigenous people from Siberia. She graduated from the Pedagogical University in Tomsk and after that, she worked as an English language teacher. After several years she was elected a president of the Tomsk Regional Association of Indigenous Peoples and vice-president of RAIPON. Later she graduated from the Small Business Accounting School in Moscow and completed an internship at the University of Saskatchewan (Canada). She also studied the Indigenous Rights and Strategic Planning at the Centre for the Support of Indigenous Peoples of the North (CSIPN/RITC) in Moscow and the Conflict Prevention course at the UNDP training Center in Geneva.


Sergey Nikolaev – is a web-administrator of the Batani web-page. Sergey is a representative of the Sami indigenous people from North-West Russia. Sergey had been working for a long period as a service engineer at the Kola Sami Radio in Murmansk region where he was involved in the development of the web dictionaries of the Sami language. Today Sergey lives in Finland and continues to cooperate with Russian indigenous web-projects as a web-designer and administrator.


Our volunteers

Artur Kalandarov – is a student at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, studying Russian and History. He is a native Russian speaker from New York City who has been assisting with translations for the Batani Organization. On campus, he assisted with the Polar Bear Russian club, among other extracurricular activities.


Boris Sulyandziga is a volunteer at the Batani Foundation. He is a representative of the Udege people from the Russian Far East. He graduated from the Polar Academy (St. Petersburg) where he studied the “state and municipal management” bachelor course. After that, he played in the Russian Professional Basketball League in the Dynamo (Moscow) and the Spartak-Primorye (Vladivostok) where he became a bronze medalist of the Russian Basketball Championship. Later he completed an internship at the University of Tromsø (Norway) and became a member of the Global Group of Indigenous Youth Coordinators.


Andrei Zverkov is a volunteer at the Batani Foundation. He was born in the Far East of Russia. Andrei is a professional basketball player and coach. In his career he has played for three teams: Spartak-Primorye (Vladivostok), Uralmash (Ekaterinburg) and PSK Sakhalin (Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk). He has won many awards in his field incuding the National Basketball Champion in 2016, Silver medal in 2015 and Bronze medal in 2014 in the Super League. He also conducts trainings and lectures for the younger generation.