The Centre for Russian and Eurasian Initiative (CENREI)

The Centre for Russian and Eurasian Initiative (CENREI), a non-government foundation established at the end of 2017 in Lithuania. It was initially created to implement projects in Russia and later in Belarus and was used as a non-public legal entity to get funding from US-based and European donors for research and human rights projects. It later expanded its activities to other post-Soviet countries. CENREI has always been working in close partnership with the Conflict Analysis and Prevention Center (CAPC), a human rights group and research center active in post-Soviet countries. CAPC has been the initial creator and co-manager of this project’s network of human rights defenders, psychologists and care workers. CAPC mission is to provide nuanced and accurate field-based policy analysis of violent conflicts, human rights violations and political violence and implement projects that will minimize the likelihood of deadly violence and grave human rights violations, facilitate post-crisis rehabilitation of victims and support human rights defenders and journalists. To be able to build a secure and effective support structure for NGOs in post-Soviet region CAPC was registered in Turkey even though all of their team members are Belarussians, Russians, Ukrainians. However, recently Turkey has been getting increasingly authoritarian and in good terms with the Putin’s regime, thus in 2025 CAPC decided to merge administratively with CENREI and now its team is working under the auspices of CENREI, some of CAPC’s projects have also been moved to CENREI. Due to this merger and CENREI’s low profile it is in a unique position to operate in dictatorships - Russia, Belarus, Azerbaijan and Georgia.