Hanna is a non-resident fellow at the Atlantic Council. She has written about the latest developments in Belarus for The Washington Post, The Economist, Deutsche Welle, and other international outlets. She started her career at the only independent Belarusian channel Belsat TV, now banned by the regime in Minsk. Liubakova reported in four languages from various countries and regions, including Belgium, the UK, Poland, and Chechnya. She is currently writing a book about Belarus.
Liubakova is widely recognised as one of Belarus’s leading voices of the free press. Her coverage of the protests against the authoritarian regime of Aliaksandr Lukashenka garnered significant attention. She was forced to flee Belarus and later learned she was on the regime’s wanted list. Despite this, she has continued to report on the people’s resistance, which has become even more crucial amid the Belarusian regime’s participation in the war against Ukraine.
Liubakova won the 2023 One Young World Journalist of the Year Award. In 2021, she was a European Press Prize finalist. In 2019, she was the first fellow from Belarus chosen to participate in the World Press Institute Fellowship in the US.
Hanna holds an MA with distinction in International Journalism from Brunel University London, where she won the Peter Caws Prize for best postgraduate dissertation in 2017. She also received the Vaclav Havel Journalism Fellowship at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in 2014.