Viktorija Starych-Samuolienė
Co-President (Strategy)
Viktorija Starych-Samuolienė is Co-President and Director of Strategy at the Council on Geostrategy, where she leads the organisation’s strategic and operational scaling, fiscal sustainability, and high-level institutional partnerships.
Viktorija has a track record of overseeing and delivering high-level conferences and forums, including flagship conferences for the Royal Navy, events under the Sea Power Laboratory programme, and the AUKUS APPG Secretariat for the UK Parliament. She navigates complex environments and convenes high-level decision-makers, and translates policy discussion into wider conversation via the Council on Geostrategy’s exclusive events series: the Geostrategy Forum, Whitehall Briefings, and Sea Power Series, which feature 1-4* officers, civil servants, diplomats, and cabinet-level politicians among other strategic figures.
Viktorija is co-creator and co-host of the Defence Talks: Securing UK Advantage podcast, produced in partnership with BAE Systems and ADS Group. She also provides expert analysis for outlets including Sky News, Times Radio, LBC, and The Sun, and has written for and been quoted in The Times, Newsweek, Sunday Express, Mail Online, and Politics Home. She is a frequent speaker at both national and international security conferences, including DSEI UK, the London Defence Conference, and the World Economic Forum, as well as at universities.
Viktorija is a Fellow of the Durham Institute for Research, Development, and Innovation (DIRDI), where she is Deputy Director of the National Strategic Research Group, and a Research Fellow at the University of Oxford’s Strategy, Statecraft, and Technology (SST) Centre within the Changing Character of War (CCW) Centre. She holds an MA in Intelligence and International Security from King’s College London and a BA in Political Science from Vilnius University.