Terrell Jermaine Starr is a non-resident senior fellow at the Center for International Policy. The Detroit native is an independent American journalist widely known for his coverage of the current Russian invasion of Ukraine. He is the founder and host of Black Diplomats, a weekly podcast reporting on foreign affairs and Eastern European politics. Terrell has been a Fulbright grantee and was formerly a nonresident Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council's Eurasia Center. Conversant in Russian, Ukrainian, and Georgian, he is a recognized authority on Ukraine-U.S. relations, Georgian politics, Central Asia, and American democracy.

As a journalist, he is probably one of the few foreign affairs reporters who compares diplomacy to the narcotics trade. In fact, one of his most popular columns compared Russian President Vladimir Putin to fictional drug lord Marlo Standfield on the HBO series The Wire. 

That’s Terrell’s approach to foreign affairs news in a nutshell: making things simple and relatable to the everyday listener. His work focuses on U.S. domestic politics, racism in the U.S. and abroad, Eastern European affairs, and other foreign policy issues. Each week on his Black Diplomats podcast, Terrell gives his take on world affairs with the help of expert guests indigenous to the regions being discussed. Black Diplomats is formatted to amplify the voices of Black and other non-white experts on foreign policy. 

Terrell’s sixteen years in journalism include stints as FUSION’s national political correspondent covering the 2016 presidential campaign. From 2017 to 2021, he served as The Root’s national political correspondent. Among the many notable interview subjects he interviewed while covering the 2020 presidential race and the 2018 midterm elections are political powerhouses Kamala Harris, Stacey Abrams, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren. Before that, he was a senior reporter at Foxtrot Alpha, a site that focuses on military, technology, and policy. He is also a contributor to Foreign Policy magazine, the Washington Post, Outrider, and O, the Oprah Magazine. 

Terrell was in Kyiv when the Russian invasion of Ukraine began in 2022 and his live, on-the-ground video stories for television networks such CNN, MSNBC, and Al Jazeera introduced his unique style of reporting to millions of people around the globe. 

As a Peace Corps volunteer in Georgia from 2003 to 2005, Terrell witnessed the Rose Revolution that peacefully ousted Eduard Shedverdnadze in favor of Mikhail Saakashvillli; he was also a Georgian language student in the capital of Tbilisi in 2008 when Russia invaded the country. Terrell lived in Ukraine as a Fulbright fellow and a freelance journalist from 2009 to 2010, during which time he produced a photojournalism project on the lives of Black Ukrainians. 

Terrell has a master’s degree in Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies where his work focused on the EU’s integration of former communist states and a second master’s in Journalism from the University of Illinois. He earned his bachelor’s degree in English at Philander Smith College, a historically Black college in Little Rock, Arkansas.

While he is based in Brooklyn, New York, Terrell spends much of his time in Ukraine and regularly travels to Central Asia and Western Europe for reporting assignments.