Joshua Yaffa

Contributing Writer for The New Yorker & Award-Winning Author of Between Two Fires: Truth, Ambition, and Compromise in Putin’s Russia

Joshua Yaffa

Contributing Writer for The New Yorker & Award-Winning Author of Between Two Fires: Truth, Ambition, and Compromise in Putin’s Russia

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Biography

Joshua Yaffa is a contributing writer for The New Yorker, where he covers Russia and Ukraine and Western policy in the region. Since Russia's invasion in 2022, he has made numerous reporting trips to Ukraine, traversing much of the country, spending time with soldiers, politicians, and those whose lives have been upended by war. He is also the author of Between Two Fires: Truth, Ambition, and Compromise in Putin’s Russia, which won the Orwell Prize for Political Writing in 2021. It was also named a New York Times Editors' Choice and one of the best books of the year by N.P.R. The Times called Between Two Fires “a deep and revealing portrait of life inside Vladimir Putin’s Russia;" The Economist wrote, “A wonderfully insightful book...It is to Mr. Yaffa’s credit that in general he avoids simplifying. Even when he describes people who seek cynical advantage from the powerful, the picture is never completely dark; when he portrays moral heroes, he never presents them as infallible.” Foreign Affairs declared, “Joshua Yaffa has distinguished himself with his rigor, his acumen, and his nuanced voice.”

Yaffa is among the premier authorities on Putin-era Russia and the impact and implications of its behavior on the world stage, and on matters of U.S. and Western policy, from sanctions on Russian oligarchs to arms supplies to Ukraine. He is an engaging, dynamic storyteller and presenter, calling on both compelling personal narratives plucked from his in-the-field reporting and higher-level analysis of the geopolitical forces and interests undergirding U.S.-Russia and U.S.-Ukraine relations. When, for example, Yaffa wrote a long-form investigation of the Russian mercenary outfit Wagner, David Remnick, The New Yorker's editor, declared: "Never before in Putin’s nearly twenty-four years of power have I read an investigation of Kremlin politics as revealing or as astonishing." Yaffa brings this combination of gripping, telling detail and big-picture explication to his public speaking. He is currently based in Berlin, where he is the writer-in-residence at Bard College Berlin; he previously was a fellow at the American Academy in Berlin.