Joshua Yaffa

Joshua Yaffa is an American journalist and a staff writer at The New Yorker based in Moscow. He has reported from Russia and Eastern Europe for more than a decade and is considered one of the foremost American journalists covering the former Soviet Union. He studied at Stanford University and the London School of Economics. His debut book Between Two Fires: Truth, Ambition, and Compromise in Putin's Russia (2020) profiles a series of individuals in contemporary Russia—a doctor, a filmmaker, a conservationist, an oligarch, an activist—who have each navigated the moral compromises required to operate within Putin's system. The book won the Orwell Prize for Political Writing in 2021, the Lionel Gelber Prize, and was longlisted for several other major awards. It is praised for its psychological depth, its reporting rigour, and its portrait of ordinary moral accommodation under authoritarianism. Yaffa continues to report from Russia and Eastern Europe for The New Yorker, and his reporting on the Ukraine war has been widely cited. He is considered one of the most important voices interpreting Russia for English-speaking audiences.