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Please join the Delacorte Center for Magazine Journalism and the Harriman Institute for a discussion with Joshua Yaffa, contributing writer for The New Yorker. Moderated by Keith Gessen.
Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year, Joshua Yaffa, who spent a decade living and reporting in Russia, has traveled across Ukraine—where he also has deep experience as a journalist—witnessing the war up close and publishing regularly in The New Yorker. He will share his impressions from his numerous reporting trips, which began in the early, fraught days in Kyiv, when the capital was the primary target of the Russian military; to Kharkiv, a historically Russian-speaking city that has faced relentless rocket and artillery fire; from the decimated towns of the Donbas to Zaporizhzhia, a regional capital in the south that became a waystation for Ukrainians fleeing the horrors of Mariupol and elsewhere. Yaffa will describe how the conflict looks and feels on the ground, whether for civilians trapped under bombardment or newly enlisted soldiers. He will also discuss a number of key questions at the start of the war’s second year. What has been the role and effect of Western military aid? What sort of end to the fighting is possible? And how will both Russia and Ukraine be forever changed as a result?
Joshua Yaffa is a contributing writer for The New Yorker. He is also the author of Between Two Fires: Truth, Ambition, and Compromise in Putin’s Russia, which won the Orwell Prize in 2021. For his work in Russia, he has been named a fellow at New America, a recipient of the American Academy’s Berlin Prize, and a finalist for the Livingston Award.
Photo: Max Avdeev
