This website is a collection of my journalistic work spanning 25 years. Here you will find reporting from North Korea, dispatches from pre-9/11 Afghanistan and commentary on what makes Vladimir Putin tick.
I have spent most of my life studying Russia and the countries that emerged from the Soviet empire. For my generation, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was a defining historical moment that paved the way for the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the unification of Europe and the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
I was born in Charleston, Illinois, in 1970. I earned a bachelor’s degree in geography and foreign languages from Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, studied journalism at the University of California at Berkeley and graduated from the master’s program in nationalism studies at Central European University in Budapest. Besides English, I speak German, Russian and French.
I started my career in 1996 as Berlin correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor, covering Germany, eastern Europeand Central Asia. In 2003, I moved to Moscow, where I became the business editor and a columnist for The Moscow Times. From 2006 to 2010, I covered Russian energy giant Gazprom and Putin’s government for Bloomberg News.
In 2011, I started a blog chronicling the Moscow protest movement. In subsequent years I blogged on my travels to Sochi and Chechnya, and covered the Ukraine conflict for news organizations such as BuzzFeed, Newsweek and Germany’s Zeit Online (hier klicken für Artikel auf Deutsch). At the same time I became a regular contributor to Slate and Reuters.
I worked as National Public Radio’s Moscow correspondent from 2016 to 2021. Subsequently I was a fellow at the Kennan Institute of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, where I wrote my first book, Putin’s Revenge: Why Russia Invaded Ukraine, which will be available from Columbia University Press at the end of 2024.
I currently work as a Ukraine analyst at International Crisis Group.
Please click here to view my CV.
