Contributors
Joshua Yaffa
Joshua Yaffa is a Moscow correspondent for The New Yorker and the author of “Between Two Fires: Truth, Ambition, and Compromise in Putin’s Russia.”
All Work
- Annals of Politics
Is Russian Meddling as Dangerous as We Think?
The spectre of foreign manipulation looms over the coming election. But in focussing on the tactics of the aggressors we overlook our weaknesses as victims.
September 7, 2020
- Dispatch
The American Prisoner in Russia Trapped Between Putin and Trump
The U.S. President and the bureaucracy reacted slowly to the arrest of Paul Whelan, who was declared a spy and sentenced to sixteen years in a Russian prison colony.
September 4, 2020
- Dispatch
What Navalny’s Poisoning Really Says About the Current State of Putin’s Russia
The most terrifying thing is not that Putin might have issued orders to kill perceived enemies but that anyone from the ruling circle can use the over-all dysfunction and impunity of Putin’s system to do so on their own.
August 21, 2020
- Dispatch
What the Removal of a K.G.B. Statue Can Teach America
Along with toppling monuments, exorcising history involves talking about and processing past crimes.
July 17, 2020
- Dispatch
How the Coronavirus Revealed the Hollowness of Putin’s “Vertical of Power”
The pandemic has shown that the Russian leader’s system is better at fostering a kind of psychic or virtual power than wielding real power in a time of crisis.
May 26, 2020
- Dispatch
Remote, Forbidding, and Infected: The Coronavirus Is Spreading in the Russian Arctic
The growth rate of new infections in Russia is the second highest in the world, behind that of the United States.
April 28, 2020
- Dispatch
How the Russian-Saudi Oil War Went Awry—for Putin Most of All
Unwilling to tap his country’s financial reserves, and facing a pandemic and ever-worsening oil prices, Putin became inclined to make a deal, but the details reveal its dangers for Russia.
April 15, 2020
- Dispatch
Why Is Russia’s Coronavirus Case Count So Low?
It is unclear whether the Russian state, in combatting the spread of COVID-19, has been lucky, smart with preëmptive measures, or dangerously incompetent.
March 25, 2020
- Dispatch
Vladimir Putin Positions Himself to Become Russia’s Eternal Leader
A proposed constitutional amendment in Russia could see Putin, already twenty years in power, extend his Presidency to 2036.
March 11, 2020
- Letter from Moscow
The Kremlin’s Creative Director
How the television producer Konstantin Ernst went from discerning auteur to Putin’s unofficial minister of propaganda.
December 9, 2019
