Nastya Stanko
in conversation with
The New Yorker’s Joshua Yaffa
Reporting from a war zone is never easy, especially when the frontlines are inside your own country. For the last decade, Nastya Stanko has distinguished herself inside Ukraine and abroad as one of the most respected and oft-cited journalists covering corruption, conflict, and Ukrainian state institutions. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion last year, her reports embedded with Ukrainian troops have been watched and shared millions of times, bringing a gritty, authentic, at times uncomfortable, but always honest and revelatory picture of the war.
In conversation with Joshua Yaffa, who has reported extensively from Ukraine for The New Yorker, Stanko will address the many aspects of the war that are often overlooked in international headlines: the murky lines between the personal and the professional, her own loss and trauma, the need to remain skeptical of power, encounters with censorship and taboos in covering the war, and assessment of how Western media present the conflict.
She and Yaffa will also discuss the current state of the war and the prospects for its resolution, drawing on Stanko’s fine-grained and sensitive understanding of both Ukrainian society and its soldiers. Both Stanko and Yaffa will draw on their own experiences and reporting from Ukraine to bring to light stories that are bracing, challenging, and revealing.
Nastya Stanko is editor-in-chief of Slidstvo, a Ukrainian investigative outlet. Previously, she was chief editor and a longtime correspondent at Hromadske. She is the recipient of numerous international prizes, including The International Press Freedom Award from the Committee to Protect Journalists.
Returning to Munich Dialogues on Democracy, Joshua Yaffa is a contributing writer for The New Yorker, where he covers Russia and Ukraine. He is also the author of Between Two Fires: Truth, Ambition, and Compromise in Putin’s Russia, which won the Orwell Prize in 2021. He is currently the inaugural writer-in-residence at Bard College Berlin.
Admission is free. Please register via this registration form.
If you cannot be with us in person, you can watch via YouTube live. Link to follow closer to the date.
This event is in cooperation with Bard College Berlin.