NY Times Names First Ukraine Bureau Chief

The NY Times has opened its first bureau in Ukraine in the capital of Kyiv and named Andrew Kramer [photo above] as the first bureau chief.

Russia first launched attacks on Ukraine on February 24 and fighting has continued in the country since.

In an announcement posted on the company website, the NY Times said there is no one better suited to lead the new bureau in Kyiv in order to keep covering a war that has upended life for millions of Ukrainians and reverberated far beyond the country’s borders. The conflict has left people around the globe at risk of starvation, and has scrambled alliances, undermined efforts to shift to clean energy and challenged an already fragile rules-based world order.

“In all the years we have worked together, I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I asked him a question about a story that he couldn’t answer — and usually, in an encyclopedic way that indicated he had already considered the matter and decided to handle it in a simpler and more effective fashion,” said Kyle Crichton, a veteran International desk editor.

Andrew started at The Times in 2005 as a correspondent for Business Day and later the International desk, and for years he was the primary reporter covering Ukraine from his perch in the Moscow bureau. In 2014, when fighting broke out in the east, he was an on-the-ground war correspondent.

He covered the Trump administration’s machinations in Ukraine, and Andrew was the reporter who found entries in a ledger recording a secret $12 million payment to Paul Manafort, then the Trump campaign manager, from the political party of the president of Ukraine, Viktor F. Yanukovych. Andrew shared a Pulitzer Prize for The Times’s reporting series on Russian meddling in world affairs, particularly the 2016 presidential campaign.

Before joining The Times, Andrew worked for The Associated Press, for The Washington Post as a researcher and news assistant, as a freelance reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle and as a part-time reporter for The Ukiah Daily Journal in California.