I’m Valerie Hopkins and I’m currently the Moscow Correspondent for the New York Times. I received the Newswomen’s Club of New York’s Marie Colvin Award for Foreign Correspondence and the Fellowships at Auschwitz for the Study of Professional Ethics (FASPE) Distinguished Fellow Award for my work since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Until May 2021, I was the South-East Europe Correspondent for the Financial Times, covering the region from Budapest.
I am thrilled to be in Moscow after more than a decade working in South-Eastern Europe. My work has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Foreign Policy, Mother Jones, Politico Europe, and elsewhere.
Before joining the FT, I worked as a freelance journalist across Europe, mostly in the Balkans.
I started my reporting career in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. My first job in journalism was reporting on war crimes cases in the Bosnian war crimes chamber.
I also had the good fortune to be the daily web editor for the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project. Two Investigations I worked on there were nominated for for the Daniel Pearl Investigative Reporting Award and the Global Shining Light Award.
I received a fellowship from the International Women's Media Foundation in 2017 to report in Rwanda and am a 2013 winner of the Overseas Press Club Fellowship, which sent me to intern for ThomsonReuters in Belgrade, Serbia. The same year I was also selected for the Fellowship at Auschwitz for the Study of Professional Ethics.
I hold a Master of Arts in Political Journalism from Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, where my M.A. thesis, a 10,000 long-form narrative piece, was a runner up for best thesis in the program. At Columbia, I received a scholarship named for Anne O’Hare McCormick, a New York Times journalist who in 1937 became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for foreign correspondence.
I have a B.A. in International Relations (focus on Russian and Post-Soviet Studies) from the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, where I served as student body president.
I previously worked for the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network, which produces, among other things, Balkan Insight and Prishtina Insight, where I was an opinions and features editor.
I have also worked as a field producer for NBC and for PBS Frontline.
Prior to working in journalism, I worked in the Press and Public Information Unit of the Organization for Security and Co-Operation in Europe Mission to Bosnia and Herzegovina and for a boutique election law firm in Washington, DC.