The War in Ukraine Has Made This D.C. Writer’s Newsletter a Must Read

(Bloomberg) -- Since the start of the war in Ukraine, journalist Julia Ioffe has emerged as one of the most prominent, incisive and in-demand experts on the horrific conflict. 

She is a regular guest on cable news, frequently popping up to do hits on CNN and MSNBC. She’s provided analysis on CBS’s “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” on HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher” and on PBS’s “Frontline.” She speaks on the radio and on podcasts, and sometimes appears live on stage. Recently, a crowd of people packed into the Comedy Cellar in New York to see her participate in a policy debate about whether the U.S. and NATO were responsible for the war in Ukraine.

But foremost, Ioffe is renowned for her trenchant writing about the people, culture and politics of Russia, a particularly crucial skillset at this current moment. 

“She brings something unique to the table and that’s her deep personal investment in Soviet and Russian life,” said David Remnick, the editor of the New Yorker, himself a longtime chronicler of Russian politics. “At the same time, because of her reporting there and her network of friends and sources, she’s extremely knowledgeable. I read what she writes with enormous interest always.”

Outbreaks of war inevitably result in breakout voices from the news industry, often drawn from whatever medium happens to be embraced by news consumers at that particular moment in history. From the radio dispatches of World War II, emerged Edward R. Murrow. From the harrowing newspaper dispatches on the Vietnam War, came venerated writers like David Halberstam and Neil Sheehan. From the explosive round-the-clock live coverage of the Persian Gulf War, arose a prominent crop of cable TV correspondents like Bernard Shaw and Christiane Amanpour. 

Ioffe, for her part, is very much a new and specific archetype of the 2022 media landscape. Every few days, her latest piece on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is delivered not to the doorstep of subscribers but to their inbox. She is a newsletter writer. 

Since last year, Ioffe (pronounced YA-FEE) has served as the Washington correspondent for Puck, a startup that aims to provide the inside story of Washington, Wall Street, Hollywood and Silicon Valley, primarily via newsletters for paying subscribers written by a handful of prominent, social-media-savvy authors. Ioffe and Puck’s other founding partners own part of the business and get paid a bonus based on how many subscriptions they generate. Puck, she says, has offered her more freedom than traditional publications.

“Whenever I’ve worked at big legacy places I’ve always had my wings clipped,” Ioffe said in an interview. “I start tripping over my feet at places like that. I’m not very good at playing internal politics and managing bureaucracies and figuring out who to CC on an email. I just want to do what I’m good at, which is reporting and writing.”

Since early December, her newsletter subscriber list has quadrupled.

Puck subscriptions, which cost $100 a year, are growing by 65% each month, driven in part by sales to businesses like law firms and media companies, according to co-founder Jon Kelly. He declined to disclose the total number of Puck subscribers. But the surge of interest in Ioffe hasn’t hurt. After one of her recent TV appearances, a university reached out to order Puck subscriptions for all its students, faculty and full-time employees, Kelly said.

“All of this attention on Julia has expanded her intellectual footprint but it also has expanded awareness of other Puck journalists,” Kelly said.

In her newsletter, Ioffe interviews people who offer a unique perspective on the war. Recent iterations have featured a Russian pollster, Biden’s former Ukraine adviser and a young actor from Moscow who is educating Russians through social media about what’s happening in Ukraine. From Washington, she conducts interviews in her native Russian and often stays up late or wakes up early to speak with sources in Moscow, which is seven hours ahead.

“I’m not on the ground in Ukraine and not in Russia, and I’m very cognizant of the limitations of that,” she said. “I’m trying to give the reader what I can offer, which is a deep knowledge of the history of the place, of the culture of the place.”

Ioffe, 39, was born in Moscow, prior to the breakup of the Soviet Union. Shortages of food and other goods were common when she was growing up. Her father is a computer programmer. Her mother is a doctor. When she was 7, she and her family, who are Jewish, fled to the U.S. after hearing rumors that there would be violent anti-Semitic riots during a celebration of Russia’s Christianity. The Ioffes landed in the suburbs of Baltimore. For years afterwards, during lean times, they marked the day of their arrival in the U.S. by splurging on dinner at Bennigan’s. 

After graduating from Princeton with a degree in history and a minor in Russian studies, Ioffe started her journalism career as a fact-checker for the New Yorker. From 2009 to 2012, she returned to Russia and began freelancing for magazines. Miriam Elder, who met Ioffe while they were both reporters in Russia, said her stories countered the prevailing narrative of Russia being “all powerful.”

“She goes deeper, and she questions everything,” said Elder, now an editor at Vanity Fair. “She was very good at cutting through the bulls---.”

David Hoffman, a friend and former Moscow bureau chief for the Washington Post, said Ioffe’s breakthrough moment was a 2011 profile that she wrote for the New Yorker about Alexey Navalny, then a blogger and crusader against Russian corruption who was relatively unknown to Western audiences. 

“When that piece appeared, I knew none of that,” Hoffman said. “I thought, ‘Wow, this is somebody who is really running deep in a place that I thought I was.’”

Ioffe’s stories caught the eye of Susan Glasser, who at the time was editor in chief of Foreign Policy magazine. Glasser asked her to write regular dispatches for the magazine, resulting in a memorable piece in 2011 that revealed the identities behind a popular Twitter account lampooning the Russian president.

“I just think she is a unique talent,” Glasser said. “It’s a wonderful benefit for all of us that she has dedicated her career to explaining and straddling these two worlds that she knows and connecting them with each other, especially in the middle of this crisis.”

Ioffe has connections to both sides of the war. Part of her family is originally from Ukraine. She still has friends in Russia, though many have recently fled. 

“I can’t help but see the tragedy of this through that lens,” she said. “The country I was born in is doing this to a country where my people are originally from.”

All of which has made Ioffe feel deeply conflicted about the circumstances of her current turn in the spotlight.

“I feel really weird about it,” Ioffe said. “It sucks to have a big moment in your career around something so horrible.”

On Twitter, where she has more than 400,000 followers, Ioffe posts frequently about the war, occasionally in Russian, and recently helped raise money for an independent Russian TV news outlet that was forced to shut down. At times, she’s faced intense attacks. After she wrote a profile of Melania Trump for GQ magazine in 2016, she received death threats and anti-Semitic messages, and people tried to send coffins to her house. Things have calmed down in the Biden era, she said, and any social media criticism she gets these days she tries to shrug off.

“It doesn’t help to be a woman, it doesn’t help to be Jewish, it doesn’t help to have a big mouth and you say things that not everyone agrees with,” Ioffe said. “Even if it’s stressful, it’s part of the job. It’s a small fraction of the interactions that I have online.”

Ioffe often expresses pessimism about the war in Ukraine. After she explained a series of worst-case scenarios on Colbert’s show, he  joked, “Thank you for all the cheer.” Her newsletter is titled, “Tomorrow Will Be Worse.”

“To me, it’s just analysis,” Ioffe said. “People say ‘Oh you’re so Russian, it’s so dark and cynical.’ But I think I’m just being realistic about where things can go.”

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