FT’s Hopkins hired by New York Times to cover Russia

Financial Times reporter Valerie Hopkins has been hired by The New York Times to cover Russia.

She has been based in Budapest for the past three years for the FT.

Before moving to Budapest, Hopkins lived in Austria, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia and Kosovo, Europe’s youngest country, working extensively across the Balkans. She learned to speak Bosnian/Serbian/Croatian and Albanian. Her work has chronicled the ongoing geopolitical battles in the region and the persistent lack of regional reconciliation decades since the wars that followed the dissolution of the former Yugoslavia.

Her interest in postwar societies in transition dates from her first job in journalism, covering war-crimes trials at the Bosnian state court for the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network. She also worked for the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project.

Hopkins is a native of Washington, D.C. She graduated from the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Va., and earned a master’s degree from the School of Journalism at Columbia University, where she wrote her thesis about female war criminals. After graduation, she won an Overseas Press Club fellowship.