WSJ London reporter moving to Moscow

Wall Street Journal Moscow bureau chief Greg White sent out the following staff announcement on Friday:

We’re excited to announce that Paul Sonne will be joining the combined DJN/WSJ bureau in Moscow as a reporter in mid-March, covering the full range of wackiness that is known to locals as “Russian reality.”

Paul is heading East after nearly four years in the London Bureau, where he covered corporate and general news. He helped spearhead the Censorship Inc. series that won the Overseas Press Club’s Malcom Forbes Award for International Business Reporting, in between reporting on Julian Assange’s courtroom travails, the phone-hacking scandal, and multi-billion dollar corporate takeovers. His story about the flawed medical prognosis that freed the Lockerbie bomber from jail led to a U.S. Senate hearing on the matter, and his investigative report with Meg Coker on Moammar Gadhafi’s Internet-spying operation prompted a French judicial probe into corporate complicity in torture. Paul’s a-heds have led him to attend Britain’s Loo of the Year contest, sympathize with animals stranded by the Eyjafjallajukull volcano, locate the woman last in line to the British throne, and travel the Thames with Her Majesty the Queen’s Swan Marker.

Having grown up in Albany, New York, Paul is particularly equipped to handle Moscow’s inclement weather, grey skies and lumbering bureaucracy. Despite a half-decade detour in the British Isles, he is no stranger to Russia. He majored in Russian literature at Columbia, received a master’s degree in Russian history and politics at Oxford, and spent time at the AP and New York Times bureaux in Moscow before joining the Journal.