The Post honorees include four journalists who are now based full-time in Kyiv: bureau chief Isabelle Khurshudyan; Siobhan O’Grady, who reported from Ukraine as Cairo bureau chief and is now the new chief Ukraine correspondent; and contributors Anastacia Galouchka and Kamila Hrabchuk. The other honorees were part of teams that rotated through Ukraine in 2022: video journalists Whitney Shefte and Whitney Leaming; contributing photojournalist Heidi Levine; Baghdad bureau chief Louisa Loveluck; national security reporter Missy Ryan; Bogotá bureau chief Samantha Schmidt; Berlin bureau chief Loveday Morris; contributing photographer Kasia Strek; political video reporter Joyce Koh; and international reporter Miriam Berger.

These women are among a large number of Post journalists who have reported from Ukraine since early 2022, delivering remarkable on-the-ground coverage in text, photographs and video from small towns, big cities and the front lines.

“The Washington Post’s Ukrainian bureau and rotating reporting team of women illuminated transgressions otherwise shrouded by the chaos of war while covering Russia’s invasion of Ukraine,” the IWMF wrote in honoring the Post journalists. “The Post’s coverage included exclusive reporting and content from the frontlines of Ukraine, including information from sources that were cultivated for months. The Post team’s reporting also included how Ukrainian forces were able to repel Russian occupiers using covert resistance fighters, drone-guided artillery fire and traditional trench warfare. Collectively, their reporting depicted – gravely and comprehensively – the human toll of war on a civilian population.”

The IWMF continues, “When the full-scale invasion began, Post journalists were in Kyiv as it came under Russian fire. In Kharkiv, Khurshudyan and Leaming were two of the last Western media reporters to leave the city as it came under heavy bombardment. O’Grady and Galouchka came under targeted artillery shelling twice while reporting on artillery combat in the Donetsk region. Shefte, who helped detail the story of women giving birth in underground bunkers, embedded with a military unit near Mariupol that had been fighting Russian-backed separatists since 2014.”

The 2023 IWMF Courage in Journalism Award winners will be recognized during private ceremonies in Washington, New York and Los Angeles in the fall.

Please join us in congratulating the winners on this well-deserved recognition.