Lizzie Johnson named Ukraine Correspondent

Washington Post

13-05-2025

We're happy to announce that Lizzie Johnson will become Ukraine correspondent, adding more powerhouse talent to our first-class team in Kyiv.
A standout reporter and writer, Lizzie already knows her way around Ukraine and the momentous stories unfolding there. She has excelled during three long fill-in stints over the past 16 months, reporting on the war, its impact and on its leaders in riveting ways. Her most recent reporting trip produced, among other things, a wrenching portrait of a city in anguish after a Russian missile strike killed nine children on a playground.
Lizzie joins International from The Post's narrative accountability team, which combines the rigor of investigative reporting with the power of narrative storytelling. She is a four-time finalist for the Livingston Award for Young Journalists, including recognition of her work from Ukraine. She was previously a staff writer at the San Francisco Chronicle, where she covered City Hall before moving to the enterprise and investigative team, earning nods from the California News Publishers Association for Best Writing, Best Profile, Best Enterprise, Best Feature and Best Wildfire Feature. She won the Best of the West contest in longform feature writing in 2021 and was honored by the National Press Club with the President's Award in 2023. Her in-depth coverage of California's wildfire crisis — for which she attended and graduated from a professional firefighting academy — led to her first book, 'Paradise: One Town's Struggle to Survive an American Wildfire." It won the 2022 Gold Medal for nonfiction in the California Book Awards contest and is being developed into a feature film starring America Ferrera and Matthew McConaughey, out this fall.
Raised in a farming family in Nebraska, Lizzie is a graduate of the University of Missouri, with bachelor's degrees in journalism and political science. She is also something of an extreme athlete who backpacks, runs marathons and climbs mountains, including some of America's tallest peaks (including, just last week, Mount Hood).
That adventuresome spirit will serve Lizzie well in Ukraine, where she joins a team led by bureau chief Siobhán O'Grady, Ukraine-based reporter David L. Stern and a talented and dedicated team of local reporters. Lizzie will start the new job on June 1; she and her husband will move to Kyiv this summer.