On May 4, 2020, the Pulitzer Prize committee announced its winners for 2019. In the category for “International Reporting” the winner was a group of reporters from the New York Times “for a set of enthralling stories, reported at great risk, exposing the predations of Vladimir Putin’s regime.”
One of these winning articles was dedicated to exposing Moscow's secret dealings in Madagascar and other African states. These are crucially important stories for a U.S. audience – Russia's operations in Africa are sponsored by Yevgeny Prigozhin, a secretive Russian businessman who’s also known for being Vladimir Putin's private chef. This is the same Prigozhin who in 2016 oversaw attempts to interfere in U.S. elections. Considering these factors, the NYT's victory is understandable and well-deserved.
But there’s a nuance.
To no small degree, the stories published by the NYT in the autumn of 2019 repeat findings published at least six months earlier by the independent Russian investigative outlet Proekt, which I founded a year and a half ago.
