Ukraine needs 500,000 military recruits. Can it raise them?
Ahead of a new mobilisation law, exhausted soldiers on the frontline complain of low morale
Financial Times
About
Isobel Koshiw has been a journalist in Ukraine on and off since January 2015.
When the invasion started, Isobel was in Ukraine making a podcast about literature smuggling into Ukraine during the Cold War funded by the University of Alberta and Studio to Be. In the weeks preceding and immediately after the invasion, she became a contributor and producer for Buzzfeed News.
In early March 2022, she became the Guardian’s first Ukraine correspondent, where she worked for just over a year. Since spring 2023, she has worked as a substitute reporter for the Financial Times and the Washington Post and freelancer for Open Democracy and the Economist’s 1843 magazine.
For five years before the invasion, Isobel worked on several investigative projects and articles about corruption, money laundering and weapons procurement. She unraveled a network of Ukrainian hackers cheating the US stock exchange; how the Assad regime laundered money and procured weapons parts through the west; how a Ukrainian businessman owned the chemicals in the 2020 Beirut blast; how the British court system has been manipulated by the international rich; and, wrote profiles on Ukraine’s oligarchs.
Isobel speaks Ukrainian and Russian. She was born in the UK but spent part of her childhood in Ukraine.
Please see the ‘Publications‘ page for a selection of her work. Isobel is HEAT accredited.
