Sara Cincurova

Sara Cincurova is an award-winning journalist, former AFP correspondent, and human rights reporter whose work focuses on war crimes, conflict-related sexual violence, forced displacement, and the experiences of civilians living through war.

Her reporting has appeared in The New York Times, BBC News, Al Jazeera English, Foreign Policy, The Guardian, Der Spiegel, Newsweek, New York Magazine, The Boston Globe, The New Humanitarian, and other leading international publications. In February 2026, her reporting on wartime sexual violence in Ukraine appeared on the front page of The New York Times, bringing global attention to the experiences of Ukrainian survivors. Her work for The New York Times has also included reporting on domestic violence on the frontlines of war in Ukraine, highlighting the experiences of women and children facing abuse amid conflict. As a New York Times contributor, she also covered other major stories from Central and Eastern Europe.

Over the past decade, Cincurova has reported from more than 20 countries across Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America, including Ukraine, Venezuela, Palestine, Belarus, Uganda, Rwanda, and Burkina Faso. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, she has extensively documented conflict-related sexual violence in the country, interviewing more than 50 survivors of wartime rape, as well as dozens of survivors of torture, unlawful detention, forced labor camps, and other abuses committed during the war. Her reporting has also examined the trafficking of Ukrainian women across Europe.

Her previous work has documented some of the world’s most urgent human rights crises and cases of conflict-related sexual violence, including rape and torture perpetrated against refugee women along Mediterranean migration routes, as well as abuses committed against women dissidents by security forces in Venezuela. She also covered the rescue of 400 refugees in distress in the Mediterranean, including a dozen survivors of rape and sexual slavery in detention centers in Libya.

Cincurova’s journalism has received multiple awards and international recognition. She was runner-up for the prestigious Elizabeth Neuffer Fellowship, awarded by the International Women’s Media Foundation to women journalists covering human rights and social justice, and was shortlisted for One World Media Awards twice. In 2026, she served as Journalism Fellow at the Canada Excellence Research Chair in Migration and Integration at Toronto Metropolitan University.

A frequent commentator on international affairs, human rights, and the war in Ukraine, Cincurova has appeared on BBC News, BBC World Service’s Newshour, BBC Breakfast, Vox’s Today, Explained, Good Morning Britain, The Telegraph’s Ukraine: The Latest, and New Lines Magazine’s The Lede. She has also spoken at universities, academic institutions, and international conferences.

Cincurova speaks six languages, including English, French, Slovak, Russian, Ukrainian, and Spanish. Known for her trauma-informed and survivor-centered approach, she specializes in documenting stories of the most vulnerable survivors of conflict that are often or overlooked by mainstream coverage. Her reporting seeks to amplify the voices of survivors while contributing to public understanding of war crimes, gender-based violence, displacement, and human rights abuses.