Simon Shuster has reported on Russia and Ukraine for over 15 years, most of that time as a staff correspondent for TIME Magazine. Born in Moscow, he emigrated to the United States as a child, two years before the collapse of the Soviet Union.

After graduating from Stanford University in 2005, he returned to Moscow to work as a reporter for The Moscow Times, Reuters, the Associated Press and other publications. His political coverage of Russia's descent into authoritarianism included traveling with President Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin press pool and interviewing President Dmitry Medvedev. He has also interviewed and profiled the last three presidents of Ukraine, starting with Viktor Yanukovych, whose violent overthrow in 2014 he covered from Independence Square in Kyiv.

That winter, Simon was the first foreign reporter to arrive in Crimea as it was occupied by Russian troops. Since then, he has spent eight years covering the war in Ukraine from both sides of the front lines. Russian soldiers and paramilitaries detained Shuster on four separate occasions during his travels in separatist-controlled areas of Ukraine, including one harrowing abduction at a checkpoint in the region of Donetsk, where he was pulled from a car and beaten with a pistol while reporting on the shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17. Soon after, the Russian authorities deemed Simon a security threat and banned him from entering the country.

Exclusively represented by BrightSight Speakers bureau, Simon first interviewed and profiled Volodymyr Zelensky in the spring of 2019, when the actor and comedian was in the middle of his longshot campaign for the presidency. Since Zelensky's election victory, Simon has been granted unparalleled access to his administration, his close friends, aides and staffers. He has twice traveled with President Zelensky to the front lines of the war in Ukraine and spent months reporting from inside the presidential compound in Kyiv as the Russian invasion unfolded.

He is the author of The Showman: Inside the Invasion That Shook the World and Made a Leader of Volodymyr Zelensky (2023).