Jerome Starkey
The Sun
It was the same journalist who made history as the first Fleet Street reporter to file a dispatch from occupied Russia since William Howard Russell covered the Crimean War in 1856.
The Sun’s defence editor Jerome Starkey breaks the most important stories in defence. He is passionate and extremely knowledgeable about his beat. Yet he retains the knack of telling defence stories in ways that are vividly accessible and relevant to Sun readers.
His account of the Trident 2 missile “going plop” in the Atlantic was a global public interest story that was followed on every continent save Antarctica. It forced the British Defence Secretary to reassure parliament with a written statement on the state of the UK nuclear deterrent. It ignited an urgent debate about Britain's and Nato’s security at a time when Vladimir Putin was making regular nuclear threats to the West.
Jerome’s dispatches from occupied Kursk brought readers face to face with ordinary Russians who were experiencing an occupation for the first time since WW2. This was, in a very real sense, bearing witness to history and it took courage and determination.
Jerome was already already banned from Russia. The Kremlin sanctioned him in Aug 2022 after he documented – and endured – indiscriminate Russian bombardments in Kharkiv and Khurakove in Ukraine.
Then a few days before Jerome was due to travel to occupied Kursk, Moscow issued a fresh round of threats to prosecute any journalists who entered the occupied territory. Jerome defied those threats for the chance bear witness and it was worth it.
His interviews with Russians in Kursk revealed a chilling yet almost invisible threat to Ukraine: The indifference of ordinary people to slaughter waged in their name.
More recently Jerome’s investigation into Russian GPS jamming was a perfect example of how he strives to make specialist defence stories relevant to everyone. He was travelling with a British defence secretary when their RAF jet was jammed near Kaliningrad. Jerome had also encountered jamming in Ukraine. These experiences inspired him to analyse open source data to see how many civilian flights might also be affected.
There was so much data he had to commission specialist software to crunch the numbers. The results were astounding. Almost 5,000 flights from Britain’s biggest carriers had reported serious interference over the previous 8 months. Jerome brings decades of defence experience to The Sun. He lived in Afghanistan for many years and has covered wars in Iraq, Ukraine, and across Africa. He tells stories fluently in print and video, writing news, features and op-ed columns on war, defence and geo-politics. He presents The Sun’s most successful YouTube series Frontline, which attracts a million viewers a month for news and analysis on Ukraine.
In the best traditions of The Sun, Jerome tells searing public interest stories in ways that engage and grow audiences.