David Hearst is the chief foreign leader writer of The Guardian. As a foreign correspondent he covered the loyalist backlash in the wake of the Anglo-Irish Agreement in Northern Ireland, the first conflict in the break-up of the former Yugoslavia in Slovenia and Croatia, the first war in Chechnya and Boris Yeltsin's moral and physical decline.

After Ireland, he was appointed Europe correspondent for Guardian Europe, then joined the Moscow bureau in 1992, before becoming bureau chief in 1994. He left  Russia in 1997 to join the foreign desk, became European editor and then Associate Foreign Editor.