A NEWSPAPER ON ZELENSKY’S TRAIL

Versão em Português

Translated by Isa Mara Lando

Drones have changed the safety strategies of journalists covering the war in Ukraine. Because of these devices, no area is completely safe for reporting a story, recording a video, or taking photographs, Ukrainian journalist Olga Rudenko said while speaking at the 10th edition of the piauí Journalism Festival, held on Sunday, September 6th, at the Cinemateca Brasileira in São Paulo.

“There is a war taking place on the front line, at the border, but also in the rear, which is targeted by bombings. Sometimes we are at home, off duty, and we wake up frightened by explosions and sirens. Then we have to get up and go out to document what is happening in the streets.”

Rudenko is the editor-in-chief of The Kyiv Independent, a digital newspaper that publishes daily news about Ukraine in English. The outlet was founded in 2021 by Rudenko and fellow journalists who had also been dismissed from the Kyiv Post, then the country's most important English-language newspaper. They left the paper after refusing to tone down their criticism of President Volodymyr Zelensky, against the wishes of the newspaper’s owner, the late businessman Adnan Kivan.

Within three days, Rudenko and her colleagues came together to launch a newsletter and continue the investigative work they had been doing. The website was created soon afterward.

When Russian troops invaded Ukraine in 2022, The Kyiv Independent newsroom was still new and small. Some of Rudenko’s colleagues decided to leave Kyiv with their families for safety. Others, like her, chose to remain close to the front lines.

Interviewed by piauí reporters Ana Clara Costa and João Batista Jr., Rudenko said that Ukrainians feel abandoned by the West. “The Trump administration has left us with a sense of disillusionment. In the end, we are on our own.”

She said that before taking the stage at the festival, she had spent the day following the news from her country. White House representatives had just met with Zelensky in Kyiv to negotiate an end to the war with Russia. “When I travel outside Ukraine, people think I’m happy to get a chance to breath easy again, but in reality I’m afraid of missing something because I’m far from the heart of the action,” Rudenko said.

Newsrooms committed to covering a territorial war such as the one in Ukraine often face even greater pressure from the authorities. Rudenko is familiar with intimidation. It was Zelensky’s government that pressured the Kyiv Post, the newspaper where she worked until 2021, urging it to make its reporting less critical and more favorable to the authorities.

“Now the government has even more mechanisms to constrain our work. If we publish a report that reflects poorly on Ukraine, the president can revoke my reporters’ credentials and prevent them from working on the front lines.”

Even so, in her view, there is more press freedom than her foreign colleagues often suppose. “Our independence was won through hard struggles by the journalists who came before us. What we feel is a certain fragility in the freedom we have today.”

The outlet is funded primarily through reader support. “Our relationship with our audience is direct,” the journalist said. “When someone cancels a subscription, we ask what led them to make that decision.”

According to Rudenko, what motivates people to subscribe to The Kyiv Independent is the dual role its reporters play: they not only cover the war, but also explain Ukraine to people outside the country, always writing in English.

By now, both Ukrainian journalists and ordinary citizens feel abandoned even by Europeans, Rudenko said. “We are exhausted; we want to move on with our lives. We need newspapers in Italy, Poland, and across Europe to convince the public that the war in Ukraine is not a distant event, but something that concerns everyone.”

The main theme of this year’s piauí Journalism Festival was In the Eye of the Storm: Newsroom Directors in Times of Turmoil. In addition to Rudenko, the event featured several other leading figures in international journalism. Among them were Dean Baquet, who led The New York Times from 2014 to 2022; Musikilu Mojeed, editor-in-chief of the Nigerian newspaper Premium Times; and Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic. The full list of participants is available here.