„The big challenge is to build your life around this important work,” says Zakhar Proitsuk, a board member of the Kyiv Independent, one of Ukraine’s largest English-language newspapers.
Zakhar Proitsuk explained, in an interview with G4Media/Info Sud-Est, what the daily challenges are for journalists who have had to run from one front to the other for over two years and who haven’t seen a „weekend as they say in a long, long time”.
- The Kyiv Independent was founded in November 2021, a few months before the start of the war: the initiative came from a group of journalists who had been fired from the Kyiv Post, in an attempt by the paper’s management to put an end to reporting critical of the Ukrainian authorities, in collaboration with Jnomics Media, an international consultancy firm.
The newsroom’s identity has been heavily influenced by the war that has gripped Ukraine and changed the lives of millions, but the challenges posed by the invasion have not stopped the newsroom’s development, explains Proitsuk, who is director in charge of audience and editorial strategy as well as administrative matters in the newsroom:
- It’s been a big challenge…to adapt, to you know, make sure that people have vacations, make sure that we have a moment of rest, that we hire new people. We’ve been trying to do it, our team grew a lot. IT was a team of 18 people in the beginning, now we are close to 60 people…we’ve managed to do a lot, but it’s a never ending process, a never ending battle.
Despite all the efforts, journalists’ lives have been deeply affected by the war, he recalled, and the consequences have not been felt professionally but more personally. Many of them had to move their families, particularly those whose relatives lived in territories now occupied by Russia.
What’s more, one of The Kyiv Independent’s journalists chose to physically participate in the war, enlisted and is now fighting on the frontline, but keeps in touch with the rest of the team:
- „He actually joined the Territorial Defense Forces a bit before the beginning of the full scale invasion, and from the February 21st he’s in the army. We, you know, support him as much as we can and try to…you know, he’s part of our team so we try help with all the means we can”.
Most of the team remained, however, in Kiev, where the newspaper’s headquarters are located. According to Zakhar, the decision to stay in Kiev was a particularly important one for a new newspaper that included the city’s name in its name. However, journalists are never too far from the front line, even if they don’t go there with a gun in hand:
- „We have, for example, one of our journalists right now being near Chasiv Yav, in Donetsk Oblast, where there’s very active fighting going on. And we have a few of our great reporters who are doing frontline reporting, pretty much, almost every month.
The time spent away on the front is a significant challenge, physically, mentally and emotionally, according to Zakhar, but they have learned over the months of war that they face „a marathon, not a sprint”.
In the end, the mission for which nearly 60 people chose to stay in Ukraine and go to the warfront day after day, gun in hand or just a camera, is a simple one, Zakhar explains: to make sure Ukrainians and the world get information and news from their country packaged in quality, first-hand journalism, without having gone „through all the filters of people across all kinds of agendas.”
- „I encourage everyone to read the Kyiv Indpendent, even if you are not, don’t have like a direct personal connection to what’s happening. Actually, it (the conncetion) is, all of of us are connected to what’s happening in some way, whether you’re in Romania or in a different country”.
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