Days and weeks under shelling, evacuation through dozens of roadblocks and enemy territory, printing of “war leaflets” on printers, relocation of newsrooms and volunteering – the war affected the fate of thousands of journalists in Ukraine. How it was possible to survive in the literal sense of the word and continue professional activity – stories about this are prepared by the team of the National Union of Journalists of Ukraine (NUJU) with the support of the Swedish human rights organization Civil Rights Defenders.
As part of the initiative called JOURNALISTS ARE IMPORTANT. Stories of Life and Work in the Conditions of Warmore than 20 professional video stories and more than 70 Skype testimonies will be produced, as well as text stories about 100 media workers will be published on the NUJU website – the world should know the journalistic stories of the war.
The family of journalists Ivan and Nataliya Leonovs learned that they were left with nothing only when they already were in evacuation. Their house in Irpin was completely destroyed in shelling.
“We left on the morning of March 4. The very next day, many of our acquaintances caught the world-famous footage of people hiding under the bridge from shelling,” says Ivan Leonov, a journalist of the Ukraina Moloda [Young Ukraine] publication, who continued to work while hiding in the basement before the evacuation.
Two-time refugee – journalist Maryna Kuraptseva was forced to escape from the so-called ‘russian world’ for the second time: back in 2014, she had to evacuate from the Donetsk Region, and in the spring of 2022 – from the completely destroyed Borodianka in the Kyiv Region. She is currently staying in Germany, and does not yet know whether or not to return to Ukraine as, according to her, she will not have the strength to go through something like this a third time.
“On February 26, I stopped working when an acquaintance who lived on the outskirts of the city wrote that a Russian convoy had destroyed the first house and people were killed there. I packed my work laptop, took the ‘emergency suitcase’, and we ran to the bomb shelter next to the house… On the hood that was in the bomb shelter, a whole “battery” of baby bottles was lined up. Those babies who were wrapped in diapers, pregnant women, dogs and cats, old people – everyone was filled with a sense of despair,” Maryna Kuraptseva recalls in a Skype interview for the NUJU.
Oksana Kovaliova, a journalist from Hlukhiv, says that she saved herself and her children from starvation when she moved to live and work in the border town of Velyka Pysarivka in the Sumy Region. Because the war left her without means of subsistence.
“One volunteer advised me to sign up for the NUJU telegram channel, and that’s where I found a job, they were looking for a journalist for the newspaper Vorskla,” Oksana says. “I knew that this is such a settlement where the “hottest” military formations come from. It was in June, everyone was surprised that I came, while, for example, male photographers from various publications refused to go there. I saw that, despite such proximity to the front, there are people living in Velyka Pysarivka, the editorial office is stable, and I felt that I was not afraid. That’s why I took the children and went there to work.”
Now Oksana Kovaliova travels with the military to the front and makes reports. The editorial office of Vorskla received protective equipment for the journalist from the NUJU in cooperation with the headquarters of UNESCO and the International Federation of Journalists.
“Every journalist’s story is about the strength of spirit, indomitability, and professionalism of Ukrainian media workers,” says Sergiy Tomilenko, the President of the NUJU.
“As the largest journalistic organization, we are in daily contact with our colleagues and editorial offices. In the first weeks and months of the war, we enlisted the help of our international partners to cover the primary needs faced by journalists, which were protective equipment, equipment, material aid, and assistance in the relocation of their editorial offices. Nowadays, we understand that the stories of journalists are important testimonies that the world – international journalistic and human rights organizations – should know. About a hundred colleagues are ready to tell their sometimes difficult and shocking stories so that both Ukrainians and people around the world know the truth about the resilience of Ukrainian journalists who are going through extraordinary tests of this unjust war,” says Sergiy Tomilenko.
Three professional television groups led by Dmytro Chystiakov, Alina Kravchenko, and Serhii Vendin are involved in media production, and online stories are prepared by experienced journalists Lesia Karlova, Olha Bohlevska and Danylo Vereyitin. At the same time, Sergiy Tomilenko, Lina Kushch, Snizhana Kutrakova, Anton Perepelytsia, Illia Suzdaliev, Valentyna Pustiva, and Bohdana Stelmakh were involved in the creative and production process (coordination and final adaptation and editing). The vast majority of the story production team are media professionals who have been forcibly displaced either since the full-scale Russian invasion this year or since the beginning of Russian aggression in 2014.
JOURNALISTS ARE IMPORTANT. Stories of Life and Work in the Conditions of War is a series of materials prepared by the team of the National Union of Journalists of Ukraine (NUJU) with the support of the Swedish human rights organization Civil Rights Defenders.
Videos with journalists’ stories are published on the YouTube channel of NUJU, while text stories are published on the Union’s website in a special section STORIES. All materials are announced on the SPILKA News telegram channel.
