People wept in joy and ‘overcrowded’ the editor-in-chief’s phone when they received the first issue in a community of the Mykolayiv Region, where a newspaper had not been published for a year.

Svitlana Lukashenko, the editor-in-chief of the newspaper of the Bereznehuvate Community called Narodna Trybuna, said this in a comment to SPILKA News.

On February 24, the first day of the full-scale invasion, the last issue of the newspaper was published, but people were never able to get it back then. On February 4, 2023, after almost a year of information vacuum, people got a newspaper again. Its publishing was financed by the National Union of Journalists of Ukraine (NUJU).

Svitlana Lukashenko prepared the newspaper herself, remotely. Together with her family, she temporarily lives in Chernivtsi. Narodna Trybuna was printed in Mykolayiv with a circulation of 1,500 copies.

“This is not much. But nevertheless, people still were shocked by this news. I received more than 100 reviews from local people. People called and said they had never cried so much. They wanted to live, they believed that everything would be fine. People took the newspaper from each other. It simply cannot be expressed in words,” says the editor.

In March, she hopes to print the newspaper again and increase the circulation by at least a little.