Seventy-two journalists from the Donetsk Region received help from the National Union of Journalists of Ukraine (NUJU). That allowed them to restore their equipment and continue their professional work.
Olena Kalaitan, forcedly displaced journalist/head of the newsroom of the Pryazovskyi Robochyi newspaper in Mariupol / head of the Donetsk regional organization of the NUJU, said this at the roundtable entitled Current State Of Investigation Of Russia’s War Crimes Against Journalists.
She noted that she was sadly surprised by the unexpected behavior of some of her colleagues who went to cooperate with the occupiers.
“We cooperate with law enforcement agencies, with the Security Service of Ukraine (SSU), and provide information about journalist collaborators. The situation in the occupied territories is complicated. Propaganda information spread by collaborators easily gets into people’s heads, and even those who are now leaving Mariupol are already ‘hacked’ by Russian propaganda,” said Olena Kalaitan.
She added that the journalists of the Donetsk Region honor the memory of the fallen colleagues Viktor Dedov, Yevhen Bal, Nataliya Kharakoz, and many others, whose fate will be impossible to determine. But the people of Mariupol already have a strategy for reviving the city after its liberation by Ukraine.
“Journalists from Donbas, who currently work in Kyiv and other cities of Ukraine, dream of returning home to restore their media and revive the Ukrainian journalistic community,” Olena Kalaitan emphasized.
NUJU information service