17 Jul 17 | Digital Freedom, Mapping Media Freedom, Media Freedom, media freedom featured, News and features, Ukraine
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Ukrainian post control before separatist zone (Credit: Geoffrey Froment/Flickr)
Soon after the annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation, full-scale fighting began between Ukrainian troops and separatists supported by Russia in the east of Ukraine. During active fighting in 2014, it was relatively easy for journalists to access to territories controlled by separatists.
“Accreditation was given quickly and without delay,” a Ukrainian producer who worked with international TV channels said. The producer, who requested anonymity because of ongoing work in the area, admits the risk for journalists was high because of the chaotic situation on the frontline and many of them faced detention by separatist militants. “I, like many, was detained and placed in a basement, but, fortunately, it only lasted for several hours,” he added.
Anna Nemtsova, a correspondent for Newsweek magazine and The Daily Beast, told Mapping Media Freedom that in 2014 she was abducted twice – firstly in the Luhansk region and secondly in the city of Donetsk.
“These were classic abductions,” Nemtsova said. “In Luhansk region, near Krasny Luch, armed militia wearing masks took our cell phones away from us and drove us in an unknown direction. In Donetsk, it happened near the morgue, where, according to our information, the militia had brought some of the bodies of passengers of the downed Boeing MH-17. Both detentions lasted for a few hours.”
Soon the situation with journalists’ access to uncontrolled territories would change for the worse. In February 2015, the Minsk agreements were signed and a ceasefire was established. The ceasefire agreement prompted the authorities of the two self-proclaimed republics to start monitoring journalists’ reports from the Donetsk People’s Republic and Luhansk People’s Republic.
“If they did not like the angle of coverage or some term, for example ‘separatist republics’, the name of a journalist was immediately added to the list of undesirable persons. The press service began to summon such journalists to ‘talks’ to express their dissatisfaction,” source who works as a local TV producer told MMF.
Nemtsova also faced similar difficulties. In summer 2015 she was told that the DPR press service did not like her reports and threatened to ban her, which later they said they did. “Their complaints were unreasonable, they were not about any errors in my report, but about the term ‘separatists’, which they claimed I used in my stories,” she said.
Thus, the monitoring of publications about the separatist zone in the media has led to the fact that from the summer of 2015 many journalists who tried to obtain accreditation from the self-proclaimed authorities began to receive refusals. Some reporters who managed to enter the territory of the self-proclaimed republics were detained and deported. On 16 June 2015, separatists from DPR captured Novaya Gazeta special correspondent Pavel Kanygin and handed him over to Russian security services (FSB). According to the journalist, they checked his documents and released him “in the middle of a field.”[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_separator color=”black” align=”align_left”][vc_row_inner][vc_column_inner width=”1/2″][vc_custom_heading text=”Ukraine” font_container=”tag:p|font_size:24|text_align:left” use_theme_fonts=”yes” link=”url:https%3A%2F%2Fmappingmediafreedom.org%2F|||”][vc_column_text]Index on Censorship monitors press freedom in Ukraine and 41 other European area countries.
As of 17/07/2017, there were 282 verified reports of violations connected to Ukraine in the Mapping Media Freedom database.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column_inner][vc_column_inner width=”1/2″][vc_single_image image=”94239″ img_size=”full” alignment=”center” onclick=”custom_link” link=”https://mappingmediafreedom.org/”][/vc_column_inner][/vc_row_inner][vc_separator color=”black” align=”align_left”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Over the past year, arbitrary refusals to enter the territory of the self-proclaimed republics have been quite frequent. In December 2016, Deutsche Welle’s correspondent Christian Trippe and his crew were barred from entering the territory of the self-proclaimed DPR. Journalists were trying to get to the territory controlled by DPR at a checkpoint near Marinka. Journalists had to wait an hour in a neutral zone between two fronts, while they were not allowed to return to the territory controlled by Ukrainian forces. The crew had received an authorisation from DPR press centre and had scheduled an interview with a spokesperson for the separatists. The journalists planned to visit Donetsk with Principal Deputy Chief Monitor Alexander Hug of the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine. However, the militants did not let them through the checkpoint with the OSCE, citing the decision of DPR special services.
In 2016, the self-proclaimed authorities continued the practice of detentions and expulsions of journalists. In November, special forces of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic detained and expelled two journalists working for Russian TV channel Dozhd. Correspondents Sergei Polonsky and Vasiliy Yerzhenkov were detained by intelligence agencies on the evening of 25 November in Donetsk. Polonsky said that members of the self-proclaimed Ministry of State Security went to their apartment and took them to the main building of the ministry where they were interrogated. “Three employees of the Ministry of State Security were involved in the interrogation. They watched videos and deleted them. They also blocked Polonsky’s phone, broke Yerzhenkov’s phone and destroyed his notebook,” Dozhd reported. According to Dozhd, the journalists were not physically abused. “We experienced psychological abuse, but nothing more,” Polonsky said. Later, employees of the Ministry of State Security explained to the correspondents that their detention was a consequence of “false information” in the accreditation, which turned out to be a wrong phone number.
The Dozhd crew were accredited to work in Donetsk by the Security Service of Ukraine and by the Ministry of information of DPR. Journalists entered the DPR border on 24 November from Russia to interview Alexey Khodakovsky, former secretary of DPR’s Security Council. Previously, the self-proclaimed Ministry of State Security of DPR said the cause of the journalists’ expulsion was “biased” and “provocative” coverage of the situation in the DPR.
Local journalists and bloggers often find it even more risky to work in the separatist territories. In 2014, many journalists were forced to leave the territory, and are now working elsewhere in Ukraine. Over the past year, a number of arrests by separatists have been reported. The latest one is an incident with blogger and writer Stanyslav Aseev who disappeared in Donetsk. The blogger was reportedly detained by militants of the self-proclaimed DPR. Aseev uses the alias Stanislav Vasin and contributes to a number of news outlets including Radio Liberty Donbass Realities project, Ukrayinska Pravda, Ukrainian week and Dzerkalo Tyzhnya. He also runs a prominent blog via Facebook.
Donbass Realities project editor-in-chief Tetyana Jakubowicz said their contact with Aseev was lost on 2 June. That day, Aseev filed the latest report from territories held by separatists for Radio Liberty. Aseev’s relatives and friends confirmed that they also lost contact with the blogger. They questioned the self-proclaimed Ministry of Public Security of the DPR, but didn’t receive any answers. The journalist’s mother found evidence that his flat was broken into in Donetsk and noticed that some of his belongings were missing, including a laptop. On 12 July, Amnesty International reported that it learned that Aseev was being held by the de-facto “ministry of state security”.
Recently, several bloggers have been arrested in the self-proclaimed LPR. In October 2016 Vladislav Ovcharenko, a 19-year old blogger, who runs the Twitter account Luhansk Junta, was detained by separatists. Later, armed representatives of the self-proclaimed Ministry of the State Security raided his parents’ apartment, taking his mother’s computer. In December 2016, Facebook blogger Gennadiy Benytskiy was arrested in Luhansk. The blogger, who is known for his pro-Ukraine views, was accused of distributing of “extremist materials” online.
Journalists take risks even when they get accreditation from the separatist authorities. A leak by the website Myrotvorets in May 2016 led to the personal data of more than 5,000 journalists becoming available online. The link to the leak was published by some Ukrainian politicians, calling journalists who received accreditation “traitors.” Some of the journalists then received threats.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]
Mapping Media Freedom
Click on the bubbles to view reports or double-click to zoom in on specific regions. The full site can be accessed at https://mappingmediafreedom.org/[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]
26 Aug 16 | Mapping Media Freedom, mobile, News and features, Ukraine
The armed conflict between the Russian Federation and Ukraine, the occupation of Crimea and Russian support for separatists in Donbas have lead to a large-scale media war, Mapping Media Freedom correspondent Tetiana Pechonchyk writes.
Faced with Russian propaganda, which attempts to stir up hatred, Ukraine imposed a number of restrictions in the media to protect its national security and territorial integrity against its aggressive neighbor. Those restrictions have manifested themselves at different levels and in different ways and touched not only on the Russian media and journalists but also Ukrainian media workers and bloggers who have been accused of being too sympathetic to Russia. In some cases the restrictions have been disproportionate, they have narrowed the space for criticism in Ukraine amid an armed conflict that began in 2014.
The most well-known example is the case of Ruslan Kotsaba, a Ukrainian journalist and blogger, who was arrested in February 2015 for posting a video criticising the country’s military recruitment campaign and called on Ukrainians to boycott it. A month later, on 31 March, Kotsaba was accused of “treason” and obstructing “the legitimate activities of the armed forces of Ukraine”.
After nearly a year and a half in detention — during which Amnesty International named him a “prisoner of conscience” — Kotsaba was acquitted of the charges by the Ivano-Frankivsk court of appeal.
In a second case, Olena Drubych a journalist working for municipally owned Kharkovskie Izvestiya, was fired in March 2016 for republishing material from the Russian website Expert Online, which reported “the Russians celebrated the second anniversary of Crimea returning to the Russian Federation”.
Two reports to MMF involved Russian TV news crews, who tried to work in Ukraine covering events.
In September 2015, Katerina Voronina, a journalist for Russian TV channel NTV was detained along with her driver by representatives of the Right Sector, a far-right Ukrainian nationalist political party, near the administrative border between occupied Crimea. NTV said that the journalist was reporting about a blockade on goods going into Crimea, and was on Ukrainian territory legally. According to the Right Sector website, Voronina, who was questioned for three hours, was filming Ukrainian soldiers. Voronina was then transferred to the Ukrainian State Security Service where she was interrogated for six more hours before being released the following morning.
In April 2016 a film crew from Russian TV channel Mir-24 was denied entry to Ukraine at the Belarusian border by Vystupovychi crossing point border guards. The journalists were planning to visit the abandoned city of Pripyat to report on the anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. According to border guards, the four correspondents, who were Belarusian citizens, did not have any permits or other documents confirming the objective of their visit.
As Index on Censorship reported in May, the Ukrainian website Myrotvorets, which publishes the personal data of those it believes to support separatism in eastern Ukraine, posted the identities of over 4,000 journalists accredited by the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic. Among those named were correspondents working for the BBC, Reuters, AFP, The Independent, Ceska televize, CNN, Al Jazeera, Liberation, ITAR-Tass and RT. Following the release, the site was criticised and announced it was shutting down, but was back online by 19 May.
Ukrainian authorities launched a criminal investigation but observers have little hope of an objective investigation. The website is openly supported by Ukraine’s interior minister, Arsen Avakov and his advisor MP Anton Herashchenko.
Following the initial post on 7 May, Myrotvorets released a second, larger list on 20 May, which contained 5,412 names including 2,082 Russian and 1,816 international journalists. The site has subsequently registered with Ukrainian authorities as a media outlet.
In 2016, Ukraine’s ranking in Reporters Without Borders press freedom index climbed 22 places to 107th out of 180 countries. According to Freedom House’s world press freedom index, Ukraine is a partially free country, up 11 places over 2015.
This article was updated on 2 September 2016 to provide context and clarification to the nature of the media environment between Russia and Ukraine.
26 Jul 16 | Europe and Central Asia, Mapping Media Freedom, News and features, Ukraine
Pavel Sheremet (Photo: Ukrainska Pravda)
The death of Pavel Sheremet on Wednesday 20 July is the latest and most egregious example of violence against journalists in Ukraine, according to verified incidents reported to Index on Censorship’s Mapping Media Freedom project.
Sheremet was killed when the car he was driving exploded on the morning of 20 July in Kyiv. In a statement, Ukrainian police said that an explosive device detonated at 7.45am as Sheremet was driving to host a morning programme on Radio Vesti, where he had been working since 2015.
The car belonged to Sheremet’s partner, journalist Olena Prytula, who co-founded Ukrainska Pravda with murdered journalist Georgiy Gongadze.
Sheremet had been imprisoned by Belarusian authorities in 1997 for three months before being deported to Russia. Though stripped of his citizenship in 2010, he continued to report on Belarus on his personal website. He moved to the Ukrainian capital in 2011 to work for the newspaper Ukrainska Pravda.
A review of Mapping Media Freedom data from 1 January to 20 July found 41 attacks on journalists — including physical violence, injuries and seizure or damage to equipment and property of journalists — have taken place in Ukraine since the beginning of the year. The largest number of incidents – about one-third – occurred in Kyiv. More than half of these journalists were attacked by unknown assailants, while the names of perpetrators in a third of these incidents are known. In about one in three cases, the attacks were committed by representatives of local authorities.
While impunity remains a key issue in Ukraine contributing to violence against journalists, the situation is slowly beginning to change for the better compared to previous years. According to the Institute of Mass Information, a positive trend has been spotted since the beginning of the year: There has been a slight increase in the number of cases involving violation of the journalists’ rights submitted to courts. In particular, there were 11 such cases in 2015. Meanwhile, 12 such cases were submitted to court for the first quarter of 2016 alone.
Despite the improvement in prosecutions, journalists are continuing to be subject to violence and intimidation.
In June, a series of incidents occurred in Berdiansk in the Zaporizhzhia region.
On 10 June Volodymyr Holovaty, a journalist working for Yuh TV, and his cameraman, Anatoliy Kyrylenko, were physically assaulted at a recreation center in Berdiansk Spit. A group of people in camouflage set upon them without warning. The attackers swore, demanded that filming stop, took the camera, stole a data storage device and struck the journalist and the cameraman, who were taken to a hospital.
On 7 June, during a rally at the Berdiansk courthouse, an unknown person harassed cameraman Bohdan Ivanuschenko and journalist Volodymyr Dyominof, who both work for Yuh TV. In that incident the individual interfered with their filming of a report with obscene language and threatened the media professionals with physical violence.
In response, journalists staged a rally on 13 June to bring attention to the recent threats and assaults in the town and demand a stronger police response. The journalists wrote an open letter demanding prosecutors help protect the rights of media workers in the town.
In May physical attacks took place in Kherson, Kyiv, Mariupol, Mykolayiv, Kharkiv, Marhanet, Zaporizhzhia and Zirne.
In the Kyiv incident, photographer and cameraman Serhiy Morhunov, who covers the conflict in eastern Ukraine, was assaulted on 22 May by unknown assailants. The journalist suffered serious head injuries including a brain haemorrhage, fractured lower jaw and partial memory loss. The doctors described his condition as serious. Morhunov was not robbed during the attack.
In Zaporizhzhia Anatoliy Ostapenko, a journalist working for Hromadske TV, who reported on corruption allegedly involving regional officials, was assaulted by masked individuals on 24 May. The journalist was walking to work when he was cut off by a car with tinted windows and lacking a license plate. Three masked men exited the car, knocked Ostapenko to the ground and physically assaulted him. Ostapenko suffered numerous bruises.
On 25 May, in Kherson, Taras Burda, the husband of a member of the Suvorivsky district council, attacked Serhiy Nikitenko, a journalist for Most media and the representative of NGO Institute of Mass Information in the region, with a tablet computer during an altercation. Burda told IMI that the journalist had attacked him first.
Many attacks have been directed at the property or equipment of journalists. In the village of Lebedivka in the Odesa region, poachers threatened the crew of the Channel 7 investigative programme Normal. The individuals pierced the tires of the journalists’ car by laying spike strips and threw eggs at the vehicles. The incident occurred when the crew was filming a TV report about the activities of poachers in the Tuzla Coastal Lakes national reserve.
On 1 April, in the town of Konotop in the Sumy region, unknown persons threw Molotov cocktails at local TV studio. A similar incident occurred in Kyiv on April 22 when 15 unidentified people attacked the office of the Ukraine TV channel. They poured red paint in the channel’s lobby and left a print out reading “Blood will be spilled!”
In April, several assaults on journalists took place in Kyiv (journalists of 1+1 TV channel were attacked), and in the village of Lymanske in Odesa region.
Only one attack on journalists was recorded in February. However, it was a flagrant incident in the context of physical violence. In Kharkiv, representatives of the Hromadska Varta organisation attacked Stanislav Kolotilov and Lesya Kocherzhuk, journalists for the Kharkiv News portal. Kolotilov suffered a concussion and spinal injury. Kocherzhuk was burned on the hand with a cigarette. The journalists were investigating allegations of illegal construction connected to the Hromadska Varta.
Also in February, representatives of the Azov civil corps blocked the premises of the Inter TV channel. The blockade participants tried to enter the office, threw debris at it and painted the doors black.
In January, journalistic activity was obstructed in Zhytomyr during a conflict involving the Zhytomyrski Lasoshchi confectionery factory. Guards prevented reporters from Channel 5 and UA1 local online media outlet from filming. A microphone was snatched from Channel 5 journalist and a camera was damaged.
Also in January, assaults on journalists, as well as attacks on journalists’ property occurred in Ternopil, Kyiv, Mykolayiv and Odesa, as well as in the village of Dovzhanka in the Ternopil region and the town of Karlivka in the Poltava region.
On 11 January 2016, the windows of a car belonging to journalist Svitlana Kriukova were smashed by unknown perpetrators but nothing was stolen from the vehicle. Kriukova was writing a book on Hennadiy Korban, a politician and businessman said to be close to oligarch Ihor Kolomoyskiy. Korban was under investigation for alleged criminal offences including kidnapping and theft. The incident occurred when the Kriukova was visiting Korban at the hospital and she believes the damages are linked to her professional activities.
13 May 16 | Digital Freedom, Mapping Media Freedom, mobile, News and features, Ukraine
Ukraine is again at the center of an international scandal. On 10 May Ukrainian website Myrotvorets, which publishes personal data of alleged separatists, made public information about the journalists who have been accredited in the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) — the part of Donbas area beyond Ukraine’s government control.
The website, which announced on Friday 13 May that it was shutting down, leaked personal data of more than 4,000 journalists, including those working for BBC, Reuters, AFP, The Independent, Ceska televize, CNN, Bloomberg, Aljazeera, AP, Liberation, ITAR-TASS and other media.
The site published the names of the journalists, the media outlets they work for, country of origin, cell phones, email and dates of stay in the DPR.
Myrotvorets, or Peacemaker, received the data from Ukrainian hackers who had attacked DPR sites. After the data was illegally disclosed, the hackers declared a boycott and suspended their activities.
The website also accuses the journalists of co-operating with “militants of the terrorist organisation” and claims that “journalists with Russian names work for many non-Russian media (CNN? BBC? AFP?).”
Myrotvorets has long been raising concerns and criticism of Ukrainian human rights activists. Launched in the spring of 2014, it publishes the personal data of people its writers see as supporting separatism in Ukraine.
In particular, it had published the personal data of former Ukrainian lawmaker Oleh Kalashnikov and journalist Oles Buzyna. Both were murdered near their apartments shortly after the release of their information.
Breaking legislation on personal data protection and the presumption of innocence, the site has been operating for two years without any prosecution for its activities.
In April 2015, the Ukrainian parliament’s Commissioner for Human Rights Valeria Lutkovska demanded that the security service and the interior ministry block the website and prosecute those behind it. Instead, she received only threats in response.
As a result, Anton Herashchenko, the MP from the People’s Front faction and the advisor to the Ukrainian Interior Minister, who previously announced his involvement in the creation of Myrotvorets, threatened Lutkovska with dismissal. He said that operation of the website was “extremely important for the national security of Ukraine and the one, who does not understand this or attempts to hinder its operation, is either a puppet in the wrong hands or works against the national security” and the information is collected “exclusively from such open sources as social networks, blogs, online directories, news feeds”.
Lutkovska’s office of ombudsman told Mapping Media Freedom that the police launched a criminal case last year, but there are no tangible results yet and the website continues its work. The sites servers are located outside Ukraine.
In the wake of the publication of journalists’ information, Lutkovska again appealed to the interior ministry and security service aksing for the site to be blocked.
Journalists, whose personal data was published, have already received threats. Ukrainian freelance journalist Roman Stepanovych has published a threat he received via e-mail.
Stepanovych, who currently works mainly for Vice News, told Mapping Media Freedom: “I filmed in Donbas like a stringer for different news agencies like NBC, DW, Reuters and sometimes worked as a fixer for Die Ziet, CCTV, Aftenposten and many more. I am a native of Donetsk, but have always worked for the western media.“
Stepanovych, who is working outside Ukraine, said that he was considering asking police to investigate the threats when he returns to the country.
On May 11, journalists working for Ukrainian and foreign media issued a joint statement with Ukrainian and international media organisations demanding that Myrotvorets immediately take down the personal data of journalists, who had been accredited in the DPR:
“The Ukrainian and foreign journalists, who risked their lives to cover the events impartially and told what was happening in the occupied territories in Ukrainian and international media, were exposed to attack. In particular, it is thanks to their work we found out about the Vostok battalion, crimes of militant known as Motorola and other militants, supply of Russian weapons and many other important facts. These journalists gave information for a qualitative investigation into downing of MH17 flight in the summer of 2014, and their materials about senior officials of the occupied territories formed the basis of many investigative and analytical articles. We especially emphasise that accreditation does not mean and has never meant cooperation of journalists with any party to the conflict. Accreditation is a form of protection and safety of journalists.”
According to the Ukrainian and international media organisations, nearly 80 journalists were taken captive in 2014, many of whom suffered torture. Accreditation is the only, although minor, mechanism for protection of journalists from torture or captivity.
Lutkovska and the journalists also appealed to Ukrainian authorities asking for a launch of criminal proceedings. On the same day, the address of the European Union’s ambassador to the Ukraine, Jan Tombinski, was released. Tombinski said that publication of the journalists’ leaked personal data violated the best international practices and Ukrainian legislation. He urged Ukrainian authorities “to help ensure that this content is no longer published“.
In response, Anton Herashchenko posted on his Facebook page: “Currently, Ukraine has no lawful methods to block harmful content and has no principles of defining which content is illegal and harmful and which is not. Ukraine has also no technical possibility to block any content on the internet.”
On May 11, the Kyiv prosecutor’s office opened criminal proceeding under Article 171 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine (Preclusion of legal professional activities of journalists).
