14 Mar 22 | News and features, Russia, Ukraine
It was never easy for hromadske. The independent Ukraine broadcaster was set up in 2013 during the dark days of Viktor Yanukovich, the pro-Russian President of Ukraine. Founded originally as an independent TV station, hromadske (public, in Ukrainian), prided itself on its freedom from control by oligarchs or the state even after Yanukovych was forced to flee by the “Maidan” protests of 2014.
Over the years journalists at the station had adapted to shifts in the media landscape and by the time of the Russian invasion hromadske was streaming topical videos on You Tube and Facebook with special reports every Tuesday and Thursday.
“From January 2022 we changed our model and had no broadcasts, only irregular live streams on the spot from what we considered to be major events,” producer Kostan Nechyporenko tells Index on Censorship. These included the treason trial of former President Petro Poroshenko and major demonstrations.
“After 24 February things changed dramatically,” says Kostan. “It was tense in the first few days and people moved out of Kyiv. We had a backup plan in case of invasion.” The station moved its studio from the centre of Ukraine, close to the country’s parliament building, to a temporary base in Vynittsia, halfway between the capital and the Moldovan border.
“We left a lot of our gear,” says Kostan. We took our most important things. We had to take care of the website as a priority.” The producer moved with his family to the countryside outside Kyiv but plans to return to the office for more equipment this week. Meanwhile, he organises logistics for hromadske crews still reporting all over the country. The film making capacity of hromadske was initially reduced, but the team took the opportunity to revive broadcasts and there is now an hour-long programme every evening at 6.30pm.
The whole mission of hromadske has now changed. “Only the video production had some problems in the early days of the war. The website and social media were working overtime and much more intensely than before. After the first five or six days the situation changed with video production too. Now we produce two to three videos a day, though they might be made in a rush. And because of the war, we’re back to digital broadcasting, though it’s of poorer quality and from a makeshift studio.”
Kostan has no doubt hromadske journalists are at mortal risk from the Russian forces. At the beginning of the war, one of his colleagues, whose must remain anonymous for security reasons, was already in the Donbas region in the east of the country to report on the shelling of Shchastia in the Luhansk region. The reporter remained there when the war started and reported from the front, but had serious problems getting out.
“Our journalist found a car and went to the front line again in the Zaporizhzhia region,” Kostan continues. “The car got shot by a Russian tank so was abandoned. The Russians took a laptop, camera and personal belongings.” Thankfully, the reporter was able to hide in an abandoned house and contact her colleagues at hromadske the next morning.
A second correspondent narrowly escaped from Irpin, on the northwest edge of Irpin, where New York Times journalist Brent Renaud was killed.
The hromadske project was founded during a flowering of independent media in Ukraine and fiercely protected its freedom from the influence of oligarchs and government. The independent values remain more important than ever as it continues to report from Ukraine under siege.
11 Mar 22 | Opinion, Russia, Ruth's blog, Ukraine
Protests against the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Photo: Stefan Rousseau/PA Wire/PA Images
I had planned to write this week on International Women’s Day. I wanted to feature the female war journalists who are on the frontline as the artillery falls in Ukraine. The brave protesters in Russia who have made their views on the war clear, in spite of the fear of detention. The Russian female scientists who added their names to a joint letter in the academic periodical Trinity Option – causing the publication to be blocked by the Russian state censor. I wanted to write of the amazing women in Myanmar and Hong Kong and Afghanistan and Belarus who keep the dream of democracy alive.
Thankfully these brave women are still fighting the good fight. Inspiring us every day.
And as important as their stories are – and we will keep covering them at Index both in the magazine and on our website, it’s the faces on our media which are dominating my thoughts.
I feel shell-shocked, unable to turn off the news, unable to look away from the devastation being wrought by the Russian military on innocent civilians. Of course, we only know what is happening in Ukraine because we are lucky enough to have independent journalism and media plurality. And as much as I keep holding onto that – it’s the images of the shelled hospital in Mariupol, the pregnant women stumbling from the wreckage, the children sobbing as they looked for help, that I cannot move on from.
War is ugly and the innocent are always caught up in the horror. This has been true since the beginning of time. But there are some images we never thought we would see again on the streets of Europe. Children dying of starvation, residential areas targeted, Holocaust survivors once again exposed to war and fleeing their homes. War crimes happening less than 1,750 miles from where I type.
For those of us who have followed closely the war in Syria, none of this should come as a surprise. And it doesn’t but that does not make the realities on our screens any easier. Russian misinformation, propaganda and lies is adding insult to injury – I won’t share their appalling statements on the events in Mariupol, as their lies need no audience but never have I been more grateful for a free press and to live in a democratic society.
So, as we mark International Women’s Day this week my heart is with the people of Ukraine. I am inspired by their collective bravery in the face of Putin’s tyranny and violence. I grieve with them as they face the reality of war and I stand with them against the lies and deceit of the Russian Federation.
11 Mar 22 | News and features, Russia, Ukraine
As Putin continues his bloody invasion of Ukraine, the rest of the world continues to look for signs of an uprising in Russia that might provide a possible exit strategy without risking World War III.
In a country that has cracked down on protest ever since Index was founded in 1972, it can be hard to tell the real scale of opposition to the war.
What we do know, thanks to human rights group OVD-info, is that some 14,000 people from 140 cities have been detained by the authorities so far for exercising their right to object to the actions in Ukraine. On 6 March alone, 5,000 protesters were detained, including 113 juveniles and 13 journalists. Children as young as seven were detained for laying flowers at Moscow’s Ukrainian Embassy.
Arrests are often violent, with protesters beaten with batons and shot with stun guns. If convicted of breaking the harsh rules on protests, they face fines of up to 300,000 roubles (around £2,000 at the current exchange rate) and detention for up to 30 days.
One of Putin’s most vocal critics – the jailed opposition politician leader Alexey Navalny – has also been publicising the work of his supporters in taking the temperature of public opinion in Russia. Navalny is currently being held in a penal colony for three and a half years after being found guilty of a charge of embezzlement. A new court case started in mid-February in which prosecutors have accused him of stealing more than 350 million roubles in donations from non-governmental organisations.
On 8 March, Navalny (actually his lawyers and supporters outside prison, presumably with his blessing) tweeted a thread sharing the results of four opinion polls taken between 25 February and 3 March in Moscow, each including 700 participants.
Navalny said in his tweets, “Whether Russians actually support the hideous war that Putin has waged against Ukraine is a matter of utmost political importance. The answer to this question will largely define Russia’s place in the history of the 21st century.
“It’s one thing if Putin killed Ukrainian civilians and destroyed life-critical infrastructure with full approval from the Russian citizens. However, it’s a whole different story if Putin’s bloody venture is not supported by the society.”
The polls showed that Muscovites view of the role of Russia in the conflict rapidly shifted, with 53% by the end of the polling saying Russia had taken on the role of aggressor in the conflict against 28% who felt Russia was a liberator and 12% who saw them as a peace-maker.
In the same period, the number of people who felt Russia was the guilty party more than doubled from 14% to 36%,.
By the end of the four polls, 60% of those surveyed felt there would be a catastrophic collapse of the Russian economy as a result of the invasion.
By 3 March, some 79% of those asked said the conflicting parties should immediately cease all military operations and engage in peace talks.
Commenting on the findings, Navalny tweeted: “The nature of these changes is plain and unambiguous: people rapidly begin to realise who is responsible for initiating the conflict, as well as the war’s true objectives and possible outcomes. Undoubtedly, the Kremlin can see these dynamics as well, hence the nervousness, the desperate attempts to end the war campaign as soon as possible.”
He added: “The anti-war momentum will keep growing across the society, so the anti-war protests should not be halted under any circumstances.”
In a thread a few days earlier, Navalny had dubbed Putin an “obviously insane czar” and added: “Putin is not Russia. If there is anything in Russia right now that you can be most proud of, it is those… people who were detained because – without any call – they took to the streets with placards saying ‘No War’”.
“We must, gritting our teeth and overcoming fear, come out and demand an end to the war. Each arrested person must be replaced by two newcomers. If in order to stop the war we have to fill prisons and paddy wagons with ourselves, we will fill prisons and paddy wagons with ourselves.
He concluded: “Everything has a price, and now, in the spring of 2022, we must pay this price. There’s no one to do it for us. Let’s not ‘be against the war’. Let’s fight against the war.”
Others would have you believe that Putin has wide support for his actions. The state-controlled pollster VCIOM said that Putin’s confidence rating among the public had grown from 73% to 7.4% between 4 and 11 March.
A 5 March poll by the organisation found that 71% of Russians support the decision to conduct what they call the “special military operation” in Ukraine with 46% of Russians believing the operation “aims to protect Russia and prevent the deployment of NATO military bases on the territory of Ukraine”.
04 Mar 22 | Opinion, Russia, Ruth's blog, Ukraine
Today marks nine days since Putin unilaterally declared war on Ukraine, invading a sovereign state and attempting to redraw the world order as we know it. Thanks to our independent and free media we have all witnessed the coordinated Russian military attacks from land, sea and air against an innocent population who sought nothing more than to be free. Every one of us is now a witness, for better or worse, to the heart-breaking events happening in mainland Europe. There can be no excuses of ignorance, no turning the other way and no pretence that this isn’t happening on our watch.
An aerial view of the TV tower and Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial in Kyiv. Photo: Google
On Tuesday Putin’s forces committed what can only be considered a war crime in Kyiv – where they targeted the main TV tower and also hit the Babyn Yar Holocaust memorial, the site of the largest mass grave in Europe. Five civilians were burned alive, in a European capital, in the twenty-first century. This is only one of the devastating atrocities we have seen reported in the last week – the International Criminal Court has already determined that there is enough evidence to launch a probe into war crimes perpetuated by Russian forces and 38 world leaders have made the largest ever referral to ICC with evidence of potential war crimes perpetuated by Putin’s forces.
On Wednesday Ukrainian Emergency Services announced that over 2,000 Ukrainian civilians have been killed by Russian actions since the invasion began.
Overnight, for the first time in world history, Russian troops targeted a nuclear power facility in Zaporizhzhia, something which could have had terrible consequences for us all.
And this morning the Russian government blocked access to the BBC Russian service website after the Russian language website’s audience had grown from 3.1 million people to 10.7 million since the invasion.
The news is bleak; every day there is more despair, more death and more destruction. Every conversation I have had over the last week has not just touched on events in Ukraine but returned to them again and again. Tears have been shed throughout Europe and impartial and independent media coverage has never been more important.
But even in the midst of war there is hope. Humanity does indeed prevail. Small acts of kindness, of resistance, of rebellion have inspired us all. From the unarmed Ukrainians who refused to let the tanks pass to the exceptional bravery of the journalists who are at the frontline reporting hourly on events, and those in Russia who have been trying to report the facts of the war.
Whilst I could have dedicated this entire blog to the incredibly impressive Volodymyr Zelenskiy and other politicians in Ukraine who are leading from the front, there are others whose bravery I would like to highlight. Every day since the invasion began anti-war protestors have made their voices heard across Russia and Belarus.
Ovd-Info reports that as of this morning 8,163 Russians have been arrested for protesting the war in towns and cities across the country. The Duma has brought in emergency legislation which will now enable jail terms of up to 15 years for spreading ‘fake information’ about the armed forces – this would include saying that the war isn’t going to plan. In response one of the final independent TV stations – Dozhd has closed up shop – their final programme an act of defiance as it showed the staff walking off the set. In Putin’s Russia challenging him or the status quo is a very dangerous thing to do – these people are heroes, using all the tools at their disposal to demonstrate their dissent.
While there are people who are willing to say No, to highlight the impact of an authoritarian regime, to fight for our shared human rights – then there is hope.
Index stands with Ukraine and we stand with the people of Russia who oppose Putin’s aggression.
