President Viktor Yanukovych has said he will support journalists’ right to free expression. Yanukovych was responding a police attack on journalists at the Ekspres newspaper in the town of Lviv last week. This was the fourth such attack since Yanukovych assumed office in February.
Journalists from television channel TVi have written an open letter to Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, demanding that he intervene to stop the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) pressuring journalists. SBU has demanded that TVi present them with documents regarding a tender, the deal angered rival companies affiliated with the SBU’s director, Valeriy Khoroshkovskiy, whose wife runs one of TVi’s competitors. Journalists expressed concerns that SBU is turning into “a structure which backs personal and business interests of the head of the SBU, Valeriy Khoroshkovskiy, and members of his family”. And in a seperate incident on Tuesday, Ukrainian police intimidated journalists and camermen at the newspaper Ekspres. The paper’s director was arrested in Livy on charges of tax evasion. Journalists who came to the police station to cover the story claim they were handled brutally by police. The paper had published an investigative report on corruption among lawmakers, triggering protests that disrupted traffic on a busy highway near Lviv. The attack is the fourth such incident involving journalists since the inauguration of President Viktor Yanukovych to the presidency in February.
A defamation case brought against the chief editor of Rodnoye Priyapovy, Sergei Shvedko, for doubting aspects of a 1930s famine has been squashed, creating a legal precedent. Businessman Vasily Kovalenko brought the case over an article that stated the Soviet famine — known as Holodomor— was not genocide against the Ukrainian people in particular. Kovalenko cited the constitution which outlaws Holodomor denial. But the court ruling stated Shevdko’s article “did not deny the fact of Holodomor” and was “subjective opinion”.
Sergei Shvedko, chief editor of the Rodnoye Priyapovye, is to go on trial for expressing doubts that the Holodomor — the 1930s famine in which millions of Ukranian starved to death because of the policies of Joseph Stalin — was genocide aimed against the Ukrainian people. Former President Yushchenko’s “Our Ukraine” party bought about the legal action claiming Shvedko denigrated Ukrainians’ dignity, dishonoured of the memory of the famine’s victims and denied the famine was genocide. Holodomor denial outlawed in Ukraine.