Since Russia’s full-scale invasion, Ukrainians have found themselves at the junction of inward and outward media perspectives. When foreign reporters descended upon the country, many assisted them while also becoming the object of news coverage. This exposes how locals are made to earn their credibility and doubt the value of their emotional engagement in the war.
While navigating the turbulent first weeks of the full-scale war in Lviv, I was called upon to speak on air to dozens of media, from Al Jazeera English to the BBC, CNN, and NTD. In these interviews, I was usually paired with an international expert who would provide an objective analytical framework to my emotional first-hand experience. My accounts of Ukrainian defiance would be “balanced” with my counterpart’s suggestion of Ukraine’s inevitable fall. I was a patriotic local woman, naively demanding to sanction the hell out of Russia and provide Ukrainians with the means of defending ourselves and shielding the rest of the world from what Russia was capable of unleashing upon it. My usually male Western counterpart provided a “realistic” antidote to my impassioned speeches; he was prepared to list Russian military capabilities and Ukrainian deficiencies.
“Credibility Deficit”
Johana Kotisova describes this dynamic as the “credibility deficit” of Ukrainians on the ground, which is mirrored by the “excess credibility” of Western experts and journalists. Ukrainians are mistrusted as a group with an “agenda” or too much of an emotional investment to be a credible source of knowledge. Western experts, on the contrary, enjoy inflated credibility owing to their position of privilege and professed emotional detachment.
In practice, having been on the receiving end of the Kremlin’s propaganda for decades, Western pundits frequently bought into the imperialist narrative of Russia’s dominance in the region and of Ukraine’s expected surrender. Often parachuted in Ukraine from the Moscow offices of the big media houses or speaking from the comfort of remote television studios, they lacked the local knowledge and contextual understanding to correctly assess Ukraine’s capabilities and will to resist.
Ukrainians proved them wrong but the price of disbelieving them is a country half-ruined and global security compromised. Epistemic mistrust leads to real-life errors of judgment that cost hundreds of thousands of lives. As Olesya Khromeychuk explains, “We must perceive those for whom this war presents an existential threat as a credible source of knowledge not only for the sake of their survival but also for the survival of the democratic order as we know it.”
Emotional Detachment
The emotional detachment of Western media practitioners often negatively affects the ethics of journalism. A Ukrainian interviewee’s interactions with them may range from almost comical to traumatizing. Following one of the first bombings of Lviv, a British news producer sought my comment. When it turned out that our schedules were out of sync, he retorted politely: “I hope another opportunity will present itself soon.” I was less hopeful that my location would get bombed again shortly.
Sometimes the lack of empathy was more disturbing. A radio journalist contacted me on the first day of the full-scale invasion as I was coordinating the evacuation of my parents from Zaporizhzhia and preparing to house other fleeing families in Lviv. I agreed to recycle my experience into a documentary, diligently recorded my audio diary, and spent an hour talking to him the evening before my parents were to evacuate to Germany.
The producer, however, was disappointed that I did not record the most dramatic moments as they happened. He wanted to hear my parents cry and beg me to come with them. He wanted me to press “record” when I was saying goodbye to my childhood friend as she was leaving the country with her kids. Once he realized I was incapable of delivering the material, he stopped our communication, leaving me to regret not spending more time with my parents before sending them off across the border, not knowing whether I would see them again.
Outsourcing of Emotional Labor
My work as a fixer in Ukraine has clarified the role of affective proximity in ethical reporting for me. While foreign journalists were observing my people at war, I was observing the foreign journalists. Sometimes, they would become so comfortable with their fixers that, driving through the recently liberated towns of the Kyiv region that still smelled of burnt metal and rot, they would turn the music on and dance a little in their seats, celebrating a good day’s work. They would then turn to their fixer plastered against the back seat and ask why she did not join the party. Being a Ukrainian often means being a killjoy, but there are some little joys that deserve to be killed.
Being a Ukrainian fixer also means rephrasing intrusive questions, keeping in touch with interviewees, and taking on other responsibilities that few international journalists have the resources to take on. After all, these resources are emotional resources and this labor is emotional labor, categories that are feminized and devalued across societies. In international reporting, this labor is tellingly outsourced to the locals.
While lack of emotional engagement is often regarded as part and parcel of journalistic professionalism, the contributions of local media practitioners are often discredited as emotional and biased. Kotisova argues that “in practice, it can be the foreign reporters who have their ‘agenda,’ ‘preconceived notions,’ or ‘narrow views.’ They can ask their local collaborators to find controversies or relatively marginal phenomena fitting into the stereotypical image of the country in question.” Stories produced in this manner are artificial and simplistic at best, harmful at worst—as in the case of the notorious foreign media hunt for “Ukrainian neo-nazis.”
Preconceived Western Notions
Reporters who discovered Ukraine in the early days of the big war frequently possessed a preconditioned image of victimhood. They were looking for wartime clichés: despairing young mothers, tearful old grannies, confused teenagers. Instead, they met teenagers who were fortifying checkpoints, grannies who were weaving camouflage nets and young mothers who were enlisting in the army.
In the following months, Ukrainian defiance kept undermining Western expectations. After the liberation of the north of the country, I accompanied foreign crews to the Kyiv region, where we met Nadiya. She was hard not to notice: her t-shirt was turquoise, same as her eyes, same as the bench she was sitting on. Same as the wall of the ruined house behind her.
The house with turquoise walls was Nadiya’s pride. It contained memories of births and funerals, weddings and family reunions, of a life full of hard work and striving. Nadiya’s love for it was palpable. When the Russians invaded her village, they drove her out of her family home and turned it into an ammunition warehouse, with tanks parked in her garden. Nadiya’s house was set on fire by a Ukrainian missile.
When we met her, Nadiya was living in a cabin put up in her backyard by volunteers. She feared one thing only: that the occupiers would return. “If only someone gave me a rifle. My legs are bad now but I would shoot at least one bastard from the sitting position,” she said quietly. The archetypal image of a tearful granny faded away.
Rather than being an obstacle, affective proximity is what makes many Ukrainians effective storytellers. Their right to tell the world their own stories on their own terms is underpinned by their embodied, intimate connection to the subject matter. To fight against epistemic injustice, Ukrainians should arm themselves with emotion.
Johana Kotisova, “The epistemic injustice in conflict reporting: Reporters and ‘fixers’ covering Ukraine, Israel, and Palestine,” Journalism 2023: 0(0), 1–20 (pp. 5–6), https://doi.org/10.1177/14648849231171019
Sasha Dovzhyk is special projects curator at the Ukrainian Institute London. She was a visiting fellow of the program Ukraine in European Dialogue at the IWM in 2023.
