Ukraine’s President Zelensky holds a press conference in Kyiv, December 19, 2023
© ALINA SMUTKO / REUTERS / Picturedesk.com
Rockets and shells killing journalists, the Kremlin sowing disinformation, government-controlled television, the wild popularity of unregulated Telegram, and intimidation of investigative outlets—all this does not sound like an environment for a free press. Yet Ukrainian media not only proved resilient in the face of Russia’s full-scale invasion but also turned into a key element of Ukraine’s wartime balance of power.
Ukraine’s top investigative journalists gathered at a media conference organized recently in Bucha, a town on Kyiv’s outskirts where the Russian army brutally killed hundreds of civilians, held no illusions about their country’s ruling elite and its attitude toward independent media.
“Life teaches them nothing,” said Nastya Stanko, editor-in-chief of Slidstovo.info, an investigative outlet whose journalist Yevhen Shulhat has been targeted by military draft officers after he published an article exposing the personal wealth of the head of the cybersecurity department of Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) in April. The case was outrageous but what made it particularly disenchanting was the fact that it followed an earlier scandal that sent shockwaves in the media community and provoked reactions from the country’s international partners.
In January, journalists from the investigative outlet Bihus.Info became the target of a comprehensive smear campaign. A recording published by The People’s Truth, a fake YouTube channel created for this occasion, showed the company’s camera operators allegedly taking drugs during a corporate event. In their emblematic style combining sarcastic commentary with hard evidence, Bihus.Info traced back the people who secretly installed cameras in the rented venue to the SBU. According to Denys Bihus, the outlet’s funder, his employees had been under surveillance by as many as 30 individuals for at least several months.
Another investigative journalist, Yuriy Nikolov, editor-in-chief of Nashi Hroshi, who broke the biggest wartime corruption story when he reported in 2023 that the Defense Ministry had been buying eggs and other products for the army at inflated prices, was targeted just two days earlier. Unidentified men tried to break into his home and covered its door with graffiti demanding he enlists in the military. The move was preceded by a “black” public relations campaign on anonymous pro-government Telegram channels.
Following these events, the independent media association Mediarukh said that the pressure on journalists was systemic and that at least ten other outlets had been targeted in various ways. Oksana Romanyuk, the director of the Institute for Mass Information, compared the situation to the times of President Viktor Yanukovych when many journalists were prosecuted and targeted by such campaigns.
A reprimand from President Volodymyr Zelensky and an internal SBU investigation into the Bihus.Info case ensued. The ambassadors of the G7 countries meet with Ukrainian journalists in Kyiv and discussed concerns about the decline of press freedom. But for the independent media, the attacks marked the definite end of the trust they place in the authorities at the beginning of the invasion.
Back then, when Russian troops bore on Kyiv, the media united and focused on delivering operational, often lifesaving, information to millions of shocked citizens, reporting developments at the front, countering Russian propaganda, and keeping the fighting spirit high. For a while Ukraine was heard and Ukrainians were unified as never before.
In the first days of the invasion, the main television channels, which for years had been subservient to their oligarchic owners with their own agendas, came together and started broadcasting shared round-the-clock programming coproduced in coordination with state officials. The so-called Telemarathon, which has not stopped to this day and has marginalized oppositional stations, soon turned into a key tool of Zelensky’s media policy
Russia declared war not only on Ukraine’s army and state but also on its media. It has destroyed telecommunication infrastructure, seized editorial offices in the occupied territories, and targeted journalists. According to the Institute for Mass Information, as of May 2024, 86 media workers had died as a result of Russian military activities (ten while on editorial assignments), 14 had gone missing, and 34 had been wounded. There were 25 instances of kidnapping recorded.
When the dust of the first battles settled, it became clear that Ukraine was in a new reality where it had to strike the right balance between preserving unity, mobilizing resources, and keeping its democratic system.
The government’s control of television and wartime restrictions on information has significantly changed media consumption trends. According to an analysis by Internews in November 2023, 73 percent of Ukrainians rely on social media to get their news, 41 percent on news sites, 30 percent on television, 10 percent on the radio, and 3 percent on printed newspapers.
The golden era of Ukrainian television is gone, with audience dropping from 85 percent in 2015 to 30 percent in 2023. Moreover, trust in the Telemarathon, which dominates broadcasting but is increasingly criticized for providing an overly optimistic and pro-government version of events, dropped from 69 percent in May 2022 to 36 percent in February 2024, according to the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology. Some backers of Telemarathon believe that it freed television from oligarchic influence, but others argue that it de facto turned an oligopolistic market into a cartel where government pumps money into the pockets of friendly channel owners.
Ironically, Telegram, an app founded by the Russian entrepreneur Pavel Durov, emerged as Ukraine’s key wartime medium. It provides access to unfiltered and unrestricted information, and it beats the alternative media in terms of speed. The quick information on Telegram is often of poor quality, and most creators on it stay anonymous. Unlike official media, many Telegram channels use Russian. Moreover, the platform is accused of having ties to the Russian state and of facilitating its war effort. Ukraine’s parliament wants to regulate Telegram, but shutting it down seems unlikely. Its surging popularity as well as the rise of YouTube as a popular alternative to television and of the largly unfiltered TikTok show how official and professional media struggle to grasp an audience that is increasingly divided as social cohesion declines and internal conflicts boil up.
Despite the wartime challenges, Ukraine jumped from 106th to 61st position in Reporters Without Borders’s World Press Freedom Index between 2022 and 2024. But is this judgment warranted?
In practice, ordinary Ukrainians have access to a wide range of information from various sources. Criticism of the government is hardly restricted. And the country’s independent media, at the forefront of this battle, feel their power. As Sevgil Musayeva, the editor-in-chief of Ukrainska Pravda, put it during the Bucha conference, investigative journalism became “a powerful factor of political life” throughout the decade following the Maidan protests of 2014. Indeed, dozens of top officials, , including former defence minister Oleksiy Reznikov and former culture minister Oleksandr Tkachenko, lost their job due to critical domestic coverage, and even the conduct of military operations is increasingly scrutinized.
Some argue the media’s power results from the weakness of the political system. “With no balance of power in Ukraine, media are the last instance able to control authorities,” Yuriy Nikolov told the author. With an absolute majority in the parliament, extraordinary prerogatives granted to him under martial law, and practical control of the judiciary, all power in Ukraine is concentrated in the hands of Zelensky and his office, he argued.
In the first weeks of the all-out war, shock followed shock, and when Ukraine emerged unbroken by the Kremlin’s attempt to subjugate it, observers in the West looked for an explanation. They quickly fell in love with Zelensky, and he promptly used that opportunity to deliver the message of the Ukrainian people fighting for their freedom to the global audience.
“What do we hear today?,” Zelensky asked on February 24, 2022, before answering: “It is not just rocket explosions, battles, the roar of aircraft. It is the sound of a new Iron Curtain lowering and closing Russia away from the civilized world.”
Those times are long gone, the war is raging, its toll staggering, and those who wanted to cheer the democratic David and waited to see him compromising the authoritarian Goliath now see how naive their optimism was. Russia appears determined to show the Western world that its political system is superior, and that Ukraine’s fragile democracy is destined to fall. Ukrainian media are fighting to prove this wrong but their work is carried out under fire and under pressure.
Aleksander Palikot is journalist based in Ukraine. He was a Milena Jesenská Fellow at the IWM in 2024.
