“It’s going to be like in the army here,” says Valeriy Hleizer, as he sits in a remodeled room in the Central Officers' House in downtown Kyiv.
The room, which has a window overlooking Ukraine’s parliament building, is now a studio stocked with radio broadcasting equipment for the newly created Army FM military radio station.
Hleizer, a former military veteran and an experienced manager, is overseeing the work of the station.
In 2013, he launched the popular online platform Svoye Radio (Your Radio). Now he’s betting that the army radio format will be just as successful, as radio is one of the fastest ways to get information to the front lines.
“We have no competitors here,” Hleizer says.
Launched by Ukraine’s Defense Ministry with the help of Spirit of America, a U.S.-based non-profit organization, the new station aims to meet soldiers’ entertainment as well as information needs. Even after two years of the Kremlin’s war on Ukraine, only Russian radio stations had previously been available in the east.
The station started broadcasting on March 1.
“It was stressful,” recalls Yana Kholodna, who heads the defense ministry’s Central Television and Radio Studio.
The first day of broadcasting started at 6 a.m. with the national anthem, and then regular news bulletins throughout the day. “It’s a pilot project, but we’ve already had lots of positive feedback, and that’s our goal – to produce content that will be interesting to our soldiers.”
Army FM was initially broadcast only via the Internet, but it has applied for radio frequencies to launch broadcasting in the Donbas in its own FM slots, and currently transmits on 105.4 FM in the town of Bakhmut (formerly Artemivsk). The station will also soon be available in the Donetsk Oblast towns of Volnovakha and Kostiantynivka. The station’s staff of 10 people now includes both serving soldiers and civilians.
Army FM airs news and a mixture of Ukrainian and foreign pop and rock music to soldiers and the general public from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. They also have a collection of songs created by the soldiers themselves.
“As soon as the offensives started in the east, we decided to gather together these songs – and now we’ve ended up with at least 250-300 on the list,” Hleizer explains. “Sometimes it’s impossible to listen to them without tears coming to your eyes.”
Oleksiy Makukhin, adviser to Defense Minister Stepan Poltorak, hopes the Army radio station will address information needs of Ukrainian soldiers.
Fighting Russian-separatist propaganda and misinformation is also one of the key goals of the radio station.
Isaac Eagan, the director of Field Operations at Spirit of America, says his organization shared the vision of Ukraine’s Defense Ministry of creating a radio station that was designed specifically for soldiers.
“Trust is Army FM’s greatest asset,” Eagan said, adding that the defense ministry’s team came up with “balanced, factual and compelling programming” for its target audience. “We simply supported their efforts by providing start-up funding for all the initial equipment needed to launch the station – studio gear and transmitters,” Eagan told the Kyiv Post.
Eagan said the station was off to a great start, with record numbers already tuning in to its online stream.
During its first day, the station was visited online more than 60,000 times.
The team also plans to have educational programs for soldiers, tell the stories of Ukraine’s war heroes, and will have a program busting fake news stories. Talk shows with key people in the sphere who will answer soldiers’ questions regarding mobilization, financial aid from the state and legal issues are also on the team’s agenda.
While the station was started primarily for the military, it also has become popular with civilians.
“People call the radio and ask us to play songs for their relatives or friends in the war zone – it makes for such a friendly, even family atmosphere,” says Iryna Sampan, one of Army FM’s DJs.
The team is certain the station is something Ukraine’s soldiers badly need.
“Some soldiers wrote to our Facebook page saying that when they heard us on air for the first time it was an incredible feeling,” Kholodna says. “It’s because they know someone is thinking about them, and working to keep them informed.”
