Once a year, Ukrainian journalists are praised as heroes. The other 364 days, they are targets.
In the week leading up to this year’s National Journalist Day — a professional holiday marked widely in Ukraine every June 6 — Ukrainian journalists were reminded just how hostile the environment they work in actually is.
The peculiar affair of Russian journalist Arkady Babchenko, who was reported murdered in Kyiv on May 29 only to show up alive a day later and reveal it was all a sting operation by the Ukrainian special services, had dark and confusing consequences for Ukrainian journalists.
Special services said they obtained in the sting operation a list of 47 people from which the Russian special services were choosing assassination targets. Most of them were journalists.
Ukrainian journalists, including those on the alleged “hit list,” disagreed about the interpretation of this threat, with some taking it seriously, while others suspecting Ukraine’s SBU security service had invented it to intimidate journalists. Some even ridiculed the list.
Journalists’ doubts fell on fertile ground, adding to the confusion caused by the Babchenko affair and backed by Ukraine’s history of violence against journalists — including assassinations — which invariably go unpunished.
“This extreme action by the Ukrainian authorities has the potential to undermine public trust in journalists and to mute outrage when they are killed,” wrote Nina Ognianova, the coordinator in Europe and Central Asia for the Committee to Protect Journalists, an international freedom of speech watchdog.
It’s actions like this and others that keep Ukraine low in the World Press Freedom Index — it currently ranks 101 out of 180 countries.
A horrendous week for Ukrainian journalists culminated on June 4 when their colleague from the Ukrinform news agency Roman Sushchenko was sentenced to 12 years in prison by a Russian court for spying in a case the Ukrainian authorities have decried as political. Sushchenko, who lives in Paris and covers France for his news agency, was arrested when he traveled to Russia in September 2016.
‘Hit list’ scare
The SBU said they obtained the Kremlin “hit list” of 47 people, some of them journalists, on May 30. The list was one of the fruits of the sting operation conducted to save the journalist Babchenko, whom the SBU said was targeted for assassination by the Russian special services. According to the SBU, the Russian special services hired a middleman in Ukraine to organize the murder.
The alleged organizer, a Ukrainian arms dealer named Borys German, was arrested during the operation as well. He gave a confusing testimony at his arrest hearing in court, claiming he was cooperating with Ukrainian special services the whole time.
The SBU refused to publish the list of assassination targets, but instead called journalists in for private talks. Those who chose to comment on the meetings said they had been offered state security and were made to sign a non-disclosure agreement — although it’s not clear if these covered the whole case or just the meeting.
Among the journalists who confirmed they were on the alleged hit list are TV host Tetiana Danylenko of ZIK TV, the chief editor of LB.ua Ksenia Vasylenko, known professionally as Sonya Koshkina, journalist Ekaterina Sergatskova of Zaborona.com, journalist Bogdan Butkevych of Espresso TV, journalist Ayder Muzhdabaev of ATR TV station, and two Russian TV journalists working in Ukraine, Yevgeny Kiselyov and Matvey Ganapolsky.
Most of the journalists on the list are TV presenters or work for leading online publications. Nearly all are active on social media.
Some of the targeted journalists were critical of the way the SBU treated the situation and voiced doubts that the “hit list” was even real.
“Personally, I decided to not participate in this farce,” editor-in-chief of LB.ua news website Koshkina wrote in a column entitled “I’m not scared” on June 6, adding she had doubts about the genuineness of the “hit list” and had refused to sign any documents or ask for security.
The full list was leaked to Strana.ua, a news website highly critical of the authorities, on June 4. The SBU has started an investigation into the leak.
But Oksana Romaniuk, the head of the Institute of Mass Information, Ukraine’s media watchdog, thinks the “hit list” could have been leaked on purpose to split the media community which dived into discussion of it.
“Everyone jumped into emotions and conspiracy theories,” she said. “Journalism was turned upside down.”
In fact, Romaniuk added, there are too many questions about the list to draw any conclusions about it.
“I can’t comment on this list because I don’t know whether it was put together by the SBU or by the (Russian special service the) FSB,” she said.
Shame list
Immediately after the reported assassination of journalist Babchenko was revealed to have been a special operation, top officials used the occasion to lambast their opponents. President Petro Poroshenko, when talking about the successful sting operation, referred to those criticizing the authorities as “the fifth column.”
Larysa Sargan, Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko’s aide and spokeswoman, went even further.
Immediately after the Babchenko affair, she published on Facebook a list of politicians and journalists who, oblivious to the sting operation, had criticized the authorities for failing to protect Babchenko and for failing to investigate other high profile murders.
She called on her followers to send her more examples of critics.
“Let’s see how they apologize,” Sargan said.
Sargan’s “shame list” provoked a concerned reaction from the OSCE’s Representative on Freedom of the Media, Harlem Desir.
“I strongly encourage the authorities to intervene and suspend such practices, especially when undertaken by government officials,” Desir said on June 4.
Among those featured on the “shame list” was Myroslava Gongadze, the widow of journalist Georgiy Gongadze, who was murdered in 2000. It took nearly 13 years to imprison the perpetrator of the murder, and others implicated in the case, including former President Leonid Kuchma, never stood trial.
“Impunity breeds crime,” Gongadze wrote when Babchenko was reported to be murdered.
For that, too, the prosecutor general’s aide expects an apology.
More turbulence?
Koshkina wrote she hoped the “hit list” presented by the SBU hadn’t been invented to intimidate journalists in the run-up for the March 2019 presidential election and October 2019 parliamentary election.
The upcoming election campaigns are indeed a big factor causing turbulence for Ukrainian media, according to Romaniuk of the Institute of Mass Information.
The institute registered 14 beatings of journalists in the first five months of 2018 — two times more than during the same period in 2017. An alternative count by the National Union of Journalists registered 21 assaults on journalists in January-April.
“This is happening all over Ukraine,” Romaniuk said.
Romaniuk thinks there will be even more violence against journalists in the run-up to the elections. She also forecasts increased pressure on the media from their owners.
Hostility and impunity
The Committee to Protect Journalists has registered seven killings of journalists in Ukraine since 1992 — and these are just the well-publicized cases where the victims were clearly targeted for their professional activities. Alternative counts list up to 50 murdered journalists.
The murder that had the biggest impact on Ukraine was that of Gongadze, the chief editor and founder of the Ukrainska Pravda online news website. Gongadze was kidnapped on Sept. 16, 2000, and his headless corpse found in a forest near the town of Tarashcha in Kyiv Oblast in November of that year. In 2013, a Ukrainian court sentenced a former police general, Oleksiy Pukach, to life in prison for the murder of Gongadze. But others implicated in the murder, including former President Leonid Kuchma, have never gone on trial.
In July 2016, the journalistic community was shaken by the brazen assassination in Kyiv of Pavel Sheremet, a famous Belarusian journalist working in Ukraine. Despite President Poroshenko’s promise to oversee the case personally, nearly two years later investigators have made no progress in the case.
Kyiv Post staff writer Oksana Grytsenko contributed reporting to this story.
