The winter of 2013/2014 was a tumultuous one for Ukraine. It saw the country’s pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych flee Ukraine after months of violent anti-government protests. This, in turn, triggered demonstrations by pro-Russians in eastern Ukraine, a primarily Russian-speaking region. One of the towns hit by the pro-Russian unrest was Kharkiv in Ukraine’s northeast, some 30 km from the Russian border.
When protests erupted in Kharkiv in March 2014, documentary filmmaker Natalia Kurdiukova spontaneously grabbed a video camera and hit the streets of her hometown, accompanied by Roman Danilenkov, a business graduate. The two citizen journalists uploaded their footage to a YouTube channel they named “Nakipelo” (“fed up”). It quickly got more than 100,000 views. They soon divided the original YouTube channel into two: one for live streams and the other for edited videos.
