Roman Stepanovych is no stranger to war. In an award-winning career for English-language news outlets including the Associated Press and Vice News, the 32-year-old Ukrainian journalist has reported from Syria, Chechnya and Myanmar, as well as covering the conflict closer to home in the Donbas region.
In the 12 days since Russia invaded, however, he has been dealing with an entirely new reality. It is not just his own safety on the line anymore: his children, parents, friends and Zaborona, the independent news website Stepanovych and his wife founded in 2017, are at risk too.
“I’m from Donetsk, which is occupied by separatists, and my wife [Kateryna Sergatskova, Zaborona’s editor-in-chief] and I and have worked in dangerous places. She was in Iraq. But now I think it was just an introduction for this. It is completely different when it is your home,” he said.
Zaborona is one of dozens of small news outlets focusing on investigative journalism that sprang up in Ukraine in the aftermath of the 2013 Maidan revolution. The protests eventually led to the overthrow of Viktor Yanukovych, the pro-Russian president accused of extensive corruption, political intimidation and violence against those who demonstrated against his government.
Despite the conflict in Donbas and Crimea, in many respects Ukrainian civil society and democratic initiatives have since flourished. Even so, the government has struggled to stamp out endemic corruption. Zaborona, which has investigated the 2016 murder of journalist Pavel Sheremet and taboo topics such as LGBTQ rights and church abuses, covers the kind of stories that Ukraine’s traditional media outlets have neither the ability nor inclination to touch.
For the 31-strong newsroom, however, the focus now is purely on surviving – both literally and figuratively. One Ukrainian journalist has already been killed, and another four injured. A Sky News crew was evacuated back to the UK from Ukraine on Sunday after the journalists were shot during an ambush by Russian snipers.
As Stepanovych knows well from his time working in Russia, Moscow has limited – and declining – tolerance for journalism which doesn’t conform to the Kremlin’s preferred narratives.
According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, Russia is now a more dangerous place for media workers than any time since the end of the cold war; murders and physical attacks often go unpunished, while new laws aim to stifle the free press and internet.
The repression has become almost total since Moscow invaded Ukraine. Last week the Russian government shut down the country’s last independent TV channel, TV Rain, as well as Echo of Moscow, one of its oldest radio stations. The BBC and other international news organisations have been blocked, as well as Facebook and Twitter, for allegedly spreading false information about the war.
Most of the journalism outlets remaining in Russia have suspended operations following a law passed on Friday punishing “fake war reports” with up to 15 years in prison.
The 2021 co-winner of the Nobel peace prize Dmitry Muratov, editor-in-chief of the independent Novaya Gazeta, told the New Yorker before the legislation was passed: “For now, we continue to call war war. We are waiting for the consequences.” The newspaper has since deleted content from its website.
In February, the US government reportedly sent a letter to the UN warning that there is “credible information that indicates Russian forces are creating lists of identified Ukrainians to be killed or sent to camps following a military occupation”.
The Zaborona team is sure that is the case. But for now, they are focusing on what can be done: setting up a new newsroom in Lviv, a city near the Polish border; coordinating stories, photographs and video footage from reporters dotted around the country; and raising money through the newly created 24.02 Foundation.
The fundraiser will buy bulletproof vests and helmets, medical equipment and satellite phones, and otherwise go towards logistical needs such as petrol and generators, as the Zaborona reporters make a sudden transformation into full-time war correspondents.
Many other Ukrainian news outlets are doing the same. The CEO of the Kyiv Independent has started a GoFundMe page to “Keep Ukraine’s media going”, the proceeds of which will go to a growing list of news organisations, with support “allocated based on urgency of needs in the first place, then distributed proportionally”.
“Before we would have been competitors, but we are not any more,” Stepanovych said. “If someone is in the right place and we need to write something or check something it doesn’t matter who they work for, we can call, because we are all working together collectively.”
It is not clear what the future holds. Men aged between 18 – 60 are not allowed to leave Ukraine, and may be called up to fight, even if they have no military experience. Sixty per cent of Zaborona’s newsroom is female: some have already left, taking their children with them, to set up in other countries and reach funders for help.
But the newsroom still has hope. “It is hard to undo the gains we have made since Maidan,” Stepanovych said. “We will keep going. Maybe we will be fighting and writing at the same time. But we will be here until the end.”