Thirty-five years of Ukrainian journalism: facts, paradigms, stories

Its rapid development, intensive adaptation to new challenges and steady expansion of its professional role have shaped journalism in modern Ukraine into one of the key institutions of public accountability and societal resilience. So when people around the world ask how Ukrainian society managed, in such a short period of time, to move so visibly away from the Soviet paradigm and establish freedom of speech as a fundamental value, media workers hold some of the key answers.

The team at International Media Support, which has supported Ukrainian journalism since 2003, is publishing a selection of facts. The information below is not exhaustive, but is intended to offer a sense of several dimensions of Ukraine’s media landscape.

Transformation from totalitarianism to independence, the return of a European identity and the role of journalist Georgiy Gongadze 

Ukrainian journalism has never been separate from its socio-political context, and for a long time its role and purpose were constrained by a function typical of totalitarian systems.

In the Soviet Union, the press occupied a subordinate position: despite its extensive network, the media landscape was effectively monolithic, and editorial policy was determined by decisions of the Communist Party. The press not only portrayed the actions and decisions of the authorities positively, but also served as part of a wider propaganda system promoting Soviet approaches, structures and values. Journalism was therefore perceived by audiences accordingly – as the voice of power, part of the system, dependent on it and performing an information-service function on its behalf.

After independence in 1991, Ukrainian society began to rethink fundamental democratic rights, freedoms and the role of journalism within the architecture of the state, against the backdrop of immense economic disruption and the collapse of previous economic ties. This transformation was intense and uneven.

In the first years of independence, there was a sharp surge in the creation of new newsrooms at both national and local level, from a limited number of nationwide state media and an extensive network of local party publications to hundreds of new independent editorial teams. At the same time, most managerial elites in the public sector had formed their worldviews in the Soviet period and understood journalism through the lens of a totalitarian era.

In this context, an event took place in September 2000 that sharply intensified public attention to the rights, role and safety of journalism and exposed a deep gap between the authorities and society in their understanding of fundamental democratic norms.

On 16 September 2000, Georgiy Gongadze disappeared in Kyiv. He was a journalist who was building one of Ukraine’s earliest online media outlets, Ukrainska Pravda, worked in investigative journalism and stood out at press events for asking the country’s leaders – including President Leonid Kuchma – direct and pointed questions about the effectiveness of governance, the transparency of decisions on the distribution of state resources and more. Fragments of those press encounters can still be found online today, and in contemporary Ukraine, where journalism now carries significant public weight, such questions to national leaders seem entirely normal. But in 2000, for a state system in which strong elements of Soviet hierarchical thinking still remained, this represented a challenge.

In early November 2000, Georgiy Gongadze’s body was found in a forest around 100km from Kyiv. Three weeks later, on 28 November, the political opposition presented parliament and journalists with audio recordings in which voices resembling those of the president and his close circle, including heads of security agencies, repeatedly discussed the journalist’s work as a personal affront and as something that had to be stopped. Following the release of these recordings, and amid the absence of clear steps to investigate the murder, numerous protests against presidential power began across Ukraine. These events were among the key crystallisation points of a new political sensitivity in the country and influenced later social processes, including heightened attention to freedom of speech and a reassessment of journalism’s role as an instrument of public oversight.

In 2000, fewer than one percent of Ukrainians had access to the internet, computers were expensive and were mostly used collectively in offices, internet cafés or wealthier households. Early Ukrainian websites were built manually in HTML, with WordPress appearing only a few years later, in 2003. According to the outlet itself, Ukrainska Pravda, the online publication developed by Georgiy Gongadze in 2000, had just 15–20 visitors per day. Today, in 2026, the Ukrainska Pravda website records more than 1.5 million unique views per day.

The direct perpetrators of the murder received prison sentences, while evidentiary work regarding those who ordered it is still ongoing. Ukrainian journalists and analysts continue to search for facts and new data, testimonies and interpretations continue to emerge, including in light of geopolitical change, so the story of Georgiy Gongadze continues to shape society.

The formation of modern Ukrainian journalism took place in conditions of high risk. According to the international organisation Committee to Protect Journalists, which records only fully documented cases, 10 media workers were killed in Ukraine because of their professional activities between 1992 and 2013, that is, before the start of Russian military aggression. According to Ukrainian institutions, the true number is several times higher. It is impossible to establish precise figures because it is often not possible to prove a direct link between a person’s editorial work and their death.

“I remember very clearly the moment I realised I would become a journalist. I was 10 years old when Georgiy Gongadze’s murdered body was found in a forest near my town. At that time, I read everything that, at the age of 10, I could find about him and his murder, and it gave me a clear understanding: telling the truth is often dangerous, but profoundly important. Perhaps that is why, in all my 13 years in the profession, I have worked for only two media outlets, both honest and independent – the public broadcaster Suspilne and the Hromadske Radio team,” says Ruslana Brianska, executive director of Hromadske Radio.

Dismantling authorities’ control over media and building a new media architecture 

The occupation of Crimea and Russia’s military intervention in 2014 did not halt this transformation, but accelerated the dismantling of the Soviet model of informational power. 

Zurab Alasania, IMS Media Adviser and one of the key figures behind the creation of the public broadcaster Suspilne, says: 

“One of the problems with state media at the time was that many people in the public sector still lacked a stable understanding that the budget funds supporting state media were taxpayers’ money and should serve taxpayers’ interests. Many politicians, officials and state managers at all levels still believed that state media were obliged to show audiences the good results of officials’ work and to spread positive narratives about almost every project, press conference, public appearance and press release coming from the authorities. When I was appointed head of the National Television Company of Ukraine in March 2014, after the Revolution of Dignity, there were internal phones in the office, including special lines to the government, the presidential administration, the parliament’s apparatus and others…I simply took a pair of scissors and physically cut the cords. It violated the rules, but it fully matched the spirit of society and the determination we had to create good public interest journalism instead of a state-controlled media giant.” 

According to Roman Kifliuk, IMS National Adviser in Ukraine, who worked within Ukraine’s media regulator system from 2014 to 2020, public demand moved ahead of the law, and legislators had to create frameworks that would enable media reform. While the 2015 law on de-statisation aimed, among other things, to strip authorities at all levels – from village councils to central state bodies – of the direct right to own and control media, as another step away from a Soviet worldview, the 2022 Law on Media seeks to regulate the entire ecosystem, including the extensive private media sector, and is a comprehensive attempt to align Ukrainian media legislation with European standards. 

In parallel with this media – both former state outlets and private ones – increasingly took on the role of forces for democratic change, including through dialogue with local authorities and constructive joint initiatives.

According to Oleg Dereniuha, a journalist from Mykolaiv, media manager and co-founder of Nik Vesti:

“In 2020, we organised the first mayoral candidate debates in Mykolaiv, ‘Battle for the City’. It was an important experience for the city: candidates came to an open platform, answered questions and people could ask their own questions, discuss the city’s problems and compare political programmes and behaviour. In one of the programmes, the mayor of Mykolaiv even swore on the Bible before viewers that he was not involved in corruption. It was all broadcast live, and for Mykolaiv this was a unique regional project of that scale. We effectively created a public platform where local politics became open to audiences not through short statements or campaign advertising, but through live discussion, questions from residents and direct comparison of candidates. For me, it was a very vivid example of local democracy. Not as a beautiful word, but as a concrete practice: when city residents see candidates in a live, unpredictable conversation; when politicians are forced to explain their positions; and when a local media outlet creates the space for that conversation.”

OSINT, investigations, factchecking

Over the past five-to-eight years, Ukraine has made a significant leap in digital transformation. In 2024, Ukraine scored 97 percent in the European Open Data Maturity assessment and ranked third among 34 European countries, while the national portal data.gov.ua contains more than 80,000 datasets. 

This includes the digitalisation of public services for citizens – notably the introduction of the “state in a smartphone” concept and more than 20 million users of the Diia app – as well as the systematic opening of data: business registers, public procurement, officials’ declarations, construction registers, cadastres, vehicle data, court decisions and corporate records.

This is an environment in which journalists can verify facts, analyse assets and transactions, establish links between actors and build evidence about the actions of officials and companies. Contemporary Ukrainian investigative journalists work actively with open data, digital tools and social media and possess the methods and digital literacy needed to identify and interpret data and digital traces, allowing them to model events and test journalistic hypotheses. 

Where journalistic investigations once more often began with documents, interviews, statements or anonymous tips, they now increasingly start on social media, where people connected to figures in corruption cases may, for example, display a lifestyle that prompts a simple question: where did the money come from?

Some data, such as e-declarations, have been temporarily closed since 2022 for security reasons, but the datasets that remain in digital form can still be viewed and analysed by journalists and other citizens alike. Ukrainian journalism has broader possibilities than countries in the European Union for the re-use, publication and combination of data obtained from open registers.

Ukrainian journalists operate within a digital and legal environment that gives them the framework and tools to identify, analyse and use as evidence geolocation data, interconnected personal data and other digital traces; in Ukrainian investigations, audiences may see private homes, offices, restaurants where meetings take place, vehicles and other location-related data that help reveal assets and trace connections between different actors.

The balance between transparency and privacy often shifts in favour of the public interest.

In addition, Ukrainian journalistic teams actively cooperate with international media partners on joint investigations – particularly in cases where access to certain registers in EU countries is largely available only to local media or organisations.

While in European Union societies corruption is often discussed as a deviation from an otherwise functioning system, Ukrainian society and media operate in a paradigm where the system itself is still being shaped and journalists focus on questions such as: who did this, how, what kind of configuration made it possible, what does this reveal, and who – personally and institutionally – should stop it?

Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine has further strengthened the role of digital tools in newsroom work and turned the use of open-source intelligence (OSINT) into a basic daily practice. 

Since 2022, newsrooms have received hundreds of pieces of user-generated content in real time – video, photos and audio – through social media and direct communication channels. These materials help document military action, missile strikes, the consequences of attacks on civilian infrastructure, the movement of equipment, events in temporarily occupied territories, the situation of civilians and other critically important episodes of the war.

Before publication, even content that appears credible at first glance goes through multi-layered verification. Journalists analyse geolocation and metadata, compare footage with satellite imagery and open maps, check whether weather conditions, time of day, landscape features, architecture, the sound environment and shadows match, and search for duplicates or earlier publications of the same content. All of this helps minimise the risk of error or manipulation – even when the source appears reliable.

In this context, the work of Ukrainian media is critically important, both for accurately informing citizens inside the country and for international audiences. According to NewsGuard, as of May 2026, more than 560 websites around the world were systematically spreading disinformation about the war in Ukraine, including 233 in English, 62 in French and 55 in German. 

In this situation, which is increasingly described in technology circles as “information poisoning”, data and verified material from Ukrainian media become a critically important source for building a more accurate picture of events. 

A separate line of media work is the analysis of the digital environment to identify Russian military personnel who have committed crimes in Ukraine. This work can also involve publishing case materials and personal data, including names, addresses, phone numbers and locations they frequent.

In a similar way, media workers use tracking software to analyse, for example, the movement of Russian cargo around the world and cooperate with foreign colleagues to make it harder for Russia to circumvent sanctions. 

Accordingly, Ukrainian media operate under constant cyber pressure, forcing editorial teams to systematically strengthen the protection of their platforms and distribution channels. According to SSSCIP, more than 200 successful cyberattacks on Ukrainian media have been recorded during the period of the full-scale war, including DDoS attacks, the use of data-wiping malware, the hacking of journalists’ and newsrooms’ social media accounts, the creation of fake copies of accounts and the spread of disinformation content using their identity.

By combining content work with a high level of technological skill, Ukrainian journalism continually adapts and develops new professional responses to new challenges.

The threats are not only digital: since 2022, Ukrainian media, newsrooms and infrastructure have also become targets of physical attack. In the first weeks of the full-scale invasion, Russia carried out a missile strike on the national TV tower, aimed at disrupting broadcasting and limiting the population’s access to information. Today, drawing on this experience, Ukrainian media managers systematise their lessons and practices and urge European colleagues, however stable peace may appear, to develop backup operating models for functioning under extraordinary conditions. 

Since 2022, 150 media workers have been killed in Ukraine, and 30 are being held in Russian captivity. Ukrainian media workers also use OSINT to search for information about their missing colleagues, including Maks Levin and Viktoriia Roshchyna, who were later confirmed to have died as a result of Russian actions.

Media as information services and anchors in local communities

Since the start of the full-scale war, the role of Ukrainian media has expanded significantly. Newsrooms – especially at local level – have effectively turned into information services for their communities. Local media have become a source of vital information: where to get help, how to evacuate, which hospitals are operating, where resilience centres are open and how to access humanitarian assistance. In many cases, media perform a navigational function in crisis conditions when state systems cannot meet all information needs on the ground.

Media have also become platforms for community cohesion. Networks of mutual aid, volunteer initiatives and local support systems form around them. Journalism enjoys a high level of trust and acts as an active participant in the social processes that strengthen societal resilience.

“There are high expectations of journalists: that we will always find the right information, that we will provide orientation and that we will always be competent and energetic. Now, in the fourth year of operating at a very high pace, we in newsrooms are especially attentive to supporting one another within our teams – to horizontal connections, trust and practices that help preserve emotional resources,” notes Tetiana Fedorkova of MediaPort, Kharkiv. “Motivation remains high, there is a catastrophic shortage of people, but the colleagues who join teams during this period know what contemporary Ukrainian journalism is and that they are ready to take on this role.”

In border regions, the role of local media has an additional dimension: people need verified information not only for a general understanding of events, but also for day-to-day orientation, decision-making and planning their own actions on the basis of facts. In Kharkiv, which is located around 40 km from the Russian border, the local information space at the start of the full-scale invasion was saturated with signals from 20 Russian FM radio stations systematically broadcasting propaganda narratives and convincing residents, for example, that Ukraine was already under the full control of Russian troops. In response to this challenge, the Kharkiv media group Nakypilo launched its own FM broadcasting in 2022 to ensure residents had access to verified local information needed to understand the situation, navigate everyday risks and make practical decisions.

Over the decades, Ukrainian journalism has developed in a society that values operational transparency: citizens are used to checking, comparing data, testing official statements against facts and drawing their own conclusions. That is why, over 35 years, it has moved from a post-totalitarian system to a complex, multi-layered infrastructure combining the functions of independent media, public oversight and a crisis information service.

Today, Ukrainian journalists work in an environment where information is not only a resource, but also a battleground for accuracy, trust and public understanding of events.

The profession retains a clear values-based direction that has been taking shape since the early 1990s – through transformation, conflict and the emergence of independent newsrooms. Today, Ukrainian media include the first generation of journalists who did not live in the Soviet Union. They enter the profession already understanding journalism as a tool of accountability, transparency and public oversight, developing the values laid down by their predecessors while also shaping new professional standards for working in conditions of large-scale war.

Other materials on Ukrainian journalism

Humour against anxiety: How the Kyiv-based Ukrainian Toronto Television communicates with young audiences through infotainment

Women chaplains and ageing without stereotypes: equality and diversity best practices in Ukrainian newsrooms

Policy Book on Information Resilience: Lessons and recommendations from Ukraine 2022–2025