In Ukraine, Attacks On Journalists Chill Media Landscape
By Christopher Miller
KYIV -- At a bustling Kyiv intersection lined with storefronts selling coffee and pastries, a pile of red roses surrounds a black-and-white photograph of Pavel Sheremet, an intrepid journalist who was killed by a car bomb here on July 20.
The simple, solemn memorial to Sheremet is also a symbol of a wave of attacks on journalists -- online and in the streets -- that has raised stark questions about power, patriotism, and the freedom of speech in Ukraine, and clouded the country's chances for normalcy.
In a nation struggling with economic troubles and Russian aggression, media professionals suspect they are being targeted in a far-reaching campaign of abuse whose perpetrators, like Sheremet’s unidentified killers, have so far acted with total impunity.
Journalists who have challenged the authorities, veered from the government’s narrative on the conflict with Russia-backed separatists in the east, or reported from separatist-held territories have found themselves in the crosshairs of coordinated online attacks carried out by hypernationalist trolls and bots -- attacks that in some cases have been supported, at least verbally, by high-ranking government and security officials.
The barrage of criticism has inspired public contempt for journalists as well as hacks and leaks of their personal data, including e-mail addresses, phone numbers, and passport information, and their correspondence with sources. Some journalists have faced death threats and physical assaults.
The day before Sheremet died -- when a bomb blast hit the car he was driving to work -- a journalist was stabbed three times in a Kyiv park and another was beaten on the street five days later.
According to the Kyiv-based Institute of Mass Information (IMI), a media watchdog that tracks attacks on reporters in Ukraine, the Prosecutor-General's Office logged 113 criminal offenses -- including physical attacks, damage to property, and obstruction of activities -- committed against journalists in the first half of 2016.
For a quarter-century, muckraking journalists in Ukraine have faced harassment, intimidation, and worse from powerful people in government and business. The media landscape is still scarred by the grisly killing of journalist Heorhiy Gongadze, whose headless corpse was found in a forest outside Kyiv after he disappeared in 2000.
The Kyiv Post newspaper has compiled a list of more than 50 Ukrainian journalists who have been killed or who died under suspicious circumstances since the country gained independence in the Soviet collapse of 1991. Others have gone missing, been beaten, or threatened with violence.
Read the entire story here.
Here's another item from our news desk:
Moscow Prosecutors Refuse To Indict Ukrainian Library Director
The prosecutor's office in Moscow has refused to indict Ukrainian Literature Library Director Natalya Sharina, who was facing charges of extremism and embezzlement.
Sharina's lawyer, Ivan Pavlov, said on August 15 that the prosecutor's office had returned the case to investigators, adding that no reason for the action was provided.
Sharina was detained in October and charged with inciting extremism and ethnic hatred because the library's collection allegedly included books by Ukrainian ultranationalist author Dmytro Korchynskiy, whose works are banned in Russia.
She was placed under house arrest.
In April, investigators charged Sharina with misallocating library funds, allegedly because she used library funds to pay for her legal defense in another extremism case against her that was dismissed in 2013.
Attorney Pavlov said the authorities had "trumped up" new charges after realizing their initial case against his client was too weak.
Sharina has rejected all the allegations, saying they are politically motivated.