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.

That concludes our live-blogging of the Ukraine crisis for Monday, August 15. Check back here tomorrow for more of our continuing coverage. Take care.