From the editor
“The Putin regime doesn’t want eyewitnesses.”
That’s how Ukrainian journalist Katerina Sergatskova, editor-in-chief of Zaborona Media, describes Russia’s murderous attacks against civilians and targeting of journalists reporting accurately on Putin’s invasion. As Russian forces retreat from Kyiv, reporters are uncovering ghastly evidence of potential war crimes.
Though some Ukrainian journalists have been covering conflict since Russia invaded the eastern part of Ukraine in 2014, many others are new to the hazards of reporting from a war zone. Robert Mahoney, executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, spoke to reporters on the ground in Ukraine about the challenges they face. Zaborona videographer Roman Stepanovych told him, “I’ve covered Crimea, Donbas, Turkey-Syria, and Myanmar. But this war is unpredictable and deadly like no other.”
So far, seven journalists have lost their lives covering Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, including 2019 Nieman Fellow Brent Renaud, whose humility, humanity, and extraordinarily empathic work is remembered in this piece by Nieman curator Ann Marie Lipinski. Photographer Juan Arredondo, another 2019 Nieman who was wounded in the same attack that killed Brent, was successfully evacuated to the U.S., where he is recovering.
Russia’s barbaric tactics are taking a gruesome toll in lost lives, but journalism itself is also in the line of fire. Elizaveta Kuznetsova, a fellow at Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University, reports that Putin’s crackdown on independent news outlets is taking Russia back to the Soviet era, while Ann Cooper, professor emerita at the Columbia University School of Journalism and the former executive director of the CPJ, chronicles how journalists in Ukraine and other post-Soviet states are trying to guard fragile press freedoms.
“The Russian regime is trying to destroy the very value of freedom, and who, if not the press, can bear witness to [Putin’s] atrocities?” Katerina Sergatskova writes in her Nieman Reports dispatch. “We use all our strength to keep reporting so that the world can see Russia’s invasion for what it is — an attempt to take our freedom from us. They may try, but they won’t succeed.”
Sincerely,
James Geary
Editor, Nieman Reports
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