Anastasiia Lapatina is just 21 years old. Seated on a terrace in a young and bubbling district of kyiv, she gets her hands on her next article on the Russian invasion which is tearing her country apart.
This little corner of the table is most of the time his office. Indeed, even if she works for the most widely read newspaper in Ukraine and the most popular for foreign readers who follow what is happening in the country, even if she is one of its founders, she does not have the luxury of working in a newsroom.
We have a huge readership, but we really are a small business. Everything is not yet installed, our website does not yet have its finalized versionshe explains.
The Kyiv Independent was born in December 2021, when the entire newsroom of the daily was laid off Kyiv Postwhose owners had a pro-Russian bent.
” We were all fired without warning for defending our editorial independence. We all agreed to continue our journalistic activities. The Kyiv Independent is truly a community enterprise. “
Just before the outbreak of war in February, the young journalist was continuing her studies in Europe. In the aftermath of the Russian invasion, she made the firm decision to return to the country to practice her profession, a patriotic duty according to her.
One of her first assignments: the massacres in Boutcha, a town next to where she and her family lived.
I covered a mass grave exhumation. It’s crazy to see the bodies of civilians being tortured, killed and buried, and this Orwellian vision of all these reporters taking pictures, it’s very strange.
She who wanted to cover international conflicts saw her dream come true, but in her own country. Something she had never considered.
His colleague Illia Ponomarenko, 30, defines herself as a war reporter. This is what he has always wanted to do and what he has practiced in particular in the coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
But he got his first dose when he was still a journalism student in the Donbass, when Russia invaded this part of eastern Ukraine in 2014. A freelancer for outlets like the BBC, he made his debut in the profession from Mariupol, under the onslaught of Russia.
Today, he covers the front lines of the all-out war launched by Vladimir Putin last February. Regularly, he follows the Ukrainian soldiers to the front. A difficult task, especially since he is alone in the field…
” You end up getting attached to these people, you always want to come back to see what they’re going through, what emotions they’re going through. It’s really inspiring, you know. “
A bewitching sting that he does not qualify as a drug. I am neither suicidal nor a drug addict. I am a professional. I’m not here to die for a paragraph or two in an article.
Since his commitment to journalism, he has more than ever what he calls a sense of duty. It’s a sense of duty. I always tell people that what we do as journalists now is not work. It is a service. As simple as that. Not a service to any government or agency, a service to your people, to this country.
But as a journalist, out of a concern for objectivity, however relative it may be, isn’t there the risk of taking up the cause of the country on which one writes, on which one reports the facts, and to forget this duty of reserve?
On this subject, Anastasiia Lapatina has a very clear opinion. I don’t think it’s difficult, because this conflict is pretty clear. Any rational person with a working brain can see that there is only one demon in this story. Of course, it is not said that Ukrainian politicians are no longer corrupt or that Ukrainians are perfect people who do not commit any crimes, but in this conflict there is a bad guy and a victim.
Does this mean that his reporting is completely biased?
What kind of objectivity are people looking for? Do they want me to quote the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine, but also that of Russia? Are the statistics literally not credible to any country in the world except China or Syria?
Covering a conflict in one’s own country as a journalist is therefore quite complicated, according to Illia Ponomarenko, caught between the war effort, emotion and factual information…
You try to watch it from afar. Do I sound like a journalist, not a propaganda worker or an overly emotional human being? Am I being honest beyond objectivity (for me there is no objectivity in real journalism)? Am I professional and honest in this? It’s very difficult.
Recently, Anastasiia Lapatina launched with two of her friends a podcast on the war, Did the War End? (Is the war over?).
It’s another way of exercising one’s profession with more freedom in tone and above all more time to recount one’s human experiences with one’s guests, Ukrainians who are suffering the horrors of war. As for her subsequent coverage of the conflict, the challenge is as great as a journalist as it is as a Ukrainian.
” Russia is not going to disappear overnight, so we have to find a way to exist alongside this country in a safe way and in a way that remains isolated from Russian propaganda and imperialism. “
A challenge also for the thirty or so employees of the Kyiv Independenta publication that continues to break readership records and recently succeeded in attracting nearly $2 million in funding for its operation and development.
Source: Radio-Canada
