Conflicted: a Ukrainian journalist covers her nation at war

Ideas53:59Conflicted: a Ukrainian journalist covers her nation at war

Veronika Melkozerova never wanted to be a war reporter, but as she says, "When war comes into your country, you have no choice."

The journalist, who is based in Kyiv, has been covering Russia's invasion of Ukraine since 2014, when the pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych was ousted after a series of intense protests — prompting the Ukrainian Revolution, also known as the Revolution of Dignity.

Soon after the revolution ended, Russia occupied and then annexed Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula, a sovereign territory.

"Back then, only the Ukrainian media called it an invasion, even though Igor Strelkov and many other top so-called separatists were Russian citizens, and even though the Russian regular army blocked Ukrainian soldiers in their bases in Crimea and was regularly entering Ukraine to aid the militants in battles,"  Melkozerova said in her Peter Stursberg Foreign Correspondent's Lecture, presented by Carleton University in January of this year. 

When reporting on the first invasion a decade ago, Melkozerova remembers being heavily edited as she tried to describe what was happening in Ukraine — calling out Russian-backed militants to clarify their origins and affiliations.

"'Russia does not admit it supports them — so we can't call them Russian,' one of my editors told me back then."

A journalist's dilemma

Melkozerova stayed in Kyiv when it was under siege in 2022, and her country became a war zone. She remained to ensure that the coverage of the war would be defined by what she felt was an appropriate context. 

As she puts it, Ukrainian reporters constantly face a dilemma: "undermining our own country at war. By which I mean reporting on our own corrupt officials."

After her talk, Melkozerova spoke to IDEAS host Nahlah Ayed about working with the tension between patriotism and journalism.

Here is an excerpt of their conversation.

Your lecture… was framed with a tension between patriotism on one hand and journalism on the other. Russia is at war with your country, and yet your job is to cover that war. When has that tension between patriotism and journalism been at its strongest for you? 

I think at the end of 2023, because I noticed that our fair reporting about corruption during war, about our problems during war that made us seem not such a [perfect] victim, has become a weapon in the hands of those who wanted — and still want — Ukraine to fall. Many radical politicians who suppressed freedom of speech in their own countries, who destroyed opposition, who take control over the media at home, like Viktor Orban in Hungary, started saying, 'Hey, look, Ukraine is corrupt. Look, Ukraine is controlling information during a war. That means Ukraine is not worth helping.' 

And people who generally got tired of helping yet another country at war started searching for [an] excuse — that has become surprising for me — an excuse to start calling for less aid, or no aid to Ukraine. I think that led to delays because it has become a part of political gain — a domestic one — in many countries. And each delay causes yet another village destroyed by Russia, yet another war crime, yet another shelling of a peaceful Ukrainian city or town. People generally seem not to care anymore about human lives. They look the other way. 

It's really quite shocking. But to be "a perfect victim" — I just want to get a sense of the scale of that demand. Who's looking for Ukraine to be "a perfect victim"? 

Our allies who support us know that you cannot be a perfect victim. But forces in those allied countries, they are different. And now we have a year of 50 or so elections all over the world and different forces, mostly radical forces, mostly right-wing conservatives, some of whom usually are pretty friendly with the Kremlin, or even took money from the Kremlin, like Marine Le Pen in France. 

A couple of days ago, I saw a video from a Trump rally, somewhere in Texas where a woman got asked, 'So why do you support Trump? He's very friendly with Russia. And Russia is bombing Ukraine, killing dozens and dozens of people.' And the woman answered with a smile. 'I don't care. Ukraine is corrupt. Putin is not our enemy.' And that blew my mind. How can a person think like that? 

I saw the same clip. I had a similar reaction. On the other hand, another theme that kind of runs through your lecture: you say you have no regrets about the way you and your colleagues have practiced journalism throughout the war. What's the single most powerful experience you've had as a journalist that makes you have no regrets? 

I think the story about Ukraine's stolen children has become one of those experiences that showed me that even though it's very hard and becomes harder to make people abroad hear you. When I saw a girl who returned from a Russian-controlled territory of Ukraine … and I saw her mother who jumped off a car and just proudly announced that 'I got my Lisa. I got my Lisa back.' Her reaction. Her smile. She was so tired.

They travelled for two days. Russians forced them to pose for this 'we-are-so grateful-to-Russia video' that they like to show to Russian domestic audiences. And maybe some of their supporters abroad [think] Russia is actually saving those children from Ukrainian Nazis. So they usually force people to film these thank-you videos, if they want to leave Russia with their children. 

Do you ever think about what it's like to be a journalist in Russia? I mean, is it, as you say, incredibly dangerous to actually report the truth? What are they supposed to do? 

I think they are supposed to build a democratic society in Russia, just like we did in Ukraine. Generations of Ukrainians were working and fighting, sometimes in a bloody revolution. We have had three big revolutions since 1991 trying to beat this Mafia-mob rule style that was coming to us from Russia. These former Soviet directors and KGB agents trying to hop on a new democratic republic. 

So do you think Russian journalists could be doing more? 

Of course they could be doing more. They were stronger at some point in the 1990s. They were teaching us how to do journalism. But at the same time, many of them were posing as oppositioners [sic], like Alexei Benedict, who's a famous radio host in Russia. He was posing as this Putin critic, and behind the curtains [he was] pretty friendly with the Kremlin. Even Alexei Navalny used to say that Ukraine lives worse than Russia because corruption is bigger in Ukraine, while the Kremlin towers are controlling all the oligarchs in Russia and makes them work for the government. 

And those who are truly critics of Putin get killed. 

Yes. 

Let me just ask you, is there such a thing as Ukrainian propaganda? 

Of course there is. 

What does it look like? 

We actually suffered from it a lot. Because in 2022, when Ukraine successfully repelled, [the] Russian attack on Kyiv, and then it was this rapid counter-offensive because the Kremlin didn't expect that we would be so resilient that we would all unite and stand firm, even with the fact that we didn't have much help from the West in first two months. So Kremlin was not prepared for such a scale of war — and that helped us a lot. 

But our officials unfortunately [jumped] on the success wave and started saying, like, 'we're going to be in Crimea in 2023 — [it's] going to all end with Ukraine's victory. We're going to take all our territories back. Kremlin is so weak. See, it was the second largest army in the world and we almost beat it'. Of course, it was all done to cheer the nation up, to make us one fight even stronger. But it's been two years and we were still there. We are losing right now [at] the war front because it seems that Russia is pretty strong. 

Is there anyone in Ukraine who buys that propaganda? 

No, I think not anymore… people started asking questions.   

We started with this whole issue of patriotism versus journalism. You've talked about this dilemma of reporting on corruption inside Ukraine while Ukraine is at war. And you talked about what the outside world thinks about that. Can you talk about the reaction you got when inside of Ukraine, when you wrote about corruption at this time of war? 

There was a time, in the first days of war, when any kind of criticism of [the] Ukrainian government was treated as if you are working for Russia. And honestly, some officials in the Ukrainian government are still trying to portray any kind of criticism against them, as if, like, [we're] working for the enemy, or undermining Ukraine when it's weak… But Ukrainians, they have [a] pretty strong civil side. We have [a] pretty strong civil society. And we have the sense that Russians don't have that: your government is supposed to serve your interests, not the other way around. And…the public wanted justice. The public wanted to know why it, corruption, is still going on when soldiers need everything. Why are there officials still stealing when we ask for aid abroad — how can we do this? 

And I think that, when I saw this reaction among Ukrainians, I understood that this is  real patriotism, that you know what is best for your country. And you know that in the long run, corruption weakens Ukraine. And if we do not do anything with it domestically, if we don't control our government, the war might never end.

 

*Q&A edited for clarity and length. This episode was produced by Greg Kelly.