The trouble-plagued opposition daily Kievskiye Vedomosti suspended publication on Feb. 21 due to lack of money, but held out hope that the shutdown would draw its owners’ attention to the newspaper’s financial plight.
The same week another opposition newspaper announced that the state printing press was continuing to refuse to publish it despite a court ruling in the paper’s favor, and the state broadcasting company shut down a private TV channel.
In the latest of a string of problems for Kievskiye Vedomosti, the newspaper ran out of paper, according to Dmitry Chekalkin, president of the broadcasting arm of the Kievskiye Vedomosti media company.
‘They don’t have paper to print and they don’t have the financial resources to print,’ he said.
Irina Titova, deputy editor-in-chief, said the last lot of paper had been bought on credit and the company could not afford to buy any more.
Staff wages had not been paid in four months, she said, and working conditions had become intolerable.
For the last five months, the newspaper has been operating on a shoestring, with only three phone lines, four computers and no news wire service or Internet access, she said.
‘We’ve been working in an information vacuum,’ Titova said. ‘In the long run, we got tired.’
In the last couple years, Kievskiye Vedomosti has been dogged with misfortune, most of which it claims is due to political persecution for its oppositionist editorial content.
It has had to fight the authorities in court again and again. In 1997, it lost a libel case brought by Kyiv Mayor Oleksandr Omelchenko, though the $500,000 damages award was later overturned by the Supreme Court. Last year a ruling that awarded $2.5 million to Interior Minister Yury Kravchenko was also overturned, but Titova says the paper’s bank accounts remain frozen.
In March 1998, one of the paper’s owners, Mykhailo Brodsky, was jailed on charges of fraud and corruption. He was released when he won a seat in parliament, which came with immunity from prosecution.
In October of last year, the editorial staff was evicted from its newsroom, which it rented from the Kyiv city administration, after the city invalidated its lease via a court case.
At the beginning of this year, the paper disappeared from news kiosks because of a dispute with Soyuzpechat, the state press distribution monopoly. Soyuzpechat, which owns the building where the paper’s printing press is located, claimed the paper had failed to remove the press after its lease had ended.
The paper had also recently lost an extremely lucrative contract with the Prioritet advertising agency.
Before the contract expired five months ago, Prioritet paid a fixed sum for exclusive rights to sell advertising in Kievskiye Vedomosti. Industry sources said the price for those rights far exceeded what the agency could actually earn from selling ads.
Vedomosti broadcasting President Chekalkin said a general decline in advertising, as well as unfair competition from subsidized papers, were the major factors in the paper’s demise.
‘Money from advertising has been substantially reduced, but I don’t think the reason was Prioritet but the general situation in the Ukrainian market, besides the policy conducted by other newspapers, which are selling advertising space for peanuts,’ he said. ‘Other papers are subsidized by companies close to the presidential administration and the current government, and are selling each issue for 5 or 6 kopecks. With this unfair competition, it is very hard to survive.’
The editorial staff decided to suspend publication in an attempt to attract the attention of owners to the newspaper’s plight, according to Titova.
‘We want our shareholders to pay attention to our problems,’ she said. ‘They have to make some decision and not keep us hanging in limbo for five months.’
The paper’s major shareholders are Ukrainian companies Dendi, Dovira, Ukrrichflot and Pryvatbank.
Natalia Napatovskaya, a spokeswoman for Pryvatbank in Dnipropetrovsk, said a decision on what to do with the bank’s shares in Kievskiye Vedomosti was imminent.
‘We understand that the revival of the paper requires large investment,’ she said. ‘But in times when the securities market is crashing, bankers have other things to worry about than a newspaper that used to be popular.’ Brodsky, via a spokesman, declined to comment.
The same week that Kievskiye Vedomosti stopped publishing, Polityka announced that state printing house Pressa Ukrainy had refused to resume printing the Kyiv-based weekly.
Last November the state printing house received a Pechersk district court order banning it from producing Polityka. A Feb. 3 Kyiv city court decision reversed that ruling.
‘We have all legal bases for putting out this newspaper,’ editor-in-chief Oleh Lyashko announced on Feb 23.
Lyashko said the paper has paid Pressa Ukrainy an advance of Hr 28,000 and provided it with 25 tons of paper. Lyashko, who wants to draw up a 1999 contract with the printing house, said that repeated letters and visits had failed to extract any explanation from Pressa Ukrainy.
A Pressa Ukrainy spokesman, who declined to be named, told the Post that Polityka is an unreliable customer. Last year the paper twice broke its contract by suspending publication.
The newspaper is welcome to take back their advance and their paper supplies, he added. He said the company would send an official answer to the paper by the end of the month.
Polityka suspended publication for two months last summer because of conflicts with the tax administration.
‘I don’t care why they stopped, said the Pressa Ukrainy spokesman. ‘It’s not my fault, it’s their business with the court.’
On the day Kievskiye Vedomosti ceased publishing, the private TV channel NART (National Association of Radio and Television broadcasters) was also taken off the air.
On Feb 21, NART, which used to broadcast in Kyiv and three neighboring regions of Ukraine, was cut off because of its independent political stance, its owners claim.
Volodymyr Tsentrovsky, president of the Ukrainian TV Union and a founder of NART, said the channel is only the first in a chain of private channels that will be taken off the air.
‘It’s just a rehearsal for political censorship and economic dictatorship in the Ukrainian TV market,’ he said.
Tsentrovsky admitted that NART owed Hr 160,000 to Ukrteleradio, the state company that controls Ukraine’s airwaves, but he said that figure was insignificant compared to the debts of many other broadcasting companies.
The state-run TV and radio channels owe the state broadcasters Hr 62 million, ‘[but] nobody has switched them off,’ Tsentrovsky said.
In a Feb. 22 news report on the private 1+1 channel, a spokesman from Ukrteleradio said the company would put NART back on the air as soon as it started paying off its debts.
Tsentrovsky claims the channel is being singled out for punishment because of its political programming. He said the channel ran a political debate program that had hosted 300 deputies from the previous parliament.
The number of independent media outlets in Ukraine continues to decline in the face of ongoing political and financial problems. Last year two national daily newspapers, Pravda Ukrainy and Vseukrainsky Vedomosti, closed down after the imposition of a government ban and the loss of a crippling libel case, respectively.
Post staff writer Alex Barankevich contributed to this story.
