Unfortunately, now it’s time for us to find contempt and pity for those in Ukraine.
The contempt part goes to lawmaker Anton Gerashchenko, adviser and unofficial spokesman for the Interior Ministry. The pity goes to the journalists — and to the profession of journalism, which Gerashchenko clearly doesn’t respect.
Gerashchenko endorsed the publication of a list of 4,000 journalists who got press accreditations from the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic, a Russia-controlled separatist organization that occupied territories in Donetsk Oblast of Ukraine.
The list was released on May 10 by Myrotvorets (www.myrotvorets.center), a controversial website that has been publishing personal data of the people who, according to the website’s runners, are separatists with anti-Ukrainian views.
The website is allegedly run by a group of independent volunteers, but has been many times promoted by Gerashchenko.
According to Gerashchenko, the list of the accredited journalists was obtained when “a group of Ukrainian hackers” stole seven terrabytes worth of information from separatist servers last year. He said that all the data were sent to the Security Service of Ukraine for analysis, and only two documents were published. One is a list of the employees of the so-called Ministry of Information of the Donetsk separatists. Another is the list of journalists who got accreditation from it.
The published file is named “scoundrels.”
A note on the Myrotvorets website says that “we don’t know what the consequences can be, but this list needs to be published because the journalists on it were cooperating with the separatists.”
The people behind this leak, who call themselves Ukrainian patriots, allege that applying for, and receiving, an accreditation from the bogus authorities of Donetsk equals cooperation with terrorists and that equals treason. The treason isn’t said but it is implied.
Such a claim is as absurd as it is dangerous.
I’d like to know where people like Gerashchenko and the “patriotic hackers” behind the publication have been finding their news on the conflict in Donbas.
Do they rely on Russia’s Channel One and LifeNews, the equivalent of Kremlin’s personal journal?
Or do they read the objective coverage in the Ukrainian media and – when their English skills allow it, or a translation is available – the Western publications?
Most likely, they depend on Ukrainian media and translated Western publications.
But where do these reliable media get the facts and images to cover the conflict? They send their journalists into the occupied territories.
And yes, they do it by getting an accreditation because there is no other choice.
Roughly half of the journalists on the list are Russian, while others work for Western media, including the New York Times, Washington Post, and agencies like Agence-France Presse, European Press Photo and others. There is a small fraction of journalists from Ukrainian media, like Channel 112, Segodnya.ua or Dzerkalo Tyzhnya newspaper.
But at the same time, many Ukrainians on the list were working for both foreign and Ukrainian media – it has been the only way for Ukrainian media outlets to get firsthand reporting from the occupied territories, where anything Ukrainian equals enemy.
It is thanks to the Ukrainian and foreign photojournalists that the world saw the bodies of the MH17 Malaysian Boeing crash victims in July 2014. The shocking photos were a powerful evidence of a crime. The people who took them had the accreditation from the separatists.
Another one on the list is Fergal Keane, a BBC correspondent that received an accreditation from the separatists. He used it, among other things, to cover the funeral of two children in Donetsk Oblast, killed by the shells fired by the separatists. It was one of the most gruesome stories from Donbas that appeared in the international media.
If anything, the journalists who were approved by the Donetsk separatists actually helped Ukraine build a case against them by covering their crimes.
Several foreign and Ukrainian journalists reacted to the publication of the list, calling it a bitter mistake.
“The problem arises when you are on this list and (it) is introduced as a list of people who collaborate with the separatist regime, without distinctions between journalists and propagandists,” Italian photojournalist Cosimo Attanasio, who is on the list, wrote on Facebook.
Volodymyr Brunets, a Ukrainian journalist with Channel 24, wrote that the publication of such a list (his name being on it) makes him feel “betrayed.”
“I believed that the risk I was taking was justified because there was a need to document all the atrocity that was happening there,” Brunets wrote on Facebook.
Brunets, as well as every other journalist on the list – Ukrainian ones most of all – was indeed taking a big risk. The journalists were going into the hostile territory, knowing that they could be killed by a rogue missile or taking captive by separatists. They were, literally, risking their lives for the sake of truth.
Neither Gerashchenko nor his supporters, who have been scolding the journalists online from their soft chairs in Kyiv or Lviv, have taken such a risk.
On the days when Ukrainian reporters were heading into Donetsk with no guarantee of coming back alive, Gerashchenko was heading to the Verkhovna Rada meetings in his comfortable Honda with a private driver.
Today, he is endorsing the scolding of the journalists who applied for the separatist accreditation as the only protection they could get to perform their job. The accreditation didn’t guarantee them safety, but it was better than nothing.
The publication of the list sends a troubling signal about Ukraine and freedom of speech. Especially since it is a part of a gruesome pattern. It seems that every time the nation wants to take a step out of the Soviet era, there are people like Gerashchenko who want to push Ukraine back into the communist swamp.
Back in September, Ukrainian authorities released a sanction list of the foreign journalists that were forbidden to enter Ukraine. A few BBC correspondents were surprised to find themselves on the list.
There isn’t a sane explanation to it. But there is a materialistic one.
By pretending that the media and the information need to be controlled in times of war, the Ukrainian bureaucrats from Interior Ministry, Defense Ministry or Security Service of Ukraine justify the need to create and finance the meaningless information departments to maintain that control.
That has been the main point of a statement by Gerashchenko. He pointed out that the Donetsk separatists, according to the leak, have 120 people working in their bogus “information ministry,” while Ukraine’s Information Ministry has only 30 employees.
Gerashchenko advocated the need to “control the work of the foreign journalists in Ukraine through accreditation” and “control the content of TV channels.”
Whether he knows it or not, Gerashchenko’s ideas reflect the information policy of the country he sees as an ultimate enemy, Russia.
Hopefully, Ukraine is infected with freedom deeply enough to resist the unhealthy impulses of the power-greedy bureaucrats. And has enough sanity to value journalists’ efforts to report the truth.
