The spokesman, Vladislav Seleznev, posted timely and reliable information about the Ukraine military bases in Crimea that were being besieged by the Russians. It helped us decide where we should go on that day to get a good story.
When the Russians started the military conflict in Donbas, Seleznev, who was one of a few Crimean soldiers to stay loyal to Ukraine, was appointed a spokesman for the anti-terrorist operation, as Ukraine’s authorities still call the war against Russia’s proxy fighters.
We first met Seleznev in the village of Dovhenke at the end of May 2014, on the border of Donetsk and Kharkiv oblasts, in the dusty field in which the Ukrainian military was setting up their headquarters and preparing for the liberation of the Donbas.
We also met there another military press officer, Oleksiy Dmytrashkivsky, a cheerful man fond of movie making.
Thanks to their help, we managed to file stories on the extremely dangerous Ukrainian checkpoint on the suburbs of then separatist-occupied Sloviansk, we traveled to Siversk on the day after its liberation, and got to talk to President Petro Poroshenko when he first came to visit the Ukrainian troops in Donbas just after being sworn into office.
The cooperation didn’t always go smoothly. Sometimes we were denied access to some military sites, but we did see that the press officers really were trying to help us.
Sometimes we argued with them about where the border lies between journalists’ obligation to tell truth, and the military need to keep strategic information secret. Still, there was an understanding that we were on the same side and working towards the same goal – to tell the world the truth about Russia’s war against Ukraine.
Meanwhile, the war was reaching its toughest period in the summer of 2014, and fighting peaked again in early 2015.
We reported from the outskirts of battle-torn Ilovaisk; from Mariupol, where residents were digging trenches as defenses against Russian tanks; from Pisky, a village regularly shelled from Donetsk airport; and from Debaltseve, from where Ukrainian soldiers were forced to retreat under fire.
The soldiers fighting on the frontlines were usually easy to talk to and didn’t mind being photographed. They just let us know what they cannot say or allow to be photographed for security reasons. These restrictions were limited and always reasonable.
But when the fighting started to die down from the summer of 2015, surprisingly, it became harder to report from the war zone.
The number of the press officers grew, and they changed so regularly that we couldn’t even remember their names anymore. Simultaneously, the number of requirements for working in the war zone grew.
An ATO press card wasn’t enough to interview and photograph soldiers anymore. We couldn’t just call a press officer to arrange a visit to a military unit – instead, they introduced a special form that journalists had to fill in a day before the visit.
And starting early July 2016, even a written request wasn’t enough anymore.
The ATO press officers started demanding that journalists do the paperwork a week before travelling. They said that “some well-known journalists came up with this idea at a meeting of a journalists club.”
It’s hard to believe this story, as any journalist working in a war zone knows that war is by nature always unpredictable. When you travel to the frontlines, you never know what you will find there, and whether you will have to go back there on the next day.
In more than two years of working in the war-torn Donbas we learned to be flexible, ready to change our plans within minutes and travel fast whenever we had to. So it is strange for us that the press officers – who are, in fact, part of the military – now refuse to be flexible at all.
On Sept. 6, for the first time since the war started, we were pressured to delete pictures and video shot in a public place, the Novotroitske crossing point on the government-controlled side of the front line. A border guard claimed our pictures contained secret information.
After an hour of waiting at the checkpoint and getting permission from three different press officers, the head of the crossing point, Volodymyr Demchenko, finally allowed us to walk around and take photos.
The restrictions were usual: no landscapes, general views, and shots of the faces of personnel.
When our work was almost done, Demchenko demanded to see all the images and video footage, explaining that he was worried about us showing the faces of his staff.
As we were going through all the images for the second or third time, Demchenko was coming up with more and more ideas about what should and what should not be in the pictures, and deleting more and more of our footage.
There was no escaping from the procedure, which took place in a small state security trailer with three armed men inside, and Demchenko tugging at the camera strap from time to time.
When we voiced our concerns that Demchenko might delete all of the footage we had taken, he brushed them away, saying that there was still plenty of time to go and shoot new photos – but this time under his guidance. That, of course, wasn’t an option for us.
Apparently, the army wants to take more and more control over what journalists say and show when reporting from the war zone.
The recent scandal with staged battle photographs taken by Dmytro Muravskiy, a former volunteer adviser at the Defense Ministry and a photographer, proved that many people – some of them in public office – don’t appreciate the difference between journalism and propaganda. The military press service might prefer showing propaganda instead of the truth.
Muravskiy was removed from his job as a volunteer adviser, but the Facebook posts that show support and admiration of his work written by Oksana Gavrilyuk, the head of communications and media at the Defense Ministry, are still up.
Access to the war zone and the access to truth must not be a reward or privilege. It mustn’t be given only to obedient and benevolent media – as we have seen, the resulting coverage will be more propaganda than news.
Faced with an enemy that lies as a matter of course, the Ukrainian military, and its politicians, should remember that one of their strongest allies is the truth, and that uncovering the truth requires letting responsible, independent journalists do their work as freely as possible. n
