Editor’s Note: This story is part of a special project by the Kyiv Post, “Dying for Truth,” a series of stories documenting violence against journalists in Ukraine. Since the country gained independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, more than 50 journalists have been killed across Ukraine — including eight since 2014. Most of the crimes have been poorly investigated, and the killers remain unpunished. The project is supported by the Justice for Journalists Foundation. Content is independent of the donor. All the stories in the series can be found here.
On Nov. 30, 2013, the Kyiv Post’s chief editor Brian Bonner woke me up with a phone call at 5 a.m. with the news that police had attacked and dispersed the student protesters camp at Maidan Nezalezhnosti Square overnight.
I didn’t believe him at first. I was there in the evening. There was no point in breaking up that small, quiet and peaceful pro-European protest that was fading every day. But when I arrived there at about 6 a.m., I saw the cordon of riot police officers who laughed remembering what they had done overnight.
A group of young men was overlooking this from the bridge above the Maidan, or Independence Square. They witnessed the attack and were shocked, recalling the inexplicable cruelty against the participants of the rally. It was unbelievable.
Since that day, the rest of 2013 and most of 2014 became a set of unbelievable events for me and other journalists working in Ukraine. Time was distorted, and a month felt like a year. Life as we knew it changed. The country we lived in was torn apart.
During that time, Russia invaded Crimea and proclaimed it as its own. Russia brought its arms and soldiers into Donbas but didn’t take the territory, leaving its residents in the limbo of war. Russia also made the rest of Ukraine live in constant fear of a coming attack. That anxious feeling lasted throughout the first year of the war at least.
During that time, I learned three things: 1) trust nobody but your own eyes; 2) the truth is not what it seems at first; 3) people get killed.
EuroMaidan
Unbelievable things kept on happening during the EuroMaidan street protests. People living in the captured Kyiv City Hall, Molotov cocktails, water cannons, armored vehicles on the streets of the capital, the first protesters killed, numerous kidnappings and beatings of activists, a shutdown of the metro system, mass shootings, the EuroMaidan protest camp on fire.
For journalists working there, it was easy and pleasant to interview the EuroMaidan protesters. They were friendly, welcoming and ready to give you hot tea and tell their stories.
It was harder to report from the streets at night because of the harsh winter, wet snow, tear gas used by the police and stones thrown by both sides. I wore a gas mask in which it was impossible to speak and a helmet that made it impossible to hear, so I had to constantly take my gear off and put it back on.
EuroMaidan was only part of the story. There was also an anti-Maidan protest in a camp of paid protesters organized by allies of then-President Viktor Yanukovych. These people were usually bused to Mariinsky Park in Kyiv. It took more time and effort to find someone talkative among them, and some pro-Yanukovych activists were aggressive.
It was impossible to interview the riot police who stood on the streets. I managed to talk to some of them only in May 2014. It was in Donbas, where they came to defend Ukraine against Russia. Sometimes they stood side-by-side with former EuroMaidan protesters in a bitter irony of 2014: Former enemies united to fight off an even bigger enemy.
A EuroMaidan protester throws a sack onto the burring barricade separating police from protesters on Maidan Nezalezhnosti late on Feb. 18, 2014. (Anastasia Vlasova)
Annexation of Crimea
I have a very patchy memory of EuroMaidan. I had no time to digest it because just after the revolution succeeded in Kyiv, Russia sent its soldiers without insignia — later called “little green men” — to Crimea. They captured the local government buildings and surrounded Ukrainian military bases on the peninsula.
I went to Crimea on March 9, 2014, flying from Kyiv to Simferopol in a small, shabby airplane with a light protective vest from EuroMaidan in my tourist rucksack. Back then, I didn’t know this vest would be one of my biggest problems.
Simferopol, the provincial capital of Crimea, was much warmer than Kyiv. People kept on living a normal life, which has already been not normal. Russian soldiers stood on the streets and pro-Russian Cossacks, many of whom also came from Russia, guarded the Crimean Parliament.
People were ready to talk. Pro-Ukrainian activists, Crimean Tatars, pro-Russian Cossacks, Ukrainian soldiers, Crimean lawmakers, even Russian lawmakers. The only people from whom I couldn’t get an interview were the Russian soldiers. They always kept silent.
Stories were everywhere. I did one story per day, sometimes even two. And then the unbelievable happened. On March 18, 2014, Russian dictator Vladimir Putin proclaimed Crimea a part of Russia. Ukraine’s government and the world did nothing to stop him.
I remember the embarrassed Ukrainian soldiers who said they had no clue how to obey their orders from Kyiv “to stay put” when Russian soldiers were storming their military bases.
I also remember a feeling of being in hostile territory. It was dangerous to admit you represent a Kyiv-based newspaper. It was even more dangerous to show the protective gear I had. The pro-Russian self-defense militants were detaining anyone with such gear. They claimed it meant you had come to Crimea to fight against them.
To get out of Crimea in late March 2014, my colleague, photographer Anastasia Vlasova, and I took a shabby regional train from Feodosia, hoping we wouldn’t be searched there. We had the vests in our backpacks. We got off the train in Kalanchak, the first stop in mainland Ukraine.
We had escaped the danger of being captured. It was an amazing feeling I got to experience several times more that year.
A woman walks by Russian soldiers patrolling outside the navy headquarters in Simferopol, Crimea, on March 19, 2014. (AFP)
War in Donbas
I traveled to Crimea thinking I was heading to a war zone. That wasn’t the case, although several soldiers were killed when Russians stormed the Ukrainian military bases.
But when I went to eastern Ukraine to report about the pro-Russian protests in early April, I found myself at war.
People in Ukraine argue about when Russia’s war against their country started. Russia has never proclaimed or officially admitted that it is a war. Ukraine’s government also hasn’t called it a “war.” Instead, Kyiv long used the term “anti-terrorist operation,” or “ATO.”
I realized that I was at war on May 22, 2014, when I saw the dead body of a Ukrainian soldier for the first time in a morgue in the town of Volnovakha in Donetsk Oblast: the dark body of a young man in a Ukrainian military uniform, his hand was twisted like he was holding a gun when he died.
He was one of 17 soldiers killed by Russian-backed militants that morning in an unexpected ambush at a military camp. It was the Ukrainian army’s largest loss at that time. Everybody was shocked.
When shocked soldiers arrived in armored vehicles at the morgue where their killed comrades lay, shocked civilians shouted at them. When we tried to talk to locals, one woman attacked me near the soldiers’ campsite so fiercely that my colleague had to drag me to the car to save me from a beating. I don’t blame that woman. Her hysteria was a normal response to the abnormal, unbelievable event that took place near her village. It was her response to the war.
Reporting in Donbas was easier than in Crimea, though it was much riskier. I was contributing to several foreign media outlets and having accreditation papers from them helped me. My Ukrainian passport was registered in Kherson Oblast, which Donbas separatists at first saw as a friendly area for them. It helped me cover the war from both sides. Most Ukrainian journalists didn’t have this opportunity.
Along with my colleague Vlasova, I was able to travel across the front line, often without knowing where exactly that front line was. Many times, we encountered people who weren’t aware of who controlled their towns at that moment.
Most people were ready to talk. Ukrainian soldiers, civilians, pro-Russian separatists. Though the separatist fighters were more discreet, some of them were Russian nationals. The stories were falling into our laps from every which way.
The best way to report from war is to visit places soon after attacks have happened there. If you arrive during the fighting, you will see nothing and risk becoming a victim. In Donbas, it was difficult to follow this rule because fighting could start anywhere at any time.
It was often hard to see the true picture of the events. Some people told us half-truths, some exaggerated and many told us rumors instead of facts. Even if we saw the site of a recent battle, it was impossible to evaluate the scale of fighting and the number of people killed based on witness accounts. So we had to return to the same place for several days. Still, I kept discovering the truth about the places I visited and the events I saw in 2014 during the ensuing years.
A photographer takes a picture of an armed man in military fatigues standing guard outside the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) regional headquarters seized by Kremlin-backed separatists in the eastern Ukrainian city of Sloviansk on April 23. (AFP)
Hangover
Reporting from the war as it was in Ukraine in 2014-2015 gave us regular adrenaline rushes. That’s why journalists get addicted to war. That’s why many journalists who were at war in 2014 feel bored by the ordinary, routine events they now have to cover. Time has been gradually slowing down since 2015, when the front line was fixed by the Minsk peace deal.
The war is still there, but it has changed. There are fewer security risks, but more restrictions on access to Ukrainian soldiers and no access to the Russian-controlled part of Donbas for journalists with Ukrainian IDs. There are still many stories, but now journalists need to research ideas and find contacts in advance. Traveling to the front-line towns and writing about the people’s lives will impress nobody as it has already been done by other journalists many times.
For me, the hangover from war adrenaline came every time I heard that a person I knew was killed. I interviewed two Ukrainian soldiers in 2014 who were later killed at war. One of them was a military chaplain. I hope that no more of my sources were killed, though some likely they were.
It’s even more striking to hear about colleagues being killed. One journalist was killed while covering EuroMaidan and at least five were killed covering the war in Donbas. I knew two of them.
Andrey Mironov, a Russian human rights activist who worked as a fixer for Western journalists, was killed on May 24, 2014 near Sloviansk while translating for the Italian photographer Andrea Rochelli, who was also killed on that day. I met Mironov in Simferopol during the annexation of Crimea. We lived in the same hotel, and during breakfast we often spoke about how the Russian regime was starting to look like Nazi Germany.
Serhiy Nikolayev was a very brave Ukrainian photographer. I met him in Tbilisi in August 2008, where we both covered Russia’s war against Georgia.
Serhiy Nikolayev, photo journaist of Segodnya newspaper, smiled during his photo exhibition in Kyiv on Nov. 28, 2013. Nikolayev was killed when covering Russia’s war against Ukraine on Feb. 28, 2015. (UNIAN)
We drank wine in local restaurants and ran away from Russian airstrikes. The Georgians were telling us back then: You Ukrainians are the next to be attacked. I didn’t pay enough attention to that warning. After the war in Georgia, Nikolayev traveled to several dangerous conflict zones, including Somalia and Libya, but he was killed in the Donbas town of Pisky on Feb. 28, 2015.
