Why do you need an English-language newspaper about Ukraine if dozens of other newspapers already cover Ukraine for the English-speaking world?
In my nearly seven years with the Kyiv Post, I was asked some variations of this question many times.
It often comes up when the speaker hears that not only does the Kyiv Post exist, but it dares to charge its readers a subscription fee of $60 a year.
My answer to that is simple. Indeed, the foreign papers – including the respectable giants like The New York Times – cover Ukraine. But I dare say they can’t substitute the local English coverage.
Firstly, the “giants” cover the tip of the iceberg. They are the movie, we’re the book it is based on. The movie is great, enjoyable and expensive to make. But for in-depth details, you go for the book.
Even more importantly, we have an advantage of living in the country we’re covering. This saves us from making the mistakes that are easy to make when you’re looking at Ukraine from New York, London or Moscow.
This propensity to mistakes showed recently when Kyiv hosted the UEFA Champions League football final. The big event got the host city into the spotlight and showed how unreliable foreign coverage of Ukraine can be.
Many newspapers issued warning reports about coming to Kyiv, often misleading. The strangest of them came from The New York Times.
The newspaper published a story by author Rory Smith about the problems that football fans were facing when coming to Kyiv for the game. Among other troubles, it mentioned that Kyiv’s main international airport, Boryspil, couldn’t process all the additional flights, so fans were seeking for alternatives, flying to nearby destinations and proceeding to Kyiv by land.
This already was questionable, as even after the story was published, online booking systems showed that tickets were still available from London, Madrid and other European cities to Kyiv for the weekend of the game.
That’s where the best part comes. According to the story, the flights were so scarce that some fans preferred to travel to Kyiv through Donetsk, a Ukrainian city some 760 kilometers southeast of the capital.
At this point, everyone familiar with Ukraine would raise their eyebrows.
Because, of course, Donetsk is the stronghold of Russia-controlled separatists who have taken over part of eastern Ukraine and have been fighting government forces for four years. Not only would it be an extremely strange choice for a tourist to arrive in a country through the region with on-and-off fighting, it also would be impossible.
As anyone in Ukraine knows, there is no way to get to Donetsk by air. Its airport was destroyed in fighting in 2015. And if, by traveling “through Donetsk,” the author meant flying into a nearby Russian city and traveling through Donetsk by land – following the route of the Russian regular army and mercenaries – that would be impossible as well.
The supposed visitor, if indeed managing to survive the travel through the conflict zone, would be stopped by the Ukrainian authorities for an illegal crossing of the border. It is unlikely that he would be able to see that football match after all.
The author was confronted on Twitter about this part of the story. He insisted that he knew from a source about one fan arriving to Ukraine “through Donetsk.” The story remained unchanged.
An attentive reader would spot other mistakes in that story. Like the one where the author calls Kyiv a “comparatively small” city that struggles with hosting big events, just like the last year’s Champions League host city Cardiff. A simple search online would reveal that Kyiv is 10 times bigger than Cardiff in population (or three times, if one counts the Cardiff metropolitan area). It is also bigger than Lisbon, which the author lists as one of the examples of “big cities” that hosted the championship with no trouble.
Had the story like that been submitted to the Kyiv Post, these would have been corrected. But an editor who’s never been to Ukraine and doesn’t monitor it on a daily basis understandably missed them.
Of course, we make mistakes, too. We’re still a small newsroom covering a very wide range of issues in a rather complicated country, and most of us do it in a foreign language. That said, our mistakes aren’t of the kind that can completely distort the issue for the reader.
We would never, for example, call the conflict in eastern Ukraine a “civil war” – something that foreign news desks do all the time.
The “civil war” nonsense is easy to buy for those who took their first glance at Ukraine when the war broke out in 2014. Anyone familiar with this country for a while can call it out for what it is: a lie originating in Russian propaganda.
And still, we see it sneak into the Western coverage of Ukraine every so often.
I myself had recently submitted a story for an American publication and witnessed an editor change the “war with Russian-backed separatists” to “civil war,” helpfully adding that it was caused by the opposition of the pro-European west and pro-Russian east of the country – a notion straight out of the Russian propaganda textbook.
This is where the Kyiv Post has a lot to offer.
We know there is no “civil war.” We can tell the real news from propaganda – both Russian and domestic – because we see the real news. Our eyes and ears are here, in Ukraine.
We’re not of the same caliber as The New York Times, and it’s good. It gives us the humbleness to acknowledge our mistakes and fix them, and get better.
We go for stories that shape Ukraine but won’t make it to the cramped pages of the international newspapers.
This is why there always will be the place and the need for the Kyiv Post.
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