Age: 28
Education: B.A. from Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv
Profession: Investigative journalist
Did you know? Lykhohliad was born in Tiraspol, a Moldovan city that is the de facto capital of the unrecognized Russian-backed statelet of Transnistria and lived for a year in Greece. She even speaks Greek.
At just 28, Kateryna Lykhohliad has influence far beyond her years. That’s because she’s a journalist at Slidstvo.info, one of Ukraine’s leading investigative media.
Her work has taken viewers and readers inside the country’s brutal and notoriously corrupt prison system and cast light on some of the most shocking tragedies Ukraine has seen in recent years.
And she has done all this in just several years as an investigative journalist.
In 2012, Lykhohliad graduated from the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv with a degree in publishing and editing. She then went on to work as a journalist and editor for such sites and news outlets as ukr.net, Channel 5, the Ukrainian Week and the investigative program Otstannya Instantsia on the ZIK TV channel.
Then in 2017, she moved to Slidstvo.info, an independent, grant-financed investigative outlet that focuses on political corruption and crimes with significance social resonance in Ukrainian society.
At Slidstvo, Lykhohliad was co-author of an investigation that revealed the political party of ex-President Petro Poroshenko had paid its opponents, former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko’s Batkivshchyna party, to vote for bills it wanted passed in parliament and nominees for office.
Next, she took a deep dive into the tragedy at the Viktoria summer camp in Odesa, where a fire left three children dead and two others injured. Lykhohliad and her colleagues discovered that the building where the fire occurred violated safety codes, which made the blaze spread very quickly.
Her most recent work, called “Prison of Opportunity,” shows how inmates in Ukrainian detention facilities pay to receive special privileges — special visits, the right to exit the prison, mobile phones and more. As a result of this investigation, the authorities in Odesa fired a guard at the local pre-trial detention center who was involved in the scheme.
But likely the most challenging and meaningful project for Lykhohliad was a film that looked into the murder of anti-corruption activist Kateryna Gandziuk. On July 31, 2018, a man threw acid on Gandziuk as she left for work in the city of Kherson, where she served as a municipal official. The attack shocked the country and highlighted the dangers civic actors fighting corruption face on a daily basis.
Gandziuk died three months later in a Kyiv hospital. To this day, the organizers of her murder have not been brought to justice.
While working on that Slidstvo investigation, Lykhohliad was constantly in contact with people who knew Gandziuk, saw how she suffered and hoped until the very end that she would survive.
“I don’t know if I’ll ever calm down if I don’t know for sure who did this,” Lykhohliad told the Kyiv Post. “Our film was released half a year ago, but we are still living in this investigation.”
While her work has drawn attention to important issues and led to change in the places where corruption occurs, Lykhohliad doesn’t believe that investigative journalism always needs to focus on producing concrete outcomes.
“I don’t set myself a goal for the investigation — that criminal probes must be opened or that there must be court decisions. That’s great, but it’s not the journalist’s job,” she said. “A journalist’s job is to represent reality with maximum accuracy.”
And in that way, Lykhohliad believes journalists can pressure the people responsible for harmful trends to act.
She summarizes the aim of her work simply, “To make others do their job well.”
