Age: 29
Education: Kyiv Mohyla Academy
Profession: Investigative journalist
Did you know? Lesya Ivanova grew up in the city of Simferopol in Crimea. She hasn’t been able to visit her home town since Russia’s annexation of the peninsula in early 2014
What’s done in the dark will be brought to the light, as the saying goes.
This age-old truth triumphed again when in late February 2019, the journalistic project Bihus.Info started releasing its groundbreaking investigation into high-profile corruption in Ukraine’s defense sector.
The journalists revealed a group of young businessmen, including Ihor Hladkovskiy, the son of major national security official Oleh Hladkovskiy, allegedly running a scheme of smuggling parts for military hardware from Russia or stealing them from Ukrainian spare depots — and then selling them back to Ukrainian defense enterprises at gravely inflated prices. The investigation showed them making millions on the military amid Russia’s war in Donbas under the protection of the country’s top defense officials.
It is one of the greatest scandals in Ukraine’s recent memory and demonstrated the power of true journalism in the service of rule of law. And it was the result of painstaking work by Lesya Ivanova, who gained fame as one of Ukraine’s top-league investigators.
She started her career in investigative reporting in 2012 after graduating from the Kyiv Mohyla Academy’s School of Journalism.
“I’ve always been most interested in investigations specifically,” Ivanova says. “I wanted to do something that is serious, important and needed by people — and not about entertainment.”
Soon her name appeared on the pages of many of Ukraine’s most respected media outlets such as Forbes, Ukrainska Pravda and Dzerkalo Tyzhnia.
Since 2014, she has also been member of YanukovychLeaks, a team of Ukraine’s top investigative journalists from various media outlets, including the Kyiv Post, that collected and analyzed numerous documents saved from being destroyed by the ousted President Viktor Yanukovych in a bid to cover up his family’s criminal corruption.
Ivanova’s work with the project turned out to be very fruitful. In 2015, along with the whole team, she received a Shining Light Award from the Global Investigative Journalism Network at their conference in Lillehammer, Norway.
But her biggest work to date, a series of materials titled “Army. Friends. Dough,” began in 2017, when an anonymous email account sent a giant archive of documents and leaked correspondence to Bihus.Info. A year and a half of careful fact-checking and putting the myriad of details to a coherent picture proved the documents to be a key element to the Hladkovskiy case.
Ivanova’s bombshell investigation caused a full-fledged earthquake in Ukrainian politics just weeks before the 2019 presidential elections. Many believe the revelation that a close ally of then-President Petro Poroshenko had embezzled from the military in a time of war was the final straw that kissed Poroshenko’s chances of re-election goodbye forever.
But furthermore, the revelation finally gave birth to new hope for the defense industry. In many ways, the scandal and the fall of Poroshenko’s administration enabled reformists like Aivaras Abromavicius to take the lead of UkrOboronProm and form a new generation of defense management free of old, corrupt practices.
Ivanova, meanwhile, continues working on new anti-corruption investigations.
“I just happen to have concentrated on the defense sector (in my anti-graft works),” she says.
“Because in a county where a war goes on, one is unlikely to find something more important than national security and defense.”
