Journalist and TV presenter Myroslava Barchuk became this year’s winner of the annual Georgiy Gongadze Prize, which supports Ukraine’s best independent and innovative journalists.
Barchuk has been a journalist since the mid-1990s and is currently the host of the Countdown program at UA:First TV channel. She will now receive Hr 100,000 ($3,631) in prize money and a statuette.
“For me, this award is the most important professional recognition there is,” Barchuk said at the award ceremony.
Barchuk was shortlisted along with editor-in-chief of Liga.net online news outlet Borys Dadvydenko, and co-founder of The Ukrainians media and editor-in-chief of Reporters online magazine Marichka Paplauskaite.
This year’s award ceremony is traditionally hosted on May 21, Gongadze’s birthday.
Gongadze, who would have turned 52 this year, was a Ukrainian political reporter who co-founded an online news outlet Ukrayinska Pravda. On Sept. 16, 2000, he was kidnapped and murdered on the outskirts of Kyiv by four police officers, who were ultimately convicted and sentenced to prison. Oleksiy Pukach, a former Interior Ministry general, was the highest-ranking among them.
Those who ordered the murder still have not been punished, though former President Leonid Kuchma, who governed from 1994-2005, remains the prime suspect. Audiotapes in which Kuchma says that Gongadze has to be silenced appeared soon after the murder, but the ex-president has not been charged.
“The Gongadze Prize, which has existed for three years, is an award for those who bravely, responsibly and innovatively create new ways for Ukraine in its search for truth and the preservation of trust,” said Gongadze’s wife and head of the Voice of America’s Ukrainian service Myroslava Gongadze. “I want this award to serve, as George once did, as a barometer in the journalistic community.”
In 2019, the Georgiy Gongadze Prize was established by PEN Ukraine in collaboration with the Kyiv-Mohyla Business School, powered by the KMBS Alumni platform and the Ukrainian Pravda publication.
Previous years’ winners are Pavlo Kazarin (2020) and Vakhtang Kipiani (2019).
