It looked like a regular box.
A handful of journalists stood around a cardboard package in the Kyiv Post newsroom, staring at it alertly.
It was November 2008, and the surprise box had just been delivered from the office of Viktor Medvedchuk.
Days earlier, the newspaper ran a front page story on Medvedchuk, headlined “‘Prince of Darkness’ Returns.” It profiled Medvedchuk as “the gray cardinal” who “personified cronyism.” It ran with an even more scathing editorial column about the pro-Russian politician and friend of Vladimir Putin.
And now there was the box from him.
Was it a threat? A stink bomb? Or worse? Everyone thought the same thing: Medvedchuk, a notoriously macabre figure, was capable of anything.
Finally, someone opened the box. The newsroom burst into laughter.
One of the most powerful people in Ukraine had sent journalists a box of the Toilet Duck toilet cleaner.
Twelve years later, the journalists who were there acknowledge that, under the laughter, they felt a pang of concern. Even this awkward attempt at an insult, they knew, could be carrying a threat.
In its 25 years of existence, the Kyiv Post has angered many bigshots. Unhappy about the coverage, they ranted, threatened and sued. None succeeded: The newspaper never bowed down, took down a story or lost a lawsuit.
But in an environment where journalists were routinely harassed, attacked and some were murdered, no threat was ever taken lightly.
Firtash loses
It was 2010 and oligarch Dmytro Firtash was riding high.
He was on the fast track to becoming a billionaire. He influenced politics and held a contractual right to buy a top TV station. One thing was missing: a public reputation worthy of something. Firtash was working on that.
The oligarch donated generously to charities and educational projects, including 4.3 million pounds to the Slavonic studies department at Cambridge University in the U.K.
It didn’t sit well with Firtash that, back home, one newspaper was publishing, in English, story after story about his companies’ shady dealings.
His representatives first threatened to sue the Kyiv Post in the early 2000s over stories that suggested that Firtash’s sudden rise as an intermediary in the Russian-Ukrainian gas trade was connected to Semyon Mogilevich, a Russian mafia boss.
The threats to sue went nowhere. And later a Wikileaks cable showed that Firtash admitted that he sought Mogilevich’s permission to enter business.
But the oligarch didn’t forget the Kyiv Post. He waited.
In 2010, the Kyiv Post reported that ex-Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko accused Firtash of using corrupt means to regain possession of the enormous reserve of natural gas that her government had seized from him. Tymoshenko threatened that she would show the documents indicating Firtash’s corruption to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
This time, there was no threat or warning. Soon after the story was published, the Kyiv Post was informed that Firtash had filed a libel suit against the newspaper in the High Court in London.
Going to a London court was a strategic decision for Firtash. Its ruling would carry much more weight than that of any Ukrainian court. Libel laws in the U.K. are famously strict. Finally, it was a way to choke the newspaper financially. If Firtash won, the estimated fees could amount to $1.5 million. Two years earlier, Kyiv Post was sold for less.
“For six months, I spent most of my time working on this case, reading laws and reaching out to people,” recalls Brian Bonner, chief editor since 2008.
Firtash didn’t get his way.
On Feb. 24, 2011, the High Court Master John Leslie dismissed Firtash’s claim, ruling that the oligarch’s connection to the U.K. jurisdiction was “tenuous in the extreme.”
The judge wasn’t satisfied with Firtash’s justification for suing in London: a donation he made to Cambridge. The Kyiv Post said that the story in question was viewed online by only 21 people from the U.K.
Firtash covered $63,000 in fees to Mark Stephens, the lawyer representing the Kyiv Post. He never tried to sue or threaten the newspaper again, but he did try to buy it from Mohammad Zahoor, the newspaper’s second owner. Zahoor refused.
Since 2014, Firtash has been living in Vienna and keeping himself busy fighting extradition to the U.S. on bribery charges.
But the cherry on top arrived two years after the ruling. In 2013, the British parliament changed the U.K. defamation law, now requiring plaintiffs to show that England is the proper jurisdiction to hear a case when the defendant does not live in England or Wales. It was a measure designed to stop the so-called libel tourism.
“I think we influenced it,” says Bonner.
Oligarch and pro-Russian politician Viktor Medvedchuk speaks with the Kyiv Post in January 2014. (Pavlo Podufalov)
Staff rebellion
In April 2011, Agriculture Minister Mykola Prysyazhnyuk sat down with two reporters for an interview that he was going to regret.
The Kyiv Post reporters grilled the minister about the government’s grain export quotas that allegedly favored a shady company. Prysyazhnyuk waffled and gave evasive and contradictory answers.
This clearly wasn’t going to be the good publicity the minister sought. After the interview, his office reached out to Zahoor, then-publisher of the Kyiv Post, and said they wanted the story stopped.
Zahoor, in turn, asked Bonner, the chief editor, to hold the story.
It was the night of April 14, when that week’s issue was ready to go in print. Prysyazhnyuk’s interview was the cover story.
It was an unprecedented breach of editorial independence. Never before, or after, did a Kyiv Post publisher tell the chief editor to kill a story.
“I was up all night looking for what we could do,” Bonner recalls. “I think some people would argue that I should have given in. But then I would have been fired by my staff who would lose their trust in me.”
He sent the paper to the printer, with the Prysyazhnyuk story untouched.
The next morning, the newspaper was on newsstands. Bonner got a call he expected: He was fired.
What followed became an important chapter in the history of Ukrainian journalism.
The staff almost unanimously went on strike, demanding Bonner be reinstated and guarantees of editorial independence for the future. The biggest international and local media covered the unprecedented rebellion of a newspaper against its publisher.
Five days later, Bonner was reinstated and the staff returned to work. Zahoor publicly promised to abide by the principle of editorial independence. He kept his promise.
Zahoor remained the publisher until he sold the newspaper to Adnan Kivan in 2018.
Surprising NBU
Some of the pushback after Kyiv Post stories was directed not at the newspaper, but at those appearing in its pages.
In the latest instance, the newspaper unwillingly played a role in the ongoing standoff between the top managers of Ukraine’s central bank.
The bank’s deputy governors, Kateryna Rozhkova and Dmytro Sologub, received a reprimand and a statement of no confidence from the bank’s council for giving comments to the Kyiv Post, for a story about the bank’s independence.
Their comments about the bank were positive, but the two were told they breached the bank’s “one voice policy” by giving them, Rozhkova later told the Liga news site.
The reprimand was an unprecedented measure and appeared to be a part of the drive to curb the influence or eventually push out the top managers associated with the team of ex-NBU Governor Valeria Gontareva, whose cleanup of the banking sector won her trust in the West but enmity from vested interests in Ukraine.
Bitter politicians
A lot of the pushback against Kyiv Post coverage never made it into the public domain. It was limited to private emails, snide remarks at embassy receptions or warnings from sources.
The newspaper’s sources many times indicated that the Kyiv Post was particularly disliked in the administration of ex-President Petro Poroshenko, including by him personally. Publicly, Poroshenko avoided the Kyiv Post. The newspaper’s journalists hadn’t been allowed a question at Poroshenko’s press conferences, except for once.
When the administration changed, the Kyiv Post got another powerful adversary on Bankova Street in no time.
In October 2019, the Kyiv Post ran a story about Andriy Bohdan, then-chief of staff for President Volodymyr Zelensky. Two sources told the Kyiv Post that a Constitutional Court judge testified that Bohdan pressured him on behalf of the government of Viktor Yanukovych in 2010.
After that, Bohdan agreed to an interview with the Kyiv Post, but dedicated a large part of it to attacking the newspaper, accusing it of lying and intentionally slandering him. He said he only agreed to an interview because he “wanted to look in the eyes” of the Kyiv Post journalists.
The Kyiv Post published two stories after that meeting: the interview itself and a story on Bohdan’s obsession with “lying” journalists, accurately headlined “Zelensky’s chief of staff has Kyiv Post on his mind.”
Bohdan was ousted from the administration three months later.
Some other reactions from politicians were so out of place, they were comical.
In 2013, a Kyiv Post reporter was covering a campaign to ban abortions spearheaded by Oleksandr Sych, a conservative lawmaker. She called him for a comment. But the reporter’s line of questioning irritated Sych.
“From your questions, I can tell that you’ve probably had abortions yourself,” he snapped on the phone and hung up.
His proposed ban on abortions never came through.
That wasn’t the last time when a conservative lawmaker got mad at the Kyiv Post.
In October 2016, lawmaker Oleg Barna showed up at the newsroom to vent about a story on sexism in the Ukrainian parliament that mentioned his dubious remarks addressed to female lawmakers. It wasn’t fair to him, he claimed, but didn’t ask for a retraction.
As a lawmaker, Barna was known for one thing. In 2015, when then-Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk was addressing the parliament, Barna approached him, put one hand on the prime minister’s crotch and another on his stomach, and tried to carry Yatsenyuk away — in an apparent protest against his leadership.
Fortunately for the Kyiv Post staff, Barna didn’t try to repeat his signature move in the newsroom. After expressing his grievances about the story, he abruptly left.
It’s rare for an angry reader to show up at the newsroom in person, so when it happens, it’s memorable.
Once, an enraged reader rang the office’s door. He said that he had bought an apartment in a building under construction in Kyiv, but the construction was later stopped over violations — the building had many more stories than the permit envisioned. It was one of the most contentious construction projects in Kyiv, and the Kyiv Post, among other media, covered the scandal surrounding it.
The reader, an expat living in Kyiv, claimed the media coverage was delaying the possible resolution — and preventing him from moving into his new apartment. After trying to pacify the man verbally, the staff had to call the police, who escorted him out.
Oligarch and pro-Kremlin politician Viktor Medvedchuk sent the Kyiv Post journalists a box of the Toilet Duck toilet cleaner in November 2008, days after the newspaper ran a front-page story on Medvedchuk, headlined “‘Prince of Darkness’ Returns.” The issue profiled Medvedchuk as “the gray cardinal” who “personified cronyism.”No fear of future
Throughout the 25 years of its history, the Kyiv Post was constantly reminded that those in power in Ukraine have no taste for independent media and are ready to go far to suppress the free press.
One of the most ominous reminders of that was the mention of the Kyiv Post in the infamous tapes that Mykola Melnychenko recorded in the office of his boss, then-President Leonid Kuchma, in 2000.
The tapes are best known for Kuchma ordering his subordinates to “do something” about journalist Georgiy Gongadze. After that, several police officials kidnapped and murdered Gongadze. Kuchma has always denied his involvement in the crime, as well as the authenticity of the tapes.
In one episode featured in the tapes, then-lawmaker Oleksandr Zinchenko discusses with Kuchma the idea that independent media critical of the government need to be suppressed.
With media like the Kyiv Post, Zinchenko says, it needs to be done delicately. The best way, he says, is to have the tax office go after them. He says he will discuss it with Mykola Azarov, then-head of the tax office and future prime minister. Amazingly, at the time Zinchenko was head of the parliament’s committee on freedom of speech.
“We always have it as a reminder of what enemies of free speech are capable of,” says Bonner, the chief editor. “Not that it can stop us.”
And what happened to that box of the Toilet Duck bottles from Medvedchuk?
Journalists took them home. The insult from one of the most powerful people in Ukraine ended up flushed down their toilets.
