The Ukrainian government has launched a new bilingual television channel to win over the hearts and minds of residents in eastern Ukraine and Crimea, which are currently occupied by Russia.
Dom, or “home” in the Russian language, went on air on March 1 in a test mode offering some of the best entertainment shows of Ukrainian television.
In the sixth year of the war, the new broadcaster faces an uphill battle against Russian propaganda networks that have dominated the airwaves in the Donbas region, which is partially controlled by Russian-backed militants, and Crimea, which was illegally annexed by Russia in 2014.
With the message “Ukraine is our home,” the new broadcaster aims to evoke a feeling of unity among estranged members of one nation. This approach mirrors President Volodymyr Zelensky’s stated policy of embracing Ukraine’s diversity, regardless of citizens’ religion, language or region.
According to the interim director of the new channel, Yulia Ostrovska, 54 % of residents in the occupied territories don’t have access to Ukrainian television.
Until today, she said, the Ukrainian government did nothing to change that, allowing Russian television channels — usually federally funded — to form the image of Ukraine in the occupied territories.
“Our task is to fix that, to deoccupy minds,” she said at a briefing in Kyiv on March 2.
The new channel, created in place of state-funded international broadcaster UATV, will transmit its programming not only to the Donbas, as was previously reported, but also to part of Crimea.
Four leading Ukrainian media groups — 1+1, StarLightMedia, Ukraina, and Inter — have agreed to provide their “most premium entertainment content” for free until Dom establishes its own production. That is expected to begin in 1.5-2 years.
Those oligarch-owned media groups won’t have any influence on the Dom channel’s editorial policy, said lawmaker Mykyta Poturayev, deputy head of the committee for humanitarian and information policy, who has been involved in the development of the new broadcaster.
Besides showing TV series, reality shows, movies, and sports broadcasts, Dom will launch its own news programs with a mix of national and regional reporting in the Russian and Ukrainian languages. Priority will be given to news of everyday life in the Donbas, which local residents are believed to lack because coverage of the region is largely focused on the war.
Kyrylo Tymoshenko, deputy chief of staff in the Office of the President, said that Dom should become “a source of objective information about Ukraine.”
However, how to balance journalistic objectivity and the more propagandistic goal of creating a positive image of Ukraine remains an open question.
“We are looking for the news model: objective and not too sweet,” said Yury Kostyuk, another deputy chief of staff.
In describing the war in eastern Ukraine and the illegal annexation of Crimea, Dom will stick to the international terminology, Ostrovska said.
This is because the vocabulary used to describe these issues drastically differs in the Ukrainian and Russian or pro-Russian media.
“Of course, nobody is going to talk about rebels or civil war or call Russian tanks pink unicorns that came from Russia with love,” said lawmaker Poturayev.
