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their previous employer inspired the
editors to strike out on their own, and
pulled Rudenko, who is now leading a
team under exceptionally difficult cir-
cumstances, back from what was meant
to be a break from journalism.
“We are starting this ambitious proj-
ect that is based on values we really, re-
ally believe in, which is independent
journalism,” Rudenko, 33, says. “And
we are doing it at the same time as our
country is fighting this war for survival.”
Those are high stakes for someone
who never expected to be in charge. “If
you saw me when I was 14 or 15, you’d
never think this person would grow up
to lead anything,” Rudenko says with the
modesty I’ve come to expect over the
course of our four conversations over
the past two months. A self- professed
geek with a love for books and Japanese
anime, Rudenko grew up in Dnipro, in
central Ukraine. After her father’s death
when Olga was 4, her mother, an accoun-
tant, raised her alone and encouraged
her to pursue a career in economics. But
Rudenko, eager to “earn a living writing
and meet interesting people,” chose to
and broke the news—and shared their
decision to start something new. “Count
me in,” Rudenko said.
They didn’t have a name for it yet,
but on Nov. 15, the group sent out the
first iteration of what would become
the Kyiv Independent. Initially it was
just a newsletter, but they soon added
a podcast—and finally, after acquiring
business partners and some grant fund-
ing, a news website. When it came time
to choose an editor in chief, the solu-
tion, says Istomina, was obvious. “We
all knew it was going to be Olga; she
had the most experience and the com-
plete trust of the staff. But still, being
a humble person, she presented a mes-
sage about how we had to have a poll
first. Of course, everyone voted for her.”All she knew was that she found the
newsroom terrifying. Struggling to keep
up with conversations in English, she
felt overwhelmed. Rather than running
away from her anxiety, she ran toward it.
Early on, she volunteered to cover a re-
cent opinion poll even though it would
mean writing in English. She brought
the piece to the editor the next day. “He
opens the story in front of me and says,
‘It’s OK, I’m just going to change a few
things.’ ” she recalls. “And then he—
control A—deletes the whole story and
starts writing a new one.”
She got better, and was soon writ-
ing exclusively in English, and not only
about lifestyle: she also covered the
2014 Russia- backed separatist conflict
in the Donbas region. In 2016, she be-
came national editor, and by 2017, she
was the deputy to the editor in chief.
With each promotion, Rudenko
doubted herself—and, in fact, initially
turned down the deputy job. “It was
‘Who, me?’ ” she says. “But when it
was announced, the reaction from peo-
ple was, ‘We thought you already were
that.’ I realized how different my vision
of myself was from how people see me.”IN 2021, Rudenko accepted a fellow-
ship at the University of Chicago’s Sti-
gler Center. By then she had been at the
Kyiv Post for a decade—and those 10
years, coupled with rising tensions over
editorial independence between the
newspaper’s staff and its third owner,
real estate developer Adnan Kivan, con-
vinced her she needed to take some time
to figure out her next steps. The plan
was to spend the fall studying in the
U.S., then return to Ukraine and simply
relax for a while; she wasn’t sure she’d
return to the Post.
But a major scandal at the newspaper
back in Kyiv got in the way. Succumbing
to pressure from Ukrainian authorities
unhappy with the Post’s critical cover-
age, Kivan tried to appoint a more com-
pliant editor, and when the staff refused
to accept her, fired them all on Nov. 8.
Rudenko was in Chicago at the time,
which left senior editors Toma Istomina
and Sorokin to handle the fallout. They
soon realized, as Sorokin puts it, “that
we weren’t ready to let it go.” That night,
Sorokin, Istomina, and head of investi-
gations Anna Myroniuk called Rudenko‘It felt like we
were defending
the essence
of journalism.’
study journalism at university in Dnipro.
After an internship at a local paper,
she moved to Kyiv in 2011, where she
landed a job at the Kyiv Post, Ukraine’s
only English- language newspaper at
the time. Although the paper’s mainly
international audience was relatively
small, it had a reputation for doing se-
rious journalism. “It was hardcore in-
vestigative journalism—those journal-
ists weren’t scared of anything,” says
Oleksiy Sorokin, who became a politi-
cal reporter at the paper in 2018 and is
now the Kyiv Independent’s political
editor. “It was always going up against
the establishment and those in power.”
Rudenko didn’t know about that
prestige when, in 2011, she got a job as a
lifestyle reporter at the paper’s recently
launched Ukrainian- language website.
NEXT GENERATION LEADERSALEXANDER CHEKMENEV FOR TIME