69By then, the rumble of the Russian
threat was growing louder. But as they
raced to figure out funding and work-
flows, and even while they reported on
the military buildup on Ukraine’s bor-
ders, the Kyiv Independent staff were
motivated by something else. “There
was just this strong sense of, We need
to succeed, because if we don’t, then the
bad guys win,” Rudenko says, referring
to the wealthy oligarchs, some linked to
Putin, who influenced what appeared in
the Ukrainian press. “It felt like we were
defending the essence of journalism.”
Since the invasion, the nature of that
defense has changed. The 24 or so re-
porters and editors on staff continue
to turn out deeply reported stories—
Rudenko ticks off several that made her
proud, including one on the street clean-
ers and garbage collectors who contin-
ued to do their jobs even while Kyiv
was being bombed, and another that
followed a Ukrainian military unit as it
collected the bodies of Russian soldiers.
But high emotions and the relentless
pace of events—to say nothing of war-
time disinformation and propaganda—
has made ensuring the accuracy of their
reporting more challenging.
Rudenko has been surprised to dis-
cover previously untapped reserves in
herself. “If I need to do a presentation
in front of 20 people, it freaks me out,”
she says, laughing. “But an audience of
2 million on Twitter does not. Both the
war, and running the team—when the
challenge is so big and so important, it’slike something arises in you; a coping
mechanism, or some inner force that
you didn’t know you had.”
That’s not to say she’s immune to the
stress and trauma. When she looks at an
elevator selfie that she, Sorokin, and Is-
tomina took as they left the office in the
early morning of Feb. 24, not two hours
before the invasion began, she no longer
fully recognizes its subjects. “We may
look the same and talk to each other as
usual and even joke around. But inside,
we are now forever changed and trau-
matized by what happened two hours
after that photo was taken.”
Trauma, and responsibility. Report-
ing from a hot spot is always voluntary
for the Kyiv Independent’s staff, and
Rudenko sees part of her job as reining in
reporters whose enthusiasm for cover-
ing the conflict might override their bet-
ter sense. Even so, in a conflict that has
already killed at least 18 journalists, she
can’t escape the sense that she is putting
her staff in danger. “For each of them,
I’ve played a scenario in my head where
I have to tell their family that some-
thing happened to them,” she says. “I
try to not let myself go too far into that.”
To keep those thoughts at bay, she
tries to picture the team together again,
with the war over and their focus once
again on exposing corruption and injus-
tice. But for now, the job has given her
and the rest of the staff a framework for
dealing with the devastation they con-
front every day. “Reporting on a war in
your own country is both a blessing and
a curse,” she says. “It’s a curse because
you can’t turn off the news. It’s your job
to be looking at the atrocities, at every
photo of a dead person in Bucha, every
civilian killed with their hands tied be-
hind their back, every horrible photo of
a mass grave—there’s no walking away.”
But the work also provides a way of
dealing with the horror—and of making
meaning out of it. “As a journalist,” she
says, “you have the privilege of knowing
that your job is actually helping. I’m not
going to say it’s helping the country or
helping the troops. But you’re helping
the right thing to happen.”◁◁ A staff meeting at the Kyiv
Independent offices on April 20