On Dec. 11, the Kyiv Post held an award ceremony for the winners of Top 30 Under 30, the newspaper’s annual prize. Established by the Kyiv Post in 2016, this award honors young Ukrainians who achieved outstanding results in different fields.
We at the Kyiv Post treasure this award. It is a way to showcase the inspiring stories of 30 bright young Ukrainians, to tell the world about their achievements.
This year, four winners turned down the award at the ceremony. They were Vladyslav Greziev, the founder of LobbyX and TEDx Kyiv; Vitaliy Ustymenko, an activist and a member of the AutoMaidan movement in Odesa; Yuriy Didula, the founder of the Build Ukraine Together volunteer movement; and Taras Prokopyshyn, the founder of The Ukrainians, an online media.
The four said they refuse the award because it was sponsored by the Victor Pinchuk Foundation. They said that their values don’t align with the values of Pinchuk, one of Ukraine’s oligarchs and son-in-law of the controversial ex-President Leonid Kuchma.
We respect the decision of the winners who chose not to accept the award. We also respect their decision to use their time on stage to make a declaration that is important to them.
We saw some reactions criticizing them for not turning down the award in advance but doing it on the stage instead. We don’t share this criticism. We think that every one of the 30 winners earned their right to be on that stage with their outstanding achievements, and they should be allowed to use their time there as they see best. As independent media, we know the value of freedom of speech.
Two of them, Greziev and Ustymenko, used their time on stage to remind the audience about the murder of Kateryna Gandziuk, an anti-corruption campaigner and an official in the city of Kherson who suffered an acid attack and died in hospital in November.
Her murder became the symbol for many attacks on activists across Ukraine and for the poor investigation of such attacks by the authorities that further breeds the impunity. Ustymenko, one of the winners, was a victim of such an attack in Odesa.
We thank the winners for bringing this up during our event. The Top 30 Under 30 award is about Ukraine’s future. This future can’t exist without justice and rule of law. At the Kyiv Post, we covered the Gandziuk case and other attacks extensively, often on the cover.
The four winners who refused the award expressed their respect to the Kyiv Post, praising the newspaper’s work and high standards.
We want to emphasize that the Top 30 Under 30 is not a Pinchuk Foundation award. It is a Kyiv Post award. Behind it is an independent newspaper that has been around for 23 years and has earned a high reputation.
The Pinchuk Foundation sponsored the award ceremony and its representatives, along with the Kyiv Post staff and former contest winners, picked this year’s top class – they had one vote on the jury of nine people. The ceremony is part of the Kyiv Post’s yearly Tiger Conference, which is a commercially-driven project and an important part of the commercial activities of the Kyiv Post, the same as selling advertising in the paper. The conference had several sponsors, to whom we are grateful for their support.
Sponsorships and advertising, together with subscription sales, are what allows the Kyiv Post existence. Commercial activities like this are key to preserving our independence.
It doesn’t come easy. The advertising market in Ukraine is poor, partly due to the state of the country’s economy, partly as a reflection of the world trend of advertising budgets being spent on Google and social media rather than on media.
Many media in Ukraine go around this problem by applying shady money-making practices, but the Kyiv Post doesn’t. We don’t publish unmarked advertising, known here as jeansa. We don’t sell out to politicians. We don’t solicit money for taking down stories that someone doesn’t want to be published. We hold ourselves to high professional standards.
Our advertisers don’t dictate what we write, and we have a similar relationship with the sponsors of our events.
We have always covered Pinchuk with the same approach as any other Ukrainian oligarch. In October 2016, we published an investigative profile of him as part of our “Oligarch Watch” series, titled “Victor Pinchuk: Friend or Foe of Ukraine?” His foundation sponsored the award knowing it won’t earn their patron any special treatment from the newspaper. We’ve also criticized Pinchuk on the opinion pages, but on two issues we share his interests: Finding and honoring Ukraine’s best young people, as the Top 30 Under 30 Award does, and raising Ukraine’s profile among world leaders, as his annual Yalta European Strategy conference does.
It is our devotion to the high professional standards that allows us to accept advertising and sponsorships while maintaining our independence from their sources – in everything we do.
An independent, free, and commercially-driven press is key for securing a democracy that Ukraine aspires to be.
We thank all the winners, presenters, and guests of the award ceremony.
We welcome feedback and are ready to publish an op-ed by the winners who turned down the award, in case they want to explain their decision further.
Finally, we encourage all who support quality journalism to do so with their money – buy a subscription today to any media that they consider worthy. We will be humbled and grateful if their choice is the Kyiv Post. The impact of every dollar given to independent media is hard to overestimate.
