Violence against journalists remains a serious problem in Ukraine, especially because the attackers are rarely found or punished.
The most horrific recent attack took place on July 20, 2016, when Pavel Sheremet, a prominent journalist of Belarusian origin who worked at Ukrainska Pravda news website and Radio Vesti, was killed by a car bomb.
A year-and-a-half later, Ukrainian authorities have no suspects in the murder.
Neither have they ever found the people who ordered the September 16, 2000, murder of another journalist, Ukrainska Pravda founder Georgiy Gongadze. Audio tapes of then-President Leonid Kuchma demanding that Gongadze be silenced were released, but Kuchma was only a suspect briefly in 2011.
Another manifestation of impunity against those attacking journalists came in December, when Yuriy Krysin, one of the paid thugs hired by then-President Yanukovych to attack anti-government protesters during the peak of the EuroMaidan Revolution in 2014, and one of those who beat to death journalist Vyacheslav Veremiy, was given only a suspended sentence — despite there being video evidence of his crime and his having a previous criminal record. His case was tried as hooliganism.
President Petro Poroshenko, however, has praised the freedom of press in Ukraine.
“The freedom of speech in Ukraine today is unprecedented,” Poroshenko said in May 2017.
But in 2017 alone, Ukrainian journalists were physically attacked 90 times, according to the National Union of Journalists.
In some notable cases, the attackers were officials or their security guards. In 2015, the journalists of the Nashi Groshi investigative show were attacked by the son-in-law of then-deputy Interior Minister Serhiy Chebotar. The case dragged on for nearly three years and was closed in February, to much dissatisfaction in the journalist community.
In a similar fashion, the state guards who attacked journalists of the Schemes investigative show to prevent them from filming politicians arriving at the wedding of Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko’s son in September, haven’t even come before a court yet. The boss of the security guards denied his subordinates were guilty, despite footage showing them pushing a cameraman to the ground.
In January, journalists from the same show reported harassment and attempts to hack into their emails and messenger accounts after they published a report about Poroshenko’s secret Christmas vacation in the Maldives, for which he paid some $500,000.
