When Olena [last name removed], a journalist from eastern Ukraine, was a student at Donetsk National School, she and her roommates left a humorous sign on their dorm door. It had a list of rules for the house written in 10 Commandment style. The residents signed the list “the holy sisters.” The year was 1984. And Olena and her roommates were citizens of the Soviet Union.
The stunt nearly cost them their educations. Administrators reported the joke, thinking that they were serious, and Olena was almost expelled.
She likes to share this story because “it’s indicative of the time,” she says.
Olena, 49, recently arrived in Columbia, Missouri, with her husband, Yaroslav, 50, and their nine-year-old daughter, Olga. Olena and her husband, also a journalist, are from Donetsk, Ukraine, one of the cities seized by pro-Russian separatists this spring. The family left the city in May and spent the summer in the Lviv region in western Ukraine.
They continued to file stories — sometimes as many as 18 a day — but received a phone call from a friend in August warning them their lives were in danger.
After the threat, their 27-year-old son, Roman, a graduate student at the University of Missouri, arranged for his family to come to the United States on a two-month professionals visa.
From their son’s apartment in north-central Columbia, Olena and her husband, continue to report on the events unfolding in Donetsk.
Olena, who spent the early part of her career as a secondary school math and physics teacher, has been a regional correspondent for Ukrainian Independent News Information Agency (UNIAN) (http://www.ostro.org/) since 2000. She was always curious about journalism, she says, but it wasn’t until the Soviet Union fell and the media opened up that she chose it for her profession.
“The social importance of this profession is very high, and I decided for myself you can’t stay quiet, you need to have as much influence on the situation as possible,” she says.
The daughter of an electrician and coal-mine geologist, Olena grew up in a Donetsk suburb called Makiivka. Like most children of the Soviet Union, she participated in the communist youth group called the Pioneers. But even at a young age, Olena knew she had to be independent. “My personal freedom I tried never to exchange at any of those meetings or politically motivated events,” she said.
She met her husband during their second year of university study. Both were scientists, studying physics. But when the opportunity to study journalism presented itself, both opted to earn a 3-year post-secondary journalism degree.
At 35, she filed her first story. The information agency in 2000 was young, she said. “The most important thing wasn’t your age, experience, diploma, awards or anything like that, the most important thing was the result of my work,” she says.
Olena covered everything in the Donetsk region. She has been the agency’s only correspondent since she began. Her reports cover everyday life, general news, and corruption — including the 2001 murder of local reporter Igor Alexandrov who covered police corruption. (any stories in English I can link to?)
Fast forward to 2014. Olena sat down with Tracey Goldner to discuss the challenges of reporting from Eastern Ukraine.
(Olena’s answers have been translated to English from Russian.)
What is it like in Eastern Ukraine right now?
Olena: It’s a very difficult situation in Ukraine right now. There’s just one word: It’s war. No rule of law. It’s absolute spread of gangs. The police system doesn’t work. Special Forces don’t work. Most Ukrainians left a month ago. The National Squad and Army left. There are a lot of pro-Russian separatists and militants and international bounty hunters. We had a lot of gangsters of the local type before, but then the separatism, the military intervention, rocket artillery started. My relatives and friends that I talk to, they tell me they have rocket artillery and gunfire from different locations in the city. The fighters play with the city like it is a game of Battleship.
When did things start to get dangerous?
Olena: It began in April. Russian militants and armed militants seized our regional administration building. Journalists were hunted, threatened and intimidated at pro-Ukrainian meetings.
For some reason, they were very aggressive toward to the word journalist. They only talked to and accepted Russian journalists. Asking journalists to leave the events was the least offensive thing they did.
This was happening to all the journalists in the region. We had to hide our identities.
If they found out that journalists were at one of the events, they would make the crowd aggressive toward them.
There was this so-called referendum that the terrorists held in order to try to legitimize their effort. It was fully fraught of course. It was just pieces of paper that they just copied on a copier, and even then it was so-called polls. They found out there was a Ukrainian journalist there. They ran her out and she hid in the suburbs because when she left, she figured that had been tailed.
At the end of April there were massive meetings with Russian citizens. Six or seven buses of people came to Donetsk from Rostov, Russia. They lived in local hotels. It’s Yanukovych who paid for this. They basically tried to mind up the crowd with pro-Russian rhetoric. Russian television would show coverage as if this is what people in the region thought.
Can you give me a specific example of the violence in the city?
Olena: So this is a very precise example with students from the Donetsk National University. Seven boys were just hanging around their dorm, sitting and talking and suddenly some armed people came wearing masks and strip-searched them. They were standing there in their underwear for absolutely no reason. Nothing indicated what political opinion those boys had, the only thing was that one boy had a small Ukrainian flag.
They took them to the regional building, which had been seized by separatists, took them to the fifth floor and started torturing them. They had a personal conversation with each boy after that. When I interviewed them later they didn’t want to talk with me actually, but they did confirm that they were indeed tortured by people wearing masks. The separatists were trying to force them to claim that they were fighters for the pro-western Ukraine side.
They hit their toes with a shovel, crushed their ribs. When I spoke to them they couldn’t walk straight. One boy was wearing a hat because his head was covered with stitches. These were second, third and four-year students from the physics faculty, actually. They were pretty smart boys because they were studying on scholarship. They were all local boys and showed their student tickets.
I thought when I was talking to them that some young psychos tortured them. They told me, ‘no, we could see that those were grown-ups, over 40 that must have been working at a prosecutor’s office. They said they were skilled in what they were doing.
One of the most important parts of this story is that they tortured these boys separately and wanted them to admit that they fought for the right sector (a Ukrainian nationalist party). They were pressuring them separately and this lasted for the whole night.
About 4 a.m., they were put into one single room, were forced to lower their heads, and the separatists put guns in front of them, and at that moment Life News TV (a Russian outlet), rushed in. The separatists said they had captured right sector soldiers.
I couldn’t believe this myself. They must have some ethics. The boys told me they could see that these were professional journalists. They came with professional equipment. The journalists acted as if the students had claimed that they came from western Ukraine to fight.
The journalists left and from that moment we knew that those boys were captured so we tried to do whatever we could to release them. We found some international organizations and tried to buy them out. We did succeed and just paid cash for their release. That’s when I interviewed them. They were quite afraid to be in Donetsk after that.
Some relatives of those guys actually recognized them on TV and called back and were horrified. They asked, “Are our children really the fighters of the right sector?”
Did you continue to work after leaving Donetsk for Busk [a town in the Lviv region]?
Olena: Yes, we never stopped working. The only condition for us to stay there (in Busk) was to have Internet to be able to work. It was dangerous for us to tell the truth and report honestly from Donetsk. In Donetsk, if we used words such as separatists or terrorists in our reports, we could be taken hostage. Outside of the region, we could say the truth. We still had all the contact information for our sources. We received emails daily. People called us who knew us from all over the country. I had a phone connection all the time with the sources. We had contact information with the commanders of the Army Corps in Luhansk and Donetsk. The national squad would just call me and tell me stuff and I would record it.
Are journalists working in Donetsk now?
Olena: No, no one is working. Everybody is in the distance. Newspapers are gone long ago. Armed people would come into a newsroom and spend several hours explaining how to report, scare them very much and they were basically told how they should start working. All they could do is close the newspaper. People just stopped going to work.
What do you think of the United States?
Olena: It’s okay, we like it here, especially we are satisfied that the states are now supportive of Ukraine. We didn’t exactly expect the civil support, and it is a very good thing.
Are you still filing stories?
Olena: Yes, 10 stories a day. Sometimes more.
Your whole life is in Donetsk. What’s happening with your house and property?
I have no idea what’s happening with my house. I read some official reports, just look at the list to see if my address is on the list. I always worry for my building. We live downtown pretty much and so shells several times hit the stadium that you can see from our window. A lot of people just left, but a lot of single people stayed. I have no idea what’s happened to our car. We left it in a garage. We still pay off the monthly payment. My mom said armed people were checking around garages to see if anything was open. You can see they are bounty hunters. Shellings are not always precise. So I really want our home to stay safe though it’s not the most important thing. Even here with our son this is a relaxing situation for me. But every morning I wake up and see my house in front of me.
The stunt nearly cost them their educations. Administrators reported the joke, thinking that they were serious, and Olena was almost expelled.
She likes to share this story because “it’s indicative of the time,” she says.
Olena, 49, recently arrived in Columbia, Missouri, with her husband, Yaroslav, 50, and their nine-year-old daughter, Olga. Olena and her husband, also a journalist, are from Donetsk, Ukraine, one of the cities seized by pro-Russian separatists this spring. The family left the city in May and spent the summer in the Lviv region in western Ukraine.
They continued to file stories — sometimes as many as 18 a day — but received a phone call from a friend in August warning them their lives were in danger.
After the threat, their 27-year-old son, Roman, a graduate student at the University of Missouri, arranged for his family to come to the United States on a two-month professionals visa.
From their son’s apartment in north-central Columbia, Olena and her husband, continue to report on the events unfolding in Donetsk.
Olena, who spent the early part of her career as a secondary school math and physics teacher, has been a regional correspondent for Ukrainian Independent News Information Agency (UNIAN) (http://www.ostro.org/) since 2000. She was always curious about journalism, she says, but it wasn’t until the Soviet Union fell and the media opened up that she chose it for her profession.
“The social importance of this profession is very high, and I decided for myself you can’t stay quiet, you need to have as much influence on the situation as possible,” she says.
The daughter of an electrician and coal-mine geologist, Olena grew up in a Donetsk suburb called Makiivka. Like most children of the Soviet Union, she participated in the communist youth group called the Pioneers. But even at a young age, Olena knew she had to be independent. “My personal freedom I tried never to exchange at any of those meetings or politically motivated events,” she said.
She met her husband during their second year of university study. Both were scientists, studying physics. But when the opportunity to study journalism presented itself, both opted to earn a 3-year post-secondary journalism degree.
At 35, she filed her first story. The information agency in 2000 was young, she said. “The most important thing wasn’t your age, experience, diploma, awards or anything like that, the most important thing was the result of my work,” she says.
Olena covered everything in the Donetsk region. She has been the agency’s only correspondent since she began. Her reports cover everyday life, general news, and corruption — including the 2001 murder of local reporter Igor Alexandrov who covered police corruption. (any stories in English I can link to?)
Fast forward to 2014. Olena sat down with Tracey Goldner to discuss the challenges of reporting from Eastern Ukraine.
(Olena’s answers have been translated to English from Russian.)
What is it like in Eastern Ukraine right now?
Olena: It’s a very difficult situation in Ukraine right now. There’s just one word: It’s war. No rule of law. It’s absolute spread of gangs. The police system doesn’t work. Special Forces don’t work. Most Ukrainians left a month ago. The National Squad and Army left. There are a lot of pro-Russian separatists and militants and international bounty hunters. We had a lot of gangsters of the local type before, but then the separatism, the military intervention, rocket artillery started. My relatives and friends that I talk to, they tell me they have rocket artillery and gunfire from different locations in the city. The fighters play with the city like it is a game of Battleship.
When did things start to get dangerous?
Olena: It began in April. Russian militants and armed militants seized our regional administration building. Journalists were hunted, threatened and intimidated at pro-Ukrainian meetings.
For some reason, they were very aggressive toward to the word journalist. They only talked to and accepted Russian journalists. Asking journalists to leave the events was the least offensive thing they did.
This was happening to all the journalists in the region. We had to hide our identities.
If they found out that journalists were at one of the events, they would make the crowd aggressive toward them.
There was this so-called referendum that the terrorists held in order to try to legitimize their effort. It was fully fraught of course. It was just pieces of paper that they just copied on a copier, and even then it was so-called polls. They found out there was a Ukrainian journalist there. They ran her out and she hid in the suburbs because when she left, she figured that had been tailed.
At the end of April there were massive meetings with Russian citizens. Six or seven buses of people came to Donetsk from Rostov, Russia. They lived in local hotels. It’s Yanukovych who paid for this. They basically tried to mind up the crowd with pro-Russian rhetoric. Russian television would show coverage as if this is what people in the region thought.
Can you give me a specific example of the violence in the city?
Olena: So this is a very precise example with students from the Donetsk National University. Seven boys were just hanging around their dorm, sitting and talking and suddenly some armed people came wearing masks and strip-searched them. They were standing there in their underwear for absolutely no reason. Nothing indicated what political opinion those boys had, the only thing was that one boy had a small Ukrainian flag.
They took them to the regional building, which had been seized by separatists, took them to the fifth floor and started torturing them. They had a personal conversation with each boy after that. When I interviewed them later they didn’t want to talk with me actually, but they did confirm that they were indeed tortured by people wearing masks. The separatists were trying to force them to claim that they were fighters for the pro-western Ukraine side.
They hit their toes with a shovel, crushed their ribs. When I spoke to them they couldn’t walk straight. One boy was wearing a hat because his head was covered with stitches. These were second, third and four-year students from the physics faculty, actually. They were pretty smart boys because they were studying on scholarship. They were all local boys and showed their student tickets.
I thought when I was talking to them that some young psychos tortured them. They told me, ‘no, we could see that those were grown-ups, over 40 that must have been working at a prosecutor’s office. They said they were skilled in what they were doing.
One of the most important parts of this story is that they tortured these boys separately and wanted them to admit that they fought for the right sector (a Ukrainian nationalist party). They were pressuring them separately and this lasted for the whole night.
About 4 a.m., they were put into one single room, were forced to lower their heads, and the separatists put guns in front of them, and at that moment Life News TV (a Russian outlet), rushed in. The separatists said they had captured right sector soldiers.
I couldn’t believe this myself. They must have some ethics. The boys told me they could see that these were professional journalists. They came with professional equipment. The journalists acted as if the students had claimed that they came from western Ukraine to fight.
The journalists left and from that moment we knew that those boys were captured so we tried to do whatever we could to release them. We found some international organizations and tried to buy them out. We did succeed and just paid cash for their release. That’s when I interviewed them. They were quite afraid to be in Donetsk after that.
Some relatives of those guys actually recognized them on TV and called back and were horrified. They asked, “Are our children really the fighters of the right sector?”
Did you continue to work after leaving Donetsk for Busk [a town in the Lviv region]?
Olena: Yes, we never stopped working. The only condition for us to stay there (in Busk) was to have Internet to be able to work. It was dangerous for us to tell the truth and report honestly from Donetsk. In Donetsk, if we used words such as separatists or terrorists in our reports, we could be taken hostage. Outside of the region, we could say the truth. We still had all the contact information for our sources. We received emails daily. People called us who knew us from all over the country. I had a phone connection all the time with the sources. We had contact information with the commanders of the Army Corps in Luhansk and Donetsk. The national squad would just call me and tell me stuff and I would record it.
Are journalists working in Donetsk now?
Olena: No, no one is working. Everybody is in the distance. Newspapers are gone long ago. Armed people would come into a newsroom and spend several hours explaining how to report, scare them very much and they were basically told how they should start working. All they could do is close the newspaper. People just stopped going to work.
What do you think of the United States?
Olena: It’s okay, we like it here, especially we are satisfied that the states are now supportive of Ukraine. We didn’t exactly expect the civil support, and it is a very good thing.
Are you still filing stories?
Olena: Yes, 10 stories a day. Sometimes more.
Your whole life is in Donetsk. What’s happening with your house and property?
I have no idea what’s happening with my house. I read some official reports, just look at the list to see if my address is on the list. I always worry for my building. We live downtown pretty much and so shells several times hit the stadium that you can see from our window. A lot of people just left, but a lot of single people stayed. I have no idea what’s happened to our car. We left it in a garage. We still pay off the monthly payment. My mom said armed people were checking around garages to see if anything was open. You can see they are bounty hunters. Shellings are not always precise. So I really want our home to stay safe though it’s not the most important thing. Even here with our son this is a relaxing situation for me. But every morning I wake up and see my house in front of me.
