Reporting from exile: “We have to keep ourselves in journalism and in its boundaries"
This article was produced in the framework of the "Unprejudiced" project with the support of the Eastern Partnership Programme and the German Federal Foreign Office in autumn 2022.
Author: Sophia Averesch
Reporting from exile: “We have to keep ourselves in journalism and in its boundaries”
It has been more than 9 months since the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Due to the fact of living under war circumstances and reporting about a war in which the journalist itself is involved just by being a resident and at home of the attacked country, several journalists and news stations cover the war – with the highest priority.
Maria Grynevych is the co-owner and editor-in-chief of the Ukrainian news platform Socportal.info: reporting about the war and the social impacts of the war in Ukrainian, Russian and English language. From six different countries in Europe: Since the war started, the journalists of Socportal.info needed to flee and work from exile. In the interview Grynevych talks about being a refugee, the struggle about reporting a war oneself is attached, too, and the need for a professional journalism about the war.
What changed in your work at Socportal.info after the Russian invasion of Ukraine on 24th of February 2022?
What changed was of course was what we are writing about. We never focused on any military issues before the war. We had our social focus. We were living our normal life and normal work. What changed immediately when the war was announced and the invasion started: Several of my colleagues left Kyiv on the same day, because they have kids and they decided that they can’t risk. For the first week I was basically working alone because they needed time to re-locate and they relocated for several times. So, I was working 24/7: Just reporting what was happening and where it was happening.
I was trying to reach out to our Russians readers, we had quite a big share at Russian readers before the war. I tried to post on our social networks in Russia but when I started to reach to them, they started sending me threats daily. My E-Mail, my phone … I just got tons of that.
How has the situation developed since then?
Our website was blocked in Russia on the second week. We still have some tiny share of Russian readers, I don’t know how they read us, via VPN probably. I got a letter from Roskomnadzor (Editor’s note: The Russian Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology and Mass Media) that I am posting something dangerous. I mean, I am registered in Ukraine, I am a resident of Ukraine, but they still wrote me that letter, actually three letters, stating that I should delete everything.
And then they wrote to my server-owner: They contacted my datacenter in Germany and said if you don’t block this website we will block all websites which you are hosting in Russia. This means huge business problems for the datacenter. Every data of my website was transferred to Ukraine because the datacenter is in Germany, but it has servers in Ukraine, too.
Right now, you are staying and working from exile in Germany. When did you decide to leave Kyiv?
I was getting those threats and Kyiv was under attack. It was three weeks after the war started and my friends were monitoring the situation very closely and they had some sources in the military. They’ve called me and said: If you want to go, go now because they can break through to Kyiv and if Kyiv will be blocked you can’t do what you want and you won’t have any possibility to leave. So I left because I am the editor-in-chief and the co-owner of the media, so I am basically a threat to my family because they started hunting journalists. I mean journalists are a target number one in this war. So I decided to leave and I left for Lwiw and I stayed there for several weeks and then I went to Germany with a journalists-in-residence program for Ukrainian journalists.
We started a new project on our website, it is called “War in Ukraine. The Storybook” and it published the stories of refugees, of volunteers, of people who survived. And I had a lot of interviews with Germans and refugees. Basically, the program was a chance for me to get into a safe-place and to address closely people in Europe about the war.
Do you “use” your exile-status for your work?
Now we plan to open a German version of the Website with a little bit different content. Because as I see here, Germany badly needs an explanation why the war is happening. Because they still think we are one nation and think “You just have to surrender, why don’t you surrender, why do we have to suffer?”. Especially in Eastern Germany there are a lot of Putin lovers and families of former migrants, and they don’t understand what is happening and they are quite hostile. So, it is a big challenge, a big issue. I had an interview with a media minister of Saxony and I spoke to him in August and he said, well people are tired from the war, but I mean, of course they are tired, but it doesn’t mean we should not explain them what is happening.
What is the hardest part of working from exile and in times of war?
My colleagues are staying all in other countries, – working from Germany, Austria, Czech Republic, Moldova, Kosovo and two of our colleagues are conscripts and working from Kyiv- we all have also to take another job because we don’t earn enough as a journalist to live abroad. Most of my co-workers have two jobs now. Sometimes they are just too tired and you know, when you see your colleagues just looking like zombies when seeing them on a call – it’s the workload and the news. F, example the journalist is working, doing his or her job, the news is really bad and I see how he or she goes from just reporting to being very emotional in the work: The titles, the subtitles, they start to be very emotional and then I have to call them and say please I know it is hard, but you have to breathe and you have to close your emotions now because you can’t have the news with super-emotional headlines. This is not journalism.
Because journalism is not activism.
This is what I usually say then: “We are not activists, we can be activists in our daily life, we can go and volunteer, we can donate, we can do a lot of stuff. But our job is our job. We must do journalism: Because if you go emotional, if you don’t check what you are writing, it can be very harmful. We still have to keep ourselves in journalism and in its boundaries.”
