Hope in the dark

Sevgil Musaieva

ILLUSTRATIONS BY MARIA-INES GUL

Knowledge is power: ask Vladimir Putin, who is so terrified of his citizens being allowed access to true information about the war in Ukraine that he has tried to cloak an entire nation in ignorance.

But also ask two extraordinary Ukrainian journalists, Sevgil Musaieva and Olena Prytula, who are doing the opposite: working to keep their country—and the wider world— informed about what is happening in Ukraine.

Musaieva, 34, is the editor, and Prytula, 55, the founding editor, of the Ukrayinska Pravda website, established in April 2000—today one of the most visited websites in the country. In the first month of the conflict they worked round the clock to keep the news flowing in both Ukrainian and English, with a daily audience of five million.

The website has performed extraordinary feats. It published a leaked list of more than 100,000 names of Russian military personnel inside Ukraine, as well as inventories of oligarchs’ yachts, which led to some being seized.

From tiny beginnings, it now employs 50 people, supplemented during the war by readers sending videos, reports and photographs. The core team works 15 to 18 hours a day.

The editors and journalists at Ukrayinska Pravda (“Ukrainian Truth”) have experienced more than their share of grief during their struggle to nurture an independent voice in Ukraine. The news organisation was originally launched by Prytula and her partner, Georgiy Gongadze, to expose endemic corruption in the country. Gongadze disappeared in September 2000: two months later his beheaded body was discovered near farmland outside Kyiv. Prytula was urged by her friends to flee the country; she refused. The murder remains unsolved.

The website played a key role during the Orange Revolution, after which it began to acquire more influence and turn a profit. Prytula found happiness in a new relationship with another journalist, Pavel Sheremet, a colleague and radio broadcaster. But in July 2016 he, too, was murdered—assassinated when Prytula’s car exploded while he was driving. That case, too, remains unsolved.

By then Musaieva, originally from Crimea, was editor-inchief. For a period she went on leave from her job—including taking a visiting fellowship with the Reuters Institute in Oxford—but returned to steer the website through a period of expansion and sale to Dragon Capital in 2021.

“The first day I was crying, but for the last 12 days I didn’t even have the chance to cry

Musaieva at first stayed in Kyiv when war broke out, surviving on little sleep until she was advised to leave. When I catch up with her over Zoom, she and some of her team are working in the Carpathian Mountains—with the intent of transferring some work to Poland. Prytula, who is looking after her 80-year-old mother, remains in Kyiv. “It was her decision,” says Musaieva. “I asked her twice and she said no.” For Musaieva, there was no option but to leave Kyiv. “I spent two nights in a shelter, and it’s impossible to edit from a shelter, with no internet or connection. One of our colleagues—he’s our designer— spent 10 days in a shelter without electricity, without even water… It’s hard to keep going. The first day I was crying, but for the last 12 days I didn’t even have the chance to cry.”