Young Ukrainian women see reporting from frontline as a duty

New Straits Times

2 days ago

WHEN Russia invaded Ukraine in early 2022, Olha Kyrylenko was at home watching images from her colleagues risking their lives to cover the siege of the port city of Mariupol.
"I asked myself whether I could work in such conditions at all," said Kyrylenko, now a 26-year-old reporter for the leading media outlet Ukrainska Pravda.
"And I was like, well, I have to at least try," she said during a rare break in war-torn eastern Ukraine.
She went to cover the front lines for the first time shortly after Russia invaded, and noticed that she was far from the only woman.
"All my friends, journalists working in the war, are women," Kyrylenko said.
While women journalists had already been covering fighting between Ukraine and Kremlin-backed separatists since 2014, a new generation emerged in 2022.
Mobilisation in Ukraine's army is obligatory only for men, but the country has seen more and more women joining its ranks.
Two Ukrainska Pravda journalists have been drafted into the army, including the photographer Kyrylenko worked with on her first reporting trip to the front in 2022.
Since then, she has been working on her own.
That was also the case for Viktoria Roshchyna, whose death in Russian detention last year highlighted the risks taken by Ukrainian journalists covering the war.
The 27-year-old went missing in 2023 during a high-risk trip to territory occupied by Russian forces.
Her body was sent back only in February and bearing signs of torture, according to a media investigation.
Kyrylenko worked with Roshchyna and remembers her as "tenacious" and ready to work where no one else would.
But Kyrylenko said her death had forced her to think hard about whether journalism "is worth risking your life".
In April, Kyrylenko was reporting in Pokrovsk, a vital frontline logistics hub where fighting is fierce, on her mother's birthday.
She promised her mother that nothing would happen to her.
But, she said, "my life right now is not the highest value in my life".
The main thing is "that my country as a country should survive and that the truth about this war, whatever it is, should be present in the information space".
Keeping a professional distance as a Ukrainian journalist covering the war can be difficult.
Alina Yevych, a 25-year-old reporter, said she had managed — for a while.
Then she met a woman who said she had been kidnapped and raped for a week by Russian soldiers in Mariupol.
After hearing her words, "I don't know how to be objective", said Yevych, who works along with her boss Maria Davydenko for Vchasno, an independent news outlet.
Yevych said soldiers they interview sometimes found it hard to believe that women could understand how tanks work or listen to their stories without flinching.
Mentalities are changing, Yevych said, but "for some people, you really remain a girl in this war".
Vyacheslav Maryshev, editor in chief of the visuals department at Suspilne, a state-funded news organisation, in Kharkiv in northeast Ukraine, said his female employees tended to take fewer unnecessary risks.
The men sometimes want to act like "Rambo" to prove their bravery, he said, but in his team of war reporters there are more women than men.
One of them, Oleksandra Novosel, said she had just convinced her bosses to invest in bulletproof jackets more suited to women's body shapes.
At the start of the invasion, one of the vests available at Suspilne weighed 12kg — around a quarter of her weight.
"I walked around in it and wobbled," Novosel recalled.
The 30-year-old said she would prefer not to need a bulletproof vest, and had not imagined working in a warzone until her country became one.
She would rather be covering courts or investigating corruption, she said, but for the moment, reporting on the war is "my duty".