On April 9, Princeton’s Program in Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies, the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies hosted Taras Fedirko, Assistant Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Glasgow, to talk about Ukraine’s journalistic reform movement. Specifically, he evaluated different understandings of liberty and how they relate to the political economy of Ukrainian journalism.

Fedirko began with a discussion of Ukrainian President Zelensky’s February 2021 presidential decree, which imposed sanctions on three pro-Russia media outlets: ZIK, NewsOne, and 112 Ukraine. The sanctions also froze Taras Kozak’s assets. Kozak, a former member of the now banned pro-Russia political party “Opposition Platform–For Life'' (OP), acquired ownership of these outlets in 2019 after the election of Zelensky. Fedirko noted that Kozak essentially used these as a political tool for Viktor Medvedchuk, a Ukrainian politician and friend of Russian President Vladimir Putin. As expected, these channels started broadcasting criticisms of the post-Maidan turn toward Euro-Atlanticism, praises for separatist republics in the Donbass, calls for peace agreements on the terms of Russian separatists, and other pro-Russia and anti-Euro-Atlanticist propaganda.

Initially, Zelensky’s government could not regulate them due to an inability to reach a consensus in parliament. Finally, in 2021, Zelensky attained his goal and enacted sanctions with a presidential decree, which Fedirko describes as having a dual purpose. First, they hindered the rise of the OP in 2021, which was challenging Zelensky’s majority in parliament. Second, the sanctions, in conjunction with the arrest of Medvedchuk, reduced Russia’s influence in Ukraine. Fedirko connected this to the Russian invasion in 2022, suggesting the possibility that it was partially motivated by the lost ability to “use political, internal means to keep Ukraine in the Kremlin’s orbit, pushing the Kremlin a step closer to war.”

Following the decree, Fedirko noticed that a small minority of Kyiv’s journalistic community, particularly those associated with watchdog and activist groups, were among the most vocal supporters. Fedirko referred to them as the “liberal movement for the reform of the journalistic profession in Ukraine.” With financial support from many G7 embassies, they had dedicated their careers to promoting independent journalism and, through it, Western ideals of liberal democracy in Ukraine. 

Here, Fedirko remarked that he was surprised: “Why would ordinary journalists, let alone members of a reform movement that had routinely mobilized against government and owner censorship, support a government ban that set dangerous precedent and was potentially unlawful and almost certainly unconstitutional?” He suggested that their support created an “apparent paradox,” then adding that it is “only a paradox if we interpret these events through the lens of the liberal notion of free speech.” His talk then transitioned to a discussion of what liberty means, specifically as it pertains to freedom of speech.

Fedirko argued that, for many, freedom of speech was defined as a lack of government interference. The National Union of Journalists in Ukraine, the European Federation of Journalists (EFJ), and the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) were among the proponents of this interpretation, subsequently criticizing the sanctions as a violation of liberty. In fact, he referenced a quote from the EFJ and IFJ, in which they asserted that the sanctions constituted “an extra-judicial and politically motivated ban and a blatant attack on press freedom that must be urgently reversed.” The banned channels echoed this sentiment.

Fedirko then contrasted this interpretation of liberty with that of those who supported the ban. For example, he quoted Zelensky, who tweeted, “Ukraine decisively supports freedom of speech, but not propaganda financed by the aggressor state, which undermines Ukraine on its way to the EU and Euro-Atlantic integration. The struggle for independence is a struggle for truth and European values in an information war.” He also quoted Oleksandr Tkachenko, who was Ukraine’s Minister of Culture at the time: “It is doubtful that this media, which followed the Kremlin’s instructions, could be called free media, media that are worthy of protection.” Fedirko then summarized the consensus among the proponents of the sanctions, noting that a “lack of freedom justified restrictions of freedom.” In brief, he contrasted the critics of the sanctions, who subscribed to the liberal notion of freedom as non-interference, with the supporters of the sanctions, who defined freedom as non-domination.

At this point, Fedirko transitioned to an overview of the media reform movement in Ukraine. He argued that the “media profession’s embrace of the sanctions against fellow journalists was the result of a two-decade-long struggle against the domination of media by patrons such as Viktor Medvedchuk.” This struggle began in the 1980s when Ukrainian journalists, seeing perestroika and glasnost as an opportunity to freely report without complete political oversight, began to report more freely. Following the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, however, the decline of Ukraine’s economy caused a decrease in the demand for journalism, forcing the industry to seek revenue from alternate sources. Wealthy businessmen and oligarchs with political aspirations stepped in, paying to promote their campaigns and rhetoric. Fedirko emphasized this, noting that “the journalists were paid to wage so-called information wars on behalf of competing political-economic factions.” Journalistic independence was effectively absent.

In response, a media reform movement began in the early 2000s, but it focused mainly on labor solidarity. Eventually, according to Fedirko, “Russian interference, patronal domination, and organizational imperatives of Western democracy promotion grants have transformed this movement from a labor movement into a divisive, moralized struggle over who counted as a real journalist in Ukraine and who also counted as a pro-Ukrainian journalist.” Zelensky’s sanctions were a culmination of this transformation.

Fedirko noted that 2005 marked the introduction of a new form of media domination, which was characterized by corrupt payments to individual journalists rather than by centralized compulsion. This primarily manifested in the practice of “dzhinsa,” whereby wealthy patrons paid journalists to covertly include political advertisements under the guise of authentically held opinions. Fedirko, relying on quotations from several unnamed sources, presented the view that this undermined the legitimacy of their work and precluded them from being considered “real” journalists. Fedirko followed this up, suggesting that “the notion of freedom as the absence of arbitrary subjection to the will of the state or patrons remained central to the reform movement.” 

Activist groups recognized that “censorship by money,” as Fedirko referred to it, “was more decentralized, more pernicious, and more difficult to resist than direct state censorship.” Eventually, the movement redefined membership to the journalist community as necessitating adherence to ethics and quality standards, identifying biased reporting as an indicator of a lack of freedom. As a result, they embraced the 2021 sanctions because they no longer considered politically influenced journalists to be members of the same profession.

Thus, the journalist reform movement’s seemingly paradoxical support of the sanctions against Zik, NewsOne, and 112 Ukraine is explicable through an evaluation of their interpretation of liberty. Instead of defining liberty through a lens of non-interference, Fedirko discovered that their interpretation was founded in ideas of non-dominance. Through this lens, they classified biased, “owned” media outlets as unfree, thus justifying the sanctions since these outlets were never free in the first place. According to Fedirko, this stance was the product of two decades of struggling for the emancipation of journalists. In essence, Fedirko’s analysis of Ukrainian journalism’s history explained the aforementioned paradox while presenting ample opportunity for future research and analysis.

By Nicholas Vickery