One year of Russia’s all-out war: a look at The Fix’s coverage of the invasion

“Since Thursday morning Ukraine has faced unprecedented, devastating Russian attacks. Both the country and its independent media have been fighting back with extraordinary courage”, we wrote on February 27th, 2022. A year has passed, but these words remain relevant – Ukraine still faces devastating Russian attacks that aim to subjugate and cripple the country, and the Ukrainians are bravely resisting.

Yet, in those terrible days, few people could predict just how resilient Ukrainian society and, by extension, its news media would be. Ukrainian media have survived and have played a crucial role in covering the invasion.

As a publication with deep roots in Ukraine, The Fix spent the past year covering different aspects of the invasion’s impact on Ukrainian and international media. Here’s a brief look at our work.

Helping Ukrainian media survive

In the first days of the full-scale invasion, The Fix and a coalition of partner organisations launched a fundraising campaign to help Ukraine’s media survive and keep going.

In late February, we published an editorial outlining how international publishers can help via financial donations and non-monetary help like security equipment and logistical assistance.

In the next month, together with partners we worked to keep Ukrainian media going by raising several million euros that helped support dozens of national and local media outlets. In June, we shared the lessons we learned from running the campaign.

(An updated report into the results of the campaign for the past year will be published soon; for now, a mid-term report published last September is available).

Telling stories of Ukrainian publishers covering the war for Ukraine and the world

Ukrainian journalists covering the war faced a multi-pronged challenge – on the one hand, they were confronted with all the personal challenges Ukrainians faced in the wake of the invasion, in many cases being forced to flee or help evacuate their relatives; on the other hand, the demand for their work skyrocketed as Ukrainians were seeking verified information about what was happening. This demand, though, hasn’t stopped advertising and reader revenue from falling off the cliff as the economic situation deteriorated.

Last March, The Fix spoke with Andrey Boborykin, the executive director of Ukraine’s biggest online publisher Ukrayinska Pravda about the outlet’s role in covering the war and the looming crisis in local media. 

We profiled top national publishers like public broadcaster Suspilne and online outlets LIGA.net and Babel, as well as local publishers working close to the frontline. We wrote about Ukraine’s English-language voice Kyiv Independent and Ukraine-based media success stories that continued operating globally despite the war.

In September, Ukrainian media expert Otar Dovzhenko told us that Ukrainian news media were in better shape at the time than analysts could have predicted at the beginning of the invasion – thanks to a combination of innate resiliency and international support. Yet, the prospects remain uncertain as Russia’s war drags on.

Analysing the invasion’s global impact – and examining international coverage

A year ago Ukraine found itself at the centre of the world’s attention, with thousands of international reporters coming to Ukraine to cover the war, and this attention hasn’t dried up now that we’re a year into the all-out war.

In early March of the last year, it was already clear that the war would profoundly change European media – from putting a stop to Russian propaganda in the West to highlighting TikTok as a place for millions of people to follow the story online. 

Since then, The Fix examined different aspects of global coverage of the war – how European publishers report in the Ukrainian language, whether there’s a space for constructive journalism in covering the war, and how nonconventional media projects like Saint Javelin and Visegrad24 gained and used their prominence.  

We also critically examined the work of Western publishers in Ukraine – while commendable in many cases, sometimes still done through the colonial gaze. The Fix wrote about lapses in Reuters’ coverage of the war and commented on The New York Times’ decision to appoint a former Moscow correspondent head of the newly opened Kyiv bureau.

As Ukraine and the world enter a second year of Russia’s invasion, The Fix will keep covering the war’s impact on the media, and The Fix Foundation will continue supporting Ukrainian media.

Source of the cover photo: Anastasiia Kuzmenko

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