March 2016: 2,000 people rally in support of Ukrainian pilot Nadiya Savchenko at Independence Square in Kiev. (c) Sergei Chuzavkov / AP / Press Association Images. All rights reserved.Under Ukraine’s pre-Maidan criminal regime, any pressure on journalists used to provoke a wave of indignation. This indignation, which came from journalists, human rights defenders and civic activists themselves, even became a precursor to the first Maidan in independent Ukraine — the protests under the banner of “Ukraine without Kuchma”.
Information about temnyky, the authorities’ secret instructions to the press about what they should and should not report, and the murders of critics of the regime invariably provoked protests. The arrest of a journalist solely for expressing his opinion in print could raise a wave, even a tsunami, of public outrage. Indeed, in 2004, putting an end to temnyky was one of the slogans behind the Orange protest.
In post-Maidan Ukraine, temnyky, arrests and censorship have become commonplace. What’s more, repression against dissidents and even murder have become socially acceptable. The murder of the journalist Oles Buzyna in April 2015 or the burning of dozens of people in Odesa in May 2014 now find their justification in the speeches of “patriots”. Meanwhile, former opposition journalists who gained seats as parliamentary deputies refuse to defend their colleague Ruslan Kotsaba, the blogger who spent a year and a half in jail for his views. In all, over 100 journalists, bloggers and indeed ordinary people who expressed their views about the war in the Donbas, conscription, the constitutional order of Ukraine (law enforcement authorities qualify such views as “separatism”) and other issues have been criminally prosecuted in Ukraine for their publications.
