‘A Big Step Back’: In Ukraine, Concerns Mount Over Narrowing Press Freedoms

A Ukrainian reporter who revealed that a state news agency tried to bar interviews with opposition politicians said he received a draft notification the next day.

Ukraine’s domestic spy agency spied on staff members of an investigative news outlet through peepholes in their hotel rooms.

The public broadcaster has decried what it says is political pressure on its reporting.

Journalists and groups monitoring press freedoms are raising alarms over what they say are increasing restrictions and pressures on the media in Ukraine under the government of President Volodymyr Zelensky that go well beyond the country’s wartime needs.

“It’s really disturbing,” said Oksana Romanyuk, director of the Institute of Mass Information, a nonprofit that monitors media freedoms. That is particularly true, she said, in a war where Ukraine is “fighting for democracy against the values of dictatorship embodied by Russia.”

Before the Russian invasion of February 2022, and since its independence in 1991, Ukraine had a long track record of tolerating a pluralistic media environment, with multiple television channels aligned with opposition and pro-government parties, and independent news outlets. Maintaining that culture has been one challenge of the war.

Ukrainian journalists largely accepted wartime rules banning publication of troop movements or positions, locations of Russian missile strikes and accounts of military casualties, considering the measures necessary for national security.