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Serhii Prokopenko, the editor in chief of Gwara Media, a newsroom near the front lines in Kharkiv, Ukraine, calculates the probability of risk in percentages. “I don’t see any other ways to manage this kind of stress,” he said. Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, twenty miles from Russia’s border, has been a key target since the invasion began, more than three years ago—the site of frequent bombardments and attacks, including with cluster munitions. Emergency laws, curfews, and air alerts have become daily routine. Prokopenko, who is thirty-four, with a robust build and soft, youthful face, manages a team of some two dozen journalists at Gwara, and, in his little spare time, he is also pursuing a PhD in management and communications at the Simon Kuznets Kharkiv National University of Economics.

Gwara is the largest independent multimedia platform in the region. At the beginning of the war, the newsroom created a fact-checking bot, Perevirka. In 2023, Human Rights First recognized Gwara with an award for its commitment to countering Russian misinformation and exposing war crimes. The same year, in partnership with a film studio in the United Kingdom, Gwara released a documentary, part of a BAFTA-winning series, about a mass grave found in Izium, in northeast Ukraine. “This is one of the stories that I’m most proud of,” Prokopenko said, “because I was born in this city.” The film was about hope, he told me: “hope that prosecutors, investigators, this powerful legal structure, give a chance to find those responsible for such crimes—giving hope to find justice.” For their labors, Gwara staffers earn salaries that average six hundred dollars a month. 

I started talking to Prokopenko in the spring, as he was considering whether to sit at home in despair or travel a thousand miles to Ukraine’s border with Poland. (Risk calculation: fifty-fifty.) He had been invited to speak on a panel in Perugia, Italy, at the International Journalism Festival, a prestigious gathering of media executives and thought leaders. The prospect of joining their ranks was a dream. In anticipation, Prokopenko studied the guest list and strategized who he’d attempt to meet, including high-level European donors. Gwara’s budget, 85 percent of which comes from donor funds, had recently been slashed: In January, President Donald Trump had frozen all foreign aid contracts through the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), which had sustained about nine out of ten media outlets in Ukraine. In March, the Trump administration announced that 83 percent of programs were terminated. That left Gwara in free fall. “Nobody cares,” Prokopenko said. “We need to manage it by ourselves.” Perugia presented a potential lifeline.

He applied to the Ukrainian government for permission to exit, a requirement under martial law for all military-age men. He spent weeks waiting in vain for the necessary documents. With only a few days to spare before the festival, he figured he would save time if the permission came and increase his chances of making it to Italy by upwards of 30 percent if he could remove the logistical hurdles of traveling and negotiate his way through. He could not risk absorbing the cost of a return trip if the scales did not tip in his favor, so he bought a one-way flight to Rome. 

He’d first need to take a twenty-two-hour train ride to Poland, and fly from there. He called a colleague, Yaroslav Ustich, Gwara’s marketing director, to plan a trip for the two of them. Ustich—who had critical-worker status and was thus exempt from military service—had already received permission to travel. (Prokopenko didn’t seek critical-worker status because of the bureaucratic hurdles and a requirement that he earn a consistent salary of roughly 500 dollars per month, which the newsroom could not afford.) To avoid authorities’ perceiving him as a criminal—someone who might use temporary permission to leave Ukraine to escape indefinitely, as a handful of journalists and artists had done—Prokopenko packed only a small bag of essentials. For his panel, he planned to wear jeans, a T-shirt, and New Balance sneakers. 

On a Sunday afternoon in April, they boarded a train from Kharkiv. They spent hours reading, sleeping, and streaming, then arrived at a crossing near Chelm, a city in Poland. Ustich was permitted to continue, but guards told Prokopenko that his leaving Ukraine was impossible. Still, he refused to give up hope—his university affiliation should have granted him exemption from military conscription, he figured. He booked a room at a nearby hotel called the Euro, whose logo, a European Union flag, Prokopenko chose to read as a good omen. From the hotel restaurant, whose large windows and vases of tulips gave him a sense of calm, he loaded up on coffee and began calling contacts: local administrative officials in Kharkiv and members of the Ministry of Culture in Kyiv. 

A new rule had recently been instituted, Prokopenko learned: instead of applying for permission to the Ministry of Culture, one must now apply to their local administration, which directs the application to Kyiv; this system entails additional steps and possible conflicts of interest. “The core danger, in my opinion, is that if you need to investigate the regional administration, you can’t,” he said. 

For days, he was bounced around to different departments. He got someone from the Ministry of Culture on the phone, who said that Prokopenko’s regional government had provided the wrong paperwork. He called the Kharkiv administration and asked if they could provide the additional documents. “No, our lawyers blocked this, we can’t give you more,” Prokopenko recalled them saying. (A representative from the Kharkiv Regional Military Administration declined to comment.) He called the ministry back and asked them to call the regional government to coordinate. “I said, ‘But this is the Perugia International Festival,’ and they said, ‘It’s a pity, but this is your destiny,’” he remembered. “Nobody wanted to fix anything.” He was crushed. “I understood this was the end,” he said. “My dream did not come true.”  

On the European side of the border, after several trains, planes, and buses, Ustich made it to Perugia, a historic, typically quiet city whose center was now brimming with thousands of journalists. It was Ustich’s third trip outside of Ukraine since the war started, and his first time in Italy. “Everything’s new for me,” he said. He is twenty-seven, tall and trim with a quiet demeanor and bright blue eyes. As we sat at a café along one of the old town’s main shopping streets, a central hub for the festival, he noted the silence. The absence of drones buzzing overhead was a relief. Still, he said, “I’m a little lost. I’m just alone without my colleagues.” 

Ustich was now tasked with carrying out Prokopenko’s vision—talking up potential funders and other people of influence about Gwara’s plight. Since the invasion, the newsroom had lost several journalists, either to the military or to more lucrative work. The staff had been forced to adopt creative strategies to stay afloat. They began renting their newsroom’s 2008 Hyundai Tucson for the equivalent of a hundred dollars per day, and they charge an extra fifty for a driver—a role taken on by Ustich’s father, who would otherwise be delivering sushi. In 2022, Ustich hatched the idea of opening a coffee shop; he thought it could diversify funding and boost morale and mental health among the staff. Prokopenko said, “Let’s try it.” Ustich set up a little storefront in the newsroom and became a barista, serving coffee and cookies he’d baked at home with his family. “Generally, our clients were journalists and their guests,” Prokopenko recalled with a laugh. It lasted a year and a half—until Gwara shut it down. “We failed to make it profitable,” he told me. 

Gwara’s precariousness is nearly a universal among Ukrainian press outlets and, as it turned out, Ustich’s colleagues in Perugia had all arrived with the same plans. They were dealing with a range of threats: Forced conscription, censorship, surveillance. Since 2022, according to the prosecutor general, more than fifty journalists, including Ukrainian reporters, foreign correspondents, and fixers, have been killed. But this year’s stakes felt particularly high, as the most existential threat to the country’s journalism was now the lack of funding. According to a 2025 study by the Media Development Foundation, whose aim is to support and empower politically unaffiliated Ukrainian media, more than half of sixty outlets surveyed had relied on foreign aid grants, which accounted for more than 80 percent of their revenue. When the war began, the media economy had collapsed; the United States stepped in, primarily through USAID, allowing high-quality coverage to proliferate. “But unfortunately, this ‘golden age’ of journalism lasted only one year—2023,” Eugene Zaslavsky, the Media Development Foundation’s executive director, told me. Now the work is shutting down. “We all understand that the Western world cannot rely on Russian media, as they do not adhere to Western journalistic standards,” he said. “Ukrainian media have served as the eyes of both ordinary Ukrainians and the rest of the world. Now we are blind. And the countdown has begun until Russia takes over the information space once again.”

With the sudden loss of funding, newsrooms across Ukraine scrambled. Prokopenko submitted some sixty grant requests to European institutions—and received roughly 15 percent of what he asked for. “My nervous system will be damaged,” he said. “We just don’t have funds.” The stress triggered what he called a “crisis,” and for the first time in his life, he sought psychological support. “I’m learning now how to ask for help,” he said. “I try to figure out how to be vulnerable.” As a Ukrainian man, he told me, he’d been raised to be stoical. But that became too difficult. “Because I understood,” he said, “I’m on the limit of breaking.”

Faced with similar concerns, several outlets in Kharkiv recently accepted funding through the local city council, “which means they become close to power,” Prokopenko noted. “It’s not very good.” In January, the Kyiv Independent, one of the most widely read and trusted sources of English-language journalism from Ukraine, started a GoFundMe campaign to support three regional media outlets, including Gwara, whose funding had been cut; the other two were in the cities of Sumy and Mykolaiv. The campaign raised more than twenty thousand dollars for each newsroom, providing much-needed relief, however temporary. 

One afternoon in Perugia, several dozen people gathered in a meeting room at the Hotel Brufani, an upscale venue, for a gathering hosted by the Independent. Around an elaborate display of Italian pastries, tea, and coffee, the Independent encouraged guests to spotlight Ukrainian journalism. “The past couple of years it’s been more difficult,” Olga Rudenko, the editor in chief, told the room. A young journalist from Belgium asked how he could help combat Russia’s propaganda machine. 

“Very often, their goal is not to convince you of one particular fact,” a journalist from the Independent said. “It’s to flood the media environment with so many narratives. It’s often conflicting, often contradictory, that you get so lost as a member of the audience that you just sort of give up looking for the truth altogether.” This apparatus has been around for decades, she noted. According to 2023 congressional testimony by Christopher Walker, the vice president for studies and analysis of the National Endowment for Democracy, Russia has spent around one and a half billion dollars annually on its foreign disinformation campaigns.

Trump has since cut off the endowment’s funding—and his pro-Russia rhetoric has apparently fueled the propaganda problem. In February, when he invited Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky to the White House and called him a “dictator,” deepfakes, spurious videos, and false claims of Zelensky’s purchase of luxury properties circulated online, inflaming anti-Ukraine sentiment. “We have observed a notable resurgence in anti-Ukraine disinformation narratives across US social media, many of which appear to be repurposed content from prior Russian influence campaigns,” McKenzie Sadeghi, an analyst with NewsGuard, the misinformation watchdog, told France24. 

“The US, obviously, was putting a lot of money into media in Ukraine,” a donor from the UK chimed in. “How much have the cuts impacted journalism?” The room turned to Oksana Romaniuk, the executive director of the Institute of Mass Information (IMI), a Ukrainian-based organization that supports regional media. According to an IMI survey of a hundred and fifty regional outlets in Ukraine, US financing was the main source of income for independent media.  Some 80 percent of grants to local journalism were US-funded. “It was a huge blow for us,” Romaniuk replied. That work “is how we remain democratic,” she said, “through having these aggressive, robust, energetic journalists, who really are the ecosystem of democracy in Ukraine.”

One Saturday in January, she recalled, she opened her email and “got a heart attack.” The message, a “stop-work order,” directed IMI to suspend all US-funded activities. “We lost, overnight, 82.5 percent of financing,” she said. IMI sub-granted 106 local media outlets with USAID funds and had offices around Ukraine that supported frontline journalists with safety equipment and charging stations. “I didn’t have money to pay rent for the next month,” Romaniuk said. Nor could she pay salaries. “It was very heartbreaking to carry out Zoom meetings with them, and to explain that we can’t support you anymore, and people cried,” she said. “Because they live in the most vulnerable areas. They are shelled every day.” 

Since 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed and Ukraine declared independence, threats against independent journalism have been woven into the country’s DNA. Former state outlets, now under Ukrainian control, dominated the media even as a few independent newspapers and TV stations emerged. In the mid-nineties, Ukraine transitioned to a free market economy, and oligarchs began acquiring media outlets in earnest, weaponizing them into tools for political leverage. Censorship was widespread. In 1999, the Committee to Protect Journalists placed Leonid Kuchma, who was then Ukraine’s president, on a list of the world’s ten worst enemies of the press. 

In 2000, Georgiy Gongadze, a pioneering investigative journalist, founded Ukrainska Pravda, now one of Ukraine’s most respected outlets. Within months of establishing the newsroom, he disappeared. Soon, he was found to have been murdered. The event later became known as the “Cassette Scandal” and “Tapegate,” when audio was released that allegedly implicated Kuchma in Gongadze’s killing. (Charges against Kuchma were later dropped because of “insufficient” evidence linking him to Gongadze’s death.) Mass protests erupted, setting the stage for the 2004 “Orange Revolution.” That year, a Russian-backed politician named Viktor Yanukovych, an ally of Kuchma’s who served as the governor of Ukraine’s most populous province during the Tapegate scandal, was declared the winner of the presidential election, prompting mass demonstrations. The media’s role in covering the story prompted a revote, and Viktor Yushchenko, a pro-Western opposition figure, won. 

In the mid-aughts, Ukrainska Pravda began what would become a tradition of watchdog journalism in Ukraine: publishing scathing exposés revealing the profligacy of political elites. Early reporting, in a series called “The Son of God,” detailed how Yushchenko’s oldest son, Andriy, then a university student, drove a rare BMW, employed a private bodyguard, and bought champagne and tables at nightclubs with hundred-dollar bills. Reform under Yushchenko was slow. Independent and local journalism remained marginal, supported mostly by small-donor programs. By 2010, Yanukovych returned to power. Press freedom regressed. Journalists faced violence, surveillance, and legal harassment. 

In 2013, Yanukovych refused to sign a long-anticipated trade and political agreement with the European Union, instead prioritizing closer ties to Russia and solidifying the Kremlin’s influence in Ukraine. The move propelled one of the most significant revolutionary eras in Ukraine’s history: Euromaidan. Independent media was instrumental in covering public mobilization and galvanizing international attention. Aspiring journalists, tired of the lack of independent, verified information—such as Prokopenko, who was then in his early twenties—entered their careers in the wake of Euromaidan. In February of 2014, after months of protests against him, Yanukovych fled to Russia, where he continues to live in exile. That month, Russia invaded Ukraine and annexed Crimea. Soon, Russian-backed forces seized large swaths of Donetsk and Luhansk, and war broke out in the east. Ukraine’s interminable fight for sovereignty culminated in Russia’s full-scale invasion, in 2022. 

In the weeks immediately afterward, Ukrainian media projected a sense of collective strength. An around-the-clock “United News” TV marathon, broadcast by state and private TV channels, began airing messages about the war. As the conflict dragged on, however, independent journalists voiced concern that the program was becoming a channel for pro-government propaganda. “What really impacted us, alongside self-censorship, were the constant victory reports from state sources, including the TV marathon,” Oleh Dereniuha, managing director of NikVesti, an independent media outlet in Mykolaiv, told me. “Every day, some high-ranking official would assure the public that Russia’s ammunition was running out, that Ukrainians would soon be sipping coffee on Yalta’s seafront, or that the Russian president would soon be gone.” These reports imbued the public consciousness. “Even considering the possibility of no victory was seen as treacherous,” Dereniuha said. “Despite journalists’ critical-thinking skills, they too were influenced by these narratives, and it undoubtedly affected their agenda and work.” 

Press freedom threats have since persisted. In the early days of the war, Ukraine’s parliament passed a broad law that granted the state powers over the media. Last year, following cases of physical intimidation and surveillance, a coalition of Ukrainian news organizations released a statement condemning the “systematic” targeting of journalists by anonymous Telegram accounts believed to be affiliated with the Ukrainian government. Nataliia Lyhachova, the editor in chief of the Ukrainian press watchdog Detector Media, said in the statement that “an ‘information army’ of anonymous Telegram channels has formed in Ukraine during the war with Russia to target internal opponents and critics of the current government, as well as independent media and journalists.” Yuriy Nikolov, a cofounder and editor of an investigative outlet, Nashi Groshi, said that a group of unidentified people had shown up at his apartment, banged on his door, and shouted that he needed to join the army. A few months later, Slidstvo.Info, an investigative journalism site, reported that military enlistment officers attempted to forcibly conscript one of its journalists, Yevhenii Shulhat, who had been investigating Illia Vitiuk, the cybersecurity chief of Ukraine’s security service, and his wife’s purchase of a luxury apartment. 

Pauline Maufrais, who covers Ukraine for Reporters Without Borders, has been impressed by the Ukrainian media’s resilience, as the country’s journalists have covered diplomacy, corruption, and war crimes, tracking procurement scandals and public spending, gathering firsthand evidence of atrocities in newly liberated areas, and following aid negotiations and EU membership bids. The environment for journalism is better than it was decades ago, Maufrais noted. “But we still need to be very vigilant,” she told me. “This wave of intimidation and threats was very worrying.”

“I don’t want empathy,” Andrey Boborykin, a self-proclaimed “reluctant media developer,” told me in Perugia. Boborykin, who is thirty-eight, with dark features and kind brown eyes that bear a weariness, is the executive director of Ukrainska Pravda and the head of growth of the Media Development Foundation, working closely with regional outlets. We sat in a leafy garden overlooking the city, and as we talked about the business of news, an air raid alert pinged his phone—a regular part of his life in Kyiv. Was there a drone or ballistic missile? Were his wife and child safe? I asked out of concern. “I don’t like to speak about that,” he said, “because, for me, it’s, like, victim porn.” 

Besides, “we’re already past that,” he explained. Ukrainian journalists needed practical solutions. Reliance on international donors, which sustained outlets for the past twenty-five years, “is now not working,” Boborykin said. Perugia had highlighted for him that Ukraine’s new generation of media leaders needed to rethink their business models. “The overall sentiment is low,” he observed. “There’s a feeling that donors are not going to save Ukrainian media.” European countries had increased budgets for defense; there were fewer resources and more competition for Ukrainian journalism. “They’re not ready to replace American aid entirely—they’re not equipped to do that,” he said. Instead, a drive toward corporate membership and reader-supported programs was necessary. Ukrainska Pravda, for its part, was considering instituting a paywall, merchandise, and subscription bundles with a leading Ukrainian streaming service. 

Boborykin had recently published a piece arguing that it would take only a hundred thousand people to save the country’s entire independent media industry. “It was met majorly with skepticism,” he said. “I see no reason for the skepticism. I think that journalism needs to learn how to sell itself.

“For me, there’s no alternative,” he added—but the healthiest long-term combination must be self-sustainable, which could include a combination of grants, subscribers, and advertising revenue. “Most media managers in Ukraine underestimate marketing, and don’t know how to do it,” he told me. (Prokopenko, who had read the piece, agreed with its premise but said that a policy push needed to accompany it, in the form of a tax return or credit system for independent media.)

Toward the end of the conference, Correctiv, a German nonprofit investigative newsroom, hosted a private breakfast on local media. Several high-level donors and executives, including from Google News, attended. People sipped juice and coffee and ate cornetti. News outlets from Italy, Switzerland, and Poland shared their experiences growing audiences and managing newsrooms. The conversation began to wrap up—and then, from the back, Boborykin spoke. “My experience couldn’t be more different from what I’ve heard in this room,” he said. Funding, mostly from American aid, had “hit a concrete wall,” he said. “The entire conference confirms this hypothesis,” he declared. “The donor model is not sustainable.” He went on: “All of your countries aid Ukraine and rely on media to show how it’s spent. The only way is through independent local publishers.” And yet, he added, “media support is absent from all the treaties with big dollars and zeros coming to Ukraine.” Then he turned to the subject of Google. “It’s ironic that Google is participating in this kind of setting, because Google is the very reason that we are scrambling for funding,” he said. 

When the conversation concluded, people surrounded Boborykin, and, he said, “secretly wanted to high-five me” for his frank comments about Google. That provided some catharsis. But none of his pleas or meetings in Perugia resulted in any funding—at least not yet, he told me. 

Gwara’s efforts were also futile. Before arriving in Perugia, Ustich had been despondent and overwhelmed; Prokopenko thought the trip might give him a boost. On the train, the two had worked together on a pitch to potential backers. When it came time to present it on his own, Ustich was nervous, but did his best to think on his toes. He talked about the importance of local independent media as a form of community building in wartime, as well as Gwara’s financial distress, and the psychological strain on staff. “It was literally new for me,” he said. “New form of festival, new country and city, new people.” For the most part, though, the conversations ended up being surface-level. None resulted in funding.

A month after Perugia, Prokopenko took a twelve-hour train ride to the city of Lviv, close to the Polish border. There, news executives, journalists, and international guests convened for yet another media forum—this one focused on domestic wartime challenges to the Ukrainian press. This time, Prokopenko could attend. The event was held on the outskirts of the city, in a sprawling business complex. USAID was not officially part of the agenda, and yet cuts were a persistent undercurrent in conversations. Prokopenko found himself running into colleagues and saying, “Any word on the cash?” Gwara, he told them, was “living on scraps.” 

He’d decided to travel to Lviv despite feeling a sense of alienation from many of the journalists who didn’t work near the front lines, mainly because he hadn’t made it to Perugia. He spent most of his time at the bar. The past few months had been grueling. He’d recently ended a relationship because the intensity of his work was too taxing on his partner. He spent much of his off time alone, finalizing his dissertation, on developing creative industries via digital marketing tools; walking to hear folk music in the park; and swimming laps and floating at the local pool. 

In Lviv, Prokopenko’s posture was slumped from fatigue, but his energy was bright and jovial. Wearing all black, he forced himself to a party put on by the event’s organizers, held in a small square. Standing at a cocktail table, he snacked on sausages and smoked cheese. Freedom of speech, he said, could not be maintained if “we just sit around and wait for donors.” He spotted a colleague. “Look, here’s our friend,” he said. “I see him here now—but yesterday, he was in the east, working as a fixer. He has PTSD. He doesn’t sleep, and yet, here he is today,” he said. “I keep thinking about him, how he must feel, standing in this moment between different worlds.” 

Feeling the tension, Prokopenko fell back on his percentages. “Honestly, 30 percent of why I came here is just to release the pressure—to recharge,” he said. “I need new ideas, new people, fresh energy.” He made his way over to a circle of friends and soon commanded the group’s attention with a monologue about his funding strategies. The latest involved a solar endowment for regional media. “Our energy system is wrecked, but there’s money pouring into Ukraine for solar panels,” he explained. “Who gets that money? Oligarchs and private businesses. Why not regional media?” He’d sent a summary of the idea to a European donor and a politician in New Mexico, he said. So far, no takers. 

Some people, Prokopenko told me, are puzzled by his ideas, “and they kind of look at me like a moron, to be honest,” he said. “Well, I think it’s creative.” Money needs to come from somewhere. As he put it, “ If my dad were an oligarch, I’d take his money and invest it in media. We’ll know we’ve succeeded when we have ‘UA AID,’ not USAID”—referring to in-country pools of funding. The crowd was with him, but he had to head back to the front. With that, Prokopenko disappeared into a taxi bound for the train station, leaving behind a trail of laughter. 

Daria Mitiuk contributed reporting from Ukraine. This piece was supported by the Pulitzer Center.

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