Ukraine

Reporters Without Borders has condemned the increasingly oppressive climate of censorship in Crimea, where news media have been closed, media premises are being surrounded and journalists have been harassed and threatened. “The media are being subjected to completely arbitrary actions and decisions,” said Reporters Without Borders secretary-general Christophe Deloire. “At a time when the...

Crimean authorities should immediately restore broadcasting in the region by the independent Ukraine television stations Channel 5 and Channel 1+1, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today. According to local journalists in Crimea and news reports, regional authorities in the administrative center Simferopol stopped transmitting the two privately owned broadcasters' analogue signals to the...

Authorities in the autonomous republic of Crimea in southern Ukraine should ensure that media outlets and independent journalists are allowed to report on the political crisis in the region without being censored or harassed, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today. Tension in the predominantly Russian-speaking southern and eastern Ukraine has increased since Ukrainian President Viktor...

The Committee to Protect Journalists is deeply troubled by the murder of a journalist and reports that pro-government groups are targeting journalists covering nationwide protests in Ukraine. The demonstrations have left at least 26 people dead and several hundred injured, including journalists, according to news reports. Unidentified masked men on Tuesday night brutally attacked Vyacheslav...

At least two international journalists reported being abducted and beaten while covering protests in Ukraine on Friday, according to news reports. The attack comes as two local press freedom groups each reported that more than 100 journalists have been attacked or briefly detained since the nationwide protests began in late November. Nikita Perfilyev, a Russian journalist reporting for the news...

Dozens of journalists were attacked, and their equipment damaged, while reporting on anti-government protests that began over the weekend in the Ukrainian capital of Kiev, according to local and international news reports. The protests come as the government has approved new legislation imposing restrictions on the media. Thousands of Ukrainian citizens gathered in the central Maidan square in...

Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has caleld for a swift and thorough probe into the July 31 arson attack on the home of Oleksiy Matsuka, a well-known investigative journalist based in the eastern city of Donetsk. Matsuka edits the regional news website Novosti Donbassa. “The authorities must react with firmness and, as this journalist’s life is clearly in serious...

Eleven years after the brutal murder of online journalist Georgy Gongadze, Ukrainian prosecutors on Thursday indicted former President Leonid Kuchma on abuse-of-office charges in connection with the slaying, local and international news reports said. According to the online news outlet Ukrainska Pravda—which Gongadze founded and edited before his murder—prosecutors indicted Kuchma on charges of...

Ukrainian prosecutor’s office has opened a criminal investigation into the role that former President Leonid Kuchma may have played in the September 2000 murder of opposition journalist Georgiy Gongadze. It is the first time that the prosecutor’s office has decided to consider tape-recordings made by former presidential bodyguard Mykola Melnichenko as evidence. In the recordings, a voice...

Ukrainian authorities are threatening to upend progress in the 10-year-old investigation into the September 2000 abduction and murder of independent journalist Georgy Gongadze, according to New York-based press freedom group Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). The Kyiv Court of Appeals on Wednesday ruled to reject a second appeal by Myroslava Gongadze, the journalist's widow, against the...