Over the course of a year and ten months since the beginning of the full-scale Russian invasion, Russia has committed 548 crimes against journalists and media in Ukraine. This information is based on the Monitoring of Russian War Crimes conducted by the Institute of Mass Information. In November-December, IMI documented five violations of freedom of speech committed by Russia, including threats, injuries to journalists, cyberattacks, and the suppression of Ukrainian broadcasting due to Russian shelling.
In total, since the start of the full-scale Russian invasion into Ukraine, occupiers have killed 70 journalists, with 10 of them losing their lives while carrying out their professional journalistic activities.
Image by IMI
In Nikopol, Dnipropetrovsk Region, Ukrainian digital broadcasting has been absent for over three months due to Russian shelling, and radio operates with interruptions. News can only be accessed if there is an internet connection.
The Dnipro online publication 'Dnipro Operatyvny' has received three notifications of alleged threats to its editorial office. These messages were sent to the editorial email on December 15, 16, and 17.
Online media outlets in Donetsk and Luhansk Regions, such as 'Skhidny Variant,' experienced cyberattacks, resulting in the Instagram account being blocked for the last two months. The editorial team considers this an attack by Russian bots aimed at obstructing their professional activities. "Considering that our website has recently been regularly subjected to DoS attacks, we conclude that this is another attempt by Russian bots to undermine our coverage of Russia's crimes in Ukraine," the editorial team stated, according to IMI.
The Gwara Media publication in Dnipropetrovsk received a letter, supposedly from an SBU employee, requesting the registration of a request for information and a written response. The letter included an archive file, 'Documents.zip.' Meanwhile, the mass sending of letters with identical content was documented by the Government's Computer Emergency Response Team of Ukraine (CERT-UA), as reported by the State Special Communications Service. CERT-UA experts note that these letters are part of a Russian hacker attack on the mobile operator Kyivstar.
Photographer and co-host of the Ukrinform program, Vlada Liberova, was injured in Donetsk Region. She and her husband came under Russian shelling while traveling by car towards Avdiivka.
As previously reported, within a year and five months since the start of the full-scale Russian invasion, Russia committed 524 crimes against journalists and media in Ukraine. In the last year and three months since the beginning of the full-scale invasion, Russia has committed 514 crimes against journalists and media in Ukraine.
