Kyiv Independent editor: ‘Our readers want Russia to suffer but we can’t be propagandists’

Readers of Ukraine’s leading English news site “really want Russia to suffer” but that should not lead the title to downplay the military and political problems facing Kyiv, its editor has said.Speaking to the Guardian before an event to London, Olga Rudenko said many of the Kyiv Independent’s most-read stories described Ukrainian deep strike attacks into Russia, potentially distorting its coverage.The Kyiv Independent, however, cannot afford to become propagandistic, she argued, and marginalise Russian military successes or reduce reporting on Ukrainian corruption because the subjects are not so well read.“We had a conversation in the newsroom when somebody raised that our website, in the mornings, is all about Ukrainian attacks on Russian Wildberries warehouses and so on,” Rudenko said.“But it’s misrepresenting the full picture when you don’t balance it out with enough stories about attacks on Ukraine, which are, by the way, far less popular with our readers.”The challenge is that “people really want Russia to suffer”, and read about “something going boom” but it was the Kyiv Independent’s duty to “not just to feed them more of what they like”.Olga Rudenko: ‘It’s misrepresenting the full picture when you don’t balance it out with enough stories about attacks on Ukraine.’ Photograph: Julia Kochetova/The GuardianThe “core idea of the Kyiv Independent is that we’re not Ukrainian propaganda, we’re not affiliated with the government, we’re not doing we’re not Ukraine’s PR service,” the editor said.Rudenko said she had “no expectation” that the war would end any time soon, with Russia stepping up its bombing of Kyiv before winter and Ukrainian strikes denting its neighbour’s economy while diplomacy is stalled.It is a feeling that has hung over journalists at the site for some time. This year employees did not bother planning for a peacetime scenario in their annual strategy session. “It was the first time when this question wasn’t really arising,” Rudenko said.On Friday, Rudenko will host a “live story-telling event” in London where reporters, including the frontline correspondent Francis Farrell, will give their personal experience of Ukraine in the midst of the biggest war in Europe since 1945.The title relies on readers to make monthly contributions for its revenue, an idea also used by the Guardian, and London was chosen as a venue because it “is probably the biggest city in terms of membership”, the editor said.Media freedom in Ukraine has not worsened under Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Rudenko said, but added: “I would struggle to say it has gotten better.” Reporters can write freely without “fearing some immediate consequences” but the editor said that a concentration of power around the president remains.Zelenskyy has not held a press conference for independent Ukrainian media since February 2025, and there is still a bitter legacy from the president’s attempt a few months later to neutralise Ukraine’s two anti-corruption agencies, which had to be reversed in the light of public protests.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“We’ve been casting a critical look at Zelenskyy and his government for a while now, she said, highlighting an editorial written last July at the height of crisis, headlined “Zelenskyy just betrayed Ukraine’s democracy”.The president and his allies, Rudenko said, had “brazenly and stupidly” sought to take away a central achievement of the Ukrainian revolution of 2014, after which the independence of Ukraine’s anti-corruption bodies was introduced.Despite this, she said, “a critical mass of Ukrainians” do not think it is time to hold a presidential election, as called for by the former defence minister Mykhalio Fedorov in August. Elections have been suspended under martial law, though Zelenskyy’s term expired more than two years ago.The Kyiv Independent has not come out in support of elections, Rudenko said, partly because support for holding them is running at about 15%. Protests this summer against Fedorov’s firing by Zelenskyy were “of the size that the president can still afford to ignore”, she added.The Kyiv Independent was founded three months before the full-scale Russian invasion by journalists who had lost their jobs when the rival Kyiv Post was temporarily closed by its owner.Launched with a $100,000 grant, it rapidly became an essential English language news sources for Ukraine as the country was attacked and the war with Russia became global news.The number of contributing readers, or members, most of whom pay $5 a month, has risen from 14,000 at the beginning of 2025 to 25,500 a year later and to 36,000 now, allowing staff numbers to grow to 99 and the title to move to bigger offices.