Ukraine

New York, December 27, 2013--The Ukrainian government must ensure that a thorough, independent, and transparent investigation is conducted in the brutal attack early Wednesday on prominent journalist Tetyana Chornovol, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today. Chornovol remains hospitalized in the capital, Kiev, with a concussion and multiple head injuries.

A video report by a Euronews cameraman shows him being attacked by police during clashes in Kiev. (YouTube/Euronews)

New York, December 2, 2013--At least 51 journalists were attacked while covering protests in the Ukrainian capital of Kiev and other cities over the weekend, according to news reports and local journalists. The Committee to Protect Journalists condemns the attacks and calls on Ukrainian authorities to ensure that journalists are free to cover political developments.

New York, July 29, 2013--Federal authorities in Ukraine should take over the investigation into today's brutal attack on a TV journalist who had regularly reported on allegations of corruption in the regional police force, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today. Sergei Ostapenko, a reporter for Irta, suffered a broken jaw and other injuries in the attack outside his apartment building in Lugansk, eastern Ukraine, according to news reports.

New York, July 22, 2013--Two assailants on Sunday severely beat Oleg Bogdanov, a Ukrainian journalist who has been subjected to an escalating series of attacks in recent months that have included threats and an arson attack on his car, according to news reports.

New York, May 20, 2013--Several assailants beat two reporters covering an opposition protest outside Ukrainian Interior Ministry headquarters in Kiev on Saturday in view of police officers who failed to intervene, according to local and international press reports. The Committee to Protect Journalists condemns the beating and the inaction of police, and it calls on authorities to hold both assailants and officers fully accountable under the law.

We received an unusual email last week. Michaella Ortega wrote to tell us that Marlon Recamata, who confessed to shooting her father, Philippine journalist Gerardo Ortega, in 2011, had been convicted and sentenced to life for the crime.

Ukrainian nationalist activists disrupted a book presentation in Kiev on March 14, 2013, and attacked journalists and other individuals present, according to news reports.

New York, March 6, 2013--Ukrainian authorities must apprehend the assailants who brutally attacked an independent editor on Tuesday, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today.

More than 12 years after several police officers strangled and beheaded muckraking online reporter Georgy Gongadze in a forest outside Kiev, justice in the case is still evasive and riddled with, well, riddles.

As Ukraine prepared to assume the 2013 chairmanship of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, the nation’s leaders undermined one of the organization’s core values: freedom of the press. Censorship, denial of public information, physical attacks against reporters, and politicized lawsuits against news outlets marred the nation’s press freedom climate, the Kiev-based Institute for Mass Information, or IMI, reported. The boldest attack against the free press was parliament’s vote to criminalize defamation. Legislators were forced to withdraw the bill within weeks in the face of nationwide protests and international outcry. Protests also greeted a government tax investigation into the opposition broadcaster TVi. Starting in July, tax police and prosecutors raided the station’s newsroom and froze its bank accounts. Prosecutors eventually dropped their case against TVi owner Nikolai Knyazhitskiy but imposed a fine against the station. Impunity prevailed in ongoing assaults against reporters, as it did in the 2000 murder of Georgy Gongadze, the first online reporter in the world to be killed for his work. Although the trial of a former Interior Ministry general on charges of carrying out Gongadze’s brutal slaying began in July 2011, the proceedings ground away without resolution in late 2012. The prosecution has been pockmarked by the government’s procedural missteps. In June, an appellate court said prosecutors could not pursue a case against former president Leonid Kuchma, who has long been accused of ordering the murder.