REPORTING ON WAR: THE KYIV INDEPENDENT.

• Position: Lili Bivings

The Kyiv Independent is the leading English-language newspaper in Ukraine. The Journal spoke with Lili Bivings, a 2023 graduate of Columbia SIPA and a contributing editor with the Kyiv Independent who has been with the publication since its founding in 2021. This conversation covers the newspaper's founding and early days, its growth and development through the first year of the war, and the challenges of reporting on the war effort both as a new institution and as a distinctily Ukrainian outlet.

Journal of International Affairs (JIA): The Kyiv Independent is a relatively new outlet. Provide us a brief overview of its founding, as well as your involvement with the publication.

Lili Bivings (LB): For about 20 years, there was an English-language newspaper in Ukraine out of Kyiv called the Kyiv Post, which was very well known within Ukraine. It had a print version that came out every week that people liked to be seen with and get photographed with. It was cool. It was also a very traditional kind of newspaper.

I worked there for about eight months in 2021 before starting my masters at Columbia. Essentially, I didn't know where I was getting into graduate schools yet, and I didn't know what my plan was. I got a job there as a business reporter, and then I became business editor. I became very close with the staff, because as an editor, you're working crazy hours. I later came to New York for school.

In November 2021, the oligarch owner of the Kyiv Post, who had purchased the newspaper three years before, decided to fire the entire staff over the fact that the editorial team was defending its independence. He was trying to put in his PR manager as an editor, and they absolutely refused. It was not going to happen. There was a huge dispute, and his solution was to fire everybody. Of course, he thought that he'll just get rid of all these annoying journalists and replace them with a bunch of hacks, and then it'll all be fine. He had no idea how the business works and that everybody that was working at the Kyiv Post had been working there forever. You couldn't just replace them, because they were Ukrainians who spoke fluent English and could write at that level--that's not easy to find, so while the Kyiv Post still exists, it's now a shell of its former self. Also, it is completely financed by this oligarch.

Within a week of being fired, the old staff of the Kyiv Post decided to create the Kyiv Independent. Initially, everybody had thought that they would go their own way, find jobs with other outlets. But this was just too heinous and outrageous to ignore. They had to respond in some way, and their response was to create their own outlet. Within a week, they had a newsletter that was coming out, which I was helping with. I was here in New York doing my masters and helping out as I could. I wasn't a full employee, just a part of the team, doing things that they need help with. Then, within three months, Russia invaded.

Russia launches its full-scale invasion and the newspaper all of a sudden becomes one of the most read English-language sources on what's happening in Ukraine. On social media, we went from 30,000 followers on Twitter to nearly 2.1 million seemingly overnight. The night it began, I was very sick with COVID-19, and I remember it as a fever dream: I didn't even know what was happening. I woke up the next day feeling slightly better, and I have not stopped working every single day since then, sometimes remotely and then last summer in Kyiv. What this has looked like was me picking up the news shift, along with a few other people that are in North America, to ensure that we maintain 24/7 coverage while the Kyiv team was asleep between midnight and 9 am Kyiv time. We still maintain this schedule, with a team over here that starts our shift at 5 pm and ends at 2 am on the East Coast. Initially, it was every single day, which is brutal while also trying to be a student at the same time. At that point, I think we were running on a lot of adrenaline, because I don't actually remember being exhausted. I remember struggling to finish tasks, but I was managing all of it somehow. We have a larger team now, and we're able to better manage those hours.

Currently, I am working remotely as an editor. I do both as well, the news shifts in the evenings but also stories and other projects. At the end of the day, we're a startup. A lot of people wear a lot of different hats, and I help as I can.

JIA: Among the staff members who had been summarily fired from the Kyiv Post, was the idea to recreate the Post in another publication, or were there other founding principles that informed what the new publication was going to be? In other words, was it a refounding of the old or a genuine founding of the new?

LB: It was a founding, because the first thing was that the Kyiv Independent will never have an owner. It will always be owned by its employees and will be funded by memberships, donors, grants. The money will never come from just a single owner. That was very important for us. It was clearly a bad model for a paper of this size. It's different from other models, but for a newspaper made up of people that are trying to pursue independent journalism, it doesn't make sense to have an owner--especially not one who's an oligarch. It's not viable. It's unsustainable. It doesn't align with our values as independent journalists. The main thing was that this paper would be owned by its journalists.

But also, I think the idea was that it would be something much more democratic than the old school model, where there is a hierarchical structure of decision-making. The Kyiv Independent is structured in such a way where many people have the power to make decisions, to field suggestions, and to contribute in their own ways. It's different, in this way, from the old Kyiv Post.

The final part was that the paper would always be Ukrainian-run. Before, the oligarch owner was not Ukrainian (he was not Russian, either, thankfully) but he was from Syria, having moved to the Soviet Union a verv long time ago. Also, Brian Bonner, who was the chief editor of the Kyiv Post, was an American. This isn't a direct criticism of those people. Rather, the idea was that the paper this time was going to be run entirely by Ukrainians, including the editors and the CEO. We have people on staff from all over the world: I work at the paper, along with many others, but I think the focus really was to have it be a Ukrainian paper as much as possible.

JIA: In the days of the Post, and then in those first couple of months at the Independent before the war, who was the audience? What was the readership?

LB: The audience for English-language coverage from Ukraine came from three main areas. First, there were people who work in governments. Many embassy people would read the Kyiv Post and then the Kyiv Independent because it is easily-accessible English language coverage about Ukraine, which is important as many embassy employees don't speak Ukrainian, even the ones who work there. Second, international experts: people who work at think tanks or academics who are following what's happening in Ukraine. These are people who focus their work or their studies on the region. Third, there is the business community: people who are looking to invest or do business in Ukraine who are going to want to follow what's happening. It was a big audience, though it was also relatively niche. All of these are very specific groups.

When the Kyiv Post was closed down, a lot of embassies in Ukraine published tweets and wrote that it was tragic. This was one of our main sources of information in Ukraine: those embassies follow us on Twitter, for example. They have now told us that the Kyiv Independent is something they're actually reading as well. Sometimes we interview people from embassies, or we have contacts with them for whatever reason, and they will tell us that they read us. It's the same thing with the business community. We have those relationships for business reporting. We would contact them for interviews and the like, so we knew that the Kyiv Post and later the Kyiv Independent was something that they were reading. Certainly, the people doing research and experts were in contact. Before I moved to the Kyiv Post, I worked at the Atlantic Council, the think tank in Washington, D.C. The Kyiv Post was an important source of their information, and since I still have contacts there, I know the Kyiv Independent is as well. This is all anecdotal, but it's still real. We of course have data on our readership, tended to by the business development team. When we have strategy meetings, they provide all the statistics.

JIA: On a more basic level, what is the status of the English language in Ukraine? In this day and age, every country has some...