Inside A Scrappy Ukrainian News Startup

The small parcel from Ukraine showed up on my doorstep after months of wartime delay, wrapped in brown paper and sealed with a three-word label: “The Kyiv Independent.”

Inside was maybe the last thing you’d expect to hold in your hands courtesy of a digital newsroom: A thick, 175-page print magazine that collects three years of reporting and photography from journalists who not only cover Russia’s full-scale invasion but also live among its devastation. Titled “The Power Within,” this anthology marks the first experiment in print from a news startup that launched four years ago this month, shortly before the outbreak of the largest armed conflict in Europe since World War II.

On the magazine’s cover, a drone operator prepares a heavy bomber drone near Bakhmut, while a small caption declares at the bottom that this magazine was “Created in a free Ukraine.” Open the cover flap, and suddenly you’re at a rave in Kharkiv — the contrasting images making an obvious statement about resilience before you’ve even read a word of the journalism inside.

Included with the magazine, there’s also a small page of Ukraine-themed stickers, perfect for items like phones and laptops, as well as a notecard with a thank-you message signed by Elsa Court, The Kyiv Independent’s audience development manager.

“It so happened that we founded The Kyiv Independent shortly before Russia invaded Ukraine,” editor-in-chief Olga Rudenko writes on one of the first pages. “Now we are taking it to print, seeking to create something tangible and permanent. In a way, it’s our stubborn answer to the uncertainty and fragility of today.”

Deputy chief editor Toma Istomina has described the magazine resulting from the site challenging itself “to craft something permanent at a time when nothing is.”

The Kyiv Independent: Telling the world the story of Ukraine

The magazine I’m holding is just one example among many of how far The Kyiv Independent has come in four years. Among the highlights: It’s grown from 18 to more than 80 people, including reporters, videographers, and more. It’s released 10 documentaries probing Russian war crimes and published more than 30,000 stories — in addition to winning more than 20 international journalism awards.

Because the site is paywall-free, it’s also on a mission at the moment to boost its community from more than 23,000 paying members as of this writing to 25,000 by the end of this year.

“A newspaper’s independence is fragile if all or a large chunk of its funding depends on a single source — like a ‘benevolent’ owner or large advertisers,” Rudenko explained, in a letter emailed to subscribers in recent days that looks back on the last four years. “So we bet on our readers. If we can get enough readers to back us, we can do it, we thought.”

In addition to paid memberships, the site also brings in revenue from sources that include donations as well as an online store that offers the print magazine plus merch like hats, totes, and T-shirts.

The Kyiv Independent launched in November 2021 as an outgrowth of a separate paper based in the city. A group of those journalists, frustrated by editorial interference from their paper’s owner, decided to set up an all-new newsroom that would become their current home.

Three months later, Vladimir Putin made that announcement about a “special military operation.” During the first week of the Russian invasion, The Kyiv Independent’s Twitter following exploded from 20,000 to more than a million.

In addition to content that’s available via the main site, subscribers can also sign up for any of several email newsletters, like the five-day-a-week “One story from Ukraine” and the weekly “War Notes.” In an edition of the latter from earlier this year, reporter Asami Terajima described meeting a 23-year-old soldier at a coffee shop in Izium who was spending his birthday alone, grateful to be away from the front “for the first time since the start of the full-scale war.”

What kept him fighting, he said, was “the young generation,” including his little brother — even though, as Terajima noted, in most places he’d still be considered a young man himself.

Meanwhile, the wider war keeps delivering fresh blows. Russia unleashed a major attack against Kyiv early Friday morning involving missiles as well as hundreds of drones. The attack, which left several dead in the city, was described by President Volodymyr Zelensky as among the most severe attacks on the capital to date.

“The Power Within” magazine is The Kyiv Independent’s attempt to capture what it’s like to live, work, and carry on inside a nation facing such attacks. There are stories about new bookstores opening as Ukrainians look to art for comfort, the symbolic presence of McDonald’s (the country’s largest restaurant taxpayer, with hundreds of employees who’ve joined the military), profiles of female partisans, dispatches about Ukraine’s faith community, and personal commentaries from Kyiv Independent staff.

“I can’t express enough how much I’m looking forward to no longer being a war journalist,” reads one of those commentaries, from reporter Francis Farrell. “But in my travels, from trenches half a minute’s walk from Russian soldiers to conversations with Baltic foreign ministers telling me about the year 1938, I try to remind myself of the price of indifference and hopelessness.

“That price is paid in kilometers on the map, in the movement of the red stain, and in all the Ukrainian lives that could still be lost or destroyed on the way. There is no choice but to keep going.”