THE NATIONAL UNION OF
JOURNALISTS OF UKRAINE
When creating a tribunal that should consider the crimes of the Putin regime, a separate section should also be provided for Russian propagandists, who prepared the Russian people to support and approve a large-scale war against Ukraine.
This was emphasized in the speech by special guests, President of the National Union of Journalists of Ukraine (NUJU), Sergiy Tomilenko, and NUJU First Secretary, Lina Kushch, at the national congress of the Norwegian Union of Journalists.
“If the second stage of the war was all about tanks, bombs, and missiles, the first was Russian propaganda,” Sergiy Tomilenko stressed.
The meeting with the leaders of the NUJU took place in the format of a live interview conducted by the famous Norwegian journalist Morten Jentoft.
When asked about the attitude towards those Russian journalists who “had to go abroad because they oppose the war,” the NUJU leaders answered that the real victims of the war are not the Russian oppositionists but the Ukrainian people.
“In the first days after the beginning of massive Russian aggression, we were shocked and thought that all journalists in the world, including in Russia, witnesses of clear injustice, would speak out against the war because war is not normal,” Sergiy Tomilenko recalls. “Ukrainian journalists appealed to their Russian colleagues to demand an end to the war. We wrote to thousands of addresses in Moscow, other Russian cities, and the mass media of Russia. Journalists from different regions of Ukraine, including me, asked Russian journalists to stop propaganda in newspapers, on the radio, television to support the demand for an end to the war. But we did not receive any support from Russia. Perhaps Russian opposition journalists are fighting for democracy, fearing for their future. But we do not see them near us.
As Lina Kushch noted, it would be strange to expect sympathy from the victim state’s representatives towards the aggressor state’s representatives.
“Help us, Ukrainians, to win, and after the victory, maybe we will try to understand emigrant journalists from Russia. But not now. As Sergiy said, we did not receive any help from Russian journalists to stop the propaganda, as well as helping those Ukrainian colleagues who were expelled from their homes and had to flee through the territory of Russia and European countries, those colleagues who were arrested and taken to Russia. We did not receive any help from our Russian colleagues. Unfortunately…,” said Lina Kushch. “If Ukrainians, particularly Ukrainian journalists, want the victory of Ukraine, then Russian journalists, even opposition ones, sympathize with Russian soldiers who were poorly equipped for the front and did not create more convenient conditions for killing Ukrainians. So, today, we cannot sympathize with Russian journalists….”
The Norwegian Union of Journalists is in constant dialogue with the journalist unions of other Scandinavian countries. It harshly condemns the Union of Journalists of Russia for opening its branches in the occupied regions of Ukraine and Russian propagandists for inciting hatred towards the Ukrainian people and the Ukrainian state. The Norwegians have been reliable associates and helpers of the NUJU in the struggle to stop the membership of the Union of Journalists of Russia in the International Federation of Journalists, which the NUJU had called for since February 2022 and which became a reality on February 22, 2023.
NUJU Information Service
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