THE NATIONAL UNION OF
JOURNALISTS OF UKRAINE
Despite the destruction of the editorial office and a long break in the newspaper’s publication, Visti Barvinkivshchyny, which is 92 years old this year, resumed publication thanks to the NUJU. “We have something to say to our readers!” said Iryna Stolbova, editor-in-chief of the newspaper, in a comment to the NUJU.
“We started the year 2022, as always, with optimism,” says Iryna Mykolayivna. “We completed a very successful subscription campaign, receiving 2022 copies of the newspaper. According to the tradition developed over the years, we used subscribers’ money to buy paper for printing the newspaper, which was stored in Balakliya at the Baldruk publishing house with which we have been cooperating for more than 20 years. We signed a contract with the town council to cover its activities. The money from subscriptions was kept on an account at Megabank under acceptable conditions. And suddenly… War, force majeure, circumstances beyond our control.”
Barvinkove came under ruscist shelling almost from the first days of the war, at first in March and then it happened almost every day. The newspaper was suspended. The editorial staff switched to working in a Facebook group. Every day they posted summaries: what services were working, opening hours of pharmacies, banks, gas stations, shops. The community head addresses there were relevant, brief, official…
On March 30, the head of the community went on the air to announce the evacuation. The town is empting. Journalists provide schedules of evacuation trains and buses…
“We, three editorial staff members, were also evacuated,” recalls Iryna Stolbova. “We took our office equipment with us. The archive of the editorial office, which is almost 80 binders of the newspaper, is confusing! For 91 years of the publication’s history! We had an idea to give all these huge thick stacks of our publication to the local library. Then we decided to move them to the deputy editor’s house.”
In early April, the administrative building, where the editorial office rents two offices, was damaged in a bombing. The doors were blown out by the blast wave. The windows survived because the advice to leave the vents open for ventilation worked. The windows in the neighboring offices were blown out completely. The building has not been restored yet: there is no electricity or heating. They only managed to replace the windows and install new doors…
A few days later, an air raid took place on the building of the central library, where they intended to transfer the newspaper’s archive. The building burned to the ground…
From April to October, the Barvinkove community was subjected to daily shelling, and the villages of Kurulka, Hrushuvakha, Velyka Komyshuvakha, Pashkove, and Nova Dmytrivka were severely damaged.
Pharmacies, Nova Poshta, Ukrposhta, and banks were closed. There was no bus or railroad service, no gas supply, and in many settlements, no electricity.
“We restored the Barvinkove-info website and ran a Facebook group,” says Iryna Mykolayivna. “We wrote about the most relevant issues as community activities, volunteer work, stories of fellow countrymen and about fellow defenders. My colleagues from the newspaper Nove Zhyttia in the urban-type settlement of Blyzniuky, where I evacuated, gave me an impetus to my work. They helped, supported, and did not allow me to give up. I wrote several articles for Nove Zhyttia.
The situation with Megabank was another blow to the activities of the Visti Barvinkivshchyny team. Just before the Journalist’s Day, on June 3, this banking institution was withdrawn from the market. Its liquidation was announced, and the publication’s account was blocked.
“We were left without money. Without salaries. We had no hope of resuming the newspaper,” says Iryna Stolbova, “and this opportunity really came after the de-occupation of Izium and Balakliya. We are grateful to the National Union of Journalists of Ukraine and its Japanese partners for the funds allocated and for the fact that our newspaper has started publishing again. We publish exclusively author’s materials. We write about the defenders who are holding the line, about villages, about people… We released the first postwar issue in early November 2022. Ukrposhta delivered 2,000 copies to subscribers, and another thousand were distributed among community residents by volunteers with the assistance of local authorities.”
Later, the Academy of Ukrainian Press helped Visti Barvinkivshchyny with equipment: now the newsroom has a laptop that allows it to work regardless of power outages and a smartphone. Iryna Stolbova says that the editorial office is very grateful to the patrons for updating and modernizing the material base of the editorial office. “Thanks to the AUP, Visti Barvinkivshchyny received stable funding. Now the newspaper is able not only to pay for printing and delivery, but also to pay salaries to its employees. For 7 months, we have gotten used to such a luxury as a salary,” says Iryna Stolbova.
“The subscription for 2023 was very small – many people who evacuated have not yet returned to the community,” says the editor. “Unfortunately, the town is plagued by lack of money, unemployment, and many houses have been destroyed by Russian shelling.”
Currently, the editorial office, fulfilling its obligations to readers, is delivering fresh issues to subscribers of both 2023 and the previous year, 2022, who were unable to receive their newspapers on time due to the war and the forced downtime of the editorial office. The newspaper’s website is also up and running, thanks to the Ternopil Press Club. Moreover, our Kharkiv colleagues provided a monetary reward for materials about deserted villages.
The newspaper has been, is and will be a chronicle of the area, a mouthpiece for important events. We have something to say to our readers. We have facts to make public to testify to russia’s war crimes on the territory of the community and the incredible patriotism of our fellow countrymen,” says the editor. We believe in the future of the newspaper. The newspaper that survived the Second World War and will overcome the challenges of this Russian-Ukrainian war.
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This story about the media was created by the NUJU in the frame of the project «Improving Ukrainian Media Resilience in Ukraine», financed by Swiss Solidarity and implemented with the support of the Swiss non-profit organization Fondation Hirondelle and the Institute for Regional Media and Information (IRMI, Ukraine). Fondation Hirondelle and IRMI implement a project of institutional support for Ukrainian media editorial offices in the east, north and south of our country, with an emphasis on the local press. They also launched a 10-month support program for 18 media.
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