Bogdan Lygvynenko

Early in the morning of February 24, Bogdan woke up to meet the first dawn on his first- ever all-inclusive vacation. The night before, he came to Egypt to get some rest and finish his thesis. The Ukraїner team had been preparing for Russia’s possible invasion since December, yet Bogdan was hoping that he still had time. That morning, he was proved wrong.

However, he wasn’t surprised at all. When the Revolution of Dignity began in 2013, Bogdan was stuck in Indonesia without a passport. When the covid pandemic broke out, he was also outside Ukraine.

“So, I joined the work remotely,” Bogdan recalls. “On day one, I coordinated the evacuation of about 200 people. Within the whole week, I didn’t go to the beach even once. I did whatever possible to be helpful from abroad, but I felt guilty for being so far from Kyiv where the rest of my team had stayed.”

In a week, Bogdan left Egypt for Berlin, and then went to Poznan where he had previously lived for two years. After waiting until a car for the Ukrainian army had been fully prepared for frontline conditions, he drove back to Kyiv at the end of March.

Bogdan decided to reformat Ukraїner. Before the invasion, his team had planned to release forty more video stories, but it seemed pointless now. So, they focused on short texts offering guidance about what to do in the new circumstances, and began to cooperate with pop stars who had many contacts in Russia to counteract Russian propaganda. Initially, Ukraїner even published content in Russian with the view of inciting Russian society to resist Putin’s regime.

As of then, Bogdan considered it possible, though he had lived a month in Chelyabinsk, travelled across Russia, interviewed Alla Pugacheva and Tina Kandelaki, and even had business contacts there before 2014 – in other words, he knew quite well what Russians were like.

“None of my contacts in Russia ended in friendship, at least on social media,” says Bogdan. “I had many acquaintances among Russian managers and journalists, but no one has written a word to me since 2014. There was just one lady who sent a message, saying that she supported me and was sorry she could not speak Ukrainian, after our forces blew up the Crimean bridge. I didn’t respond at all, just made a screenshot and posted it on Facebook for fun. It was pathetic and miserable. It took a month in Chelyabinsk for me to understand that since the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries Russians have never been a nation, but just a horde of mental slaves. As recently as 2009 they were buying portraits of Putin and Stalin in bookstores. I’m strongly convinced that Russia must be split up. We are witnessing its final agony.”

Soon the journalists of Ukraїner gave up their attempts to reach out to Russians. Instead, they decided to focus on two main activities: producing morale-boosting content such as memes for Ukrainians, and countering Russian disinformation abroad. The latter, Bogdan says, was really successful. Unsurprisingly Russia had prepared tons of fakes in advance – like, for example, a story that about foreign students had been beaten up at the border when trying to leave Ukraine.

Documenting stories from the liberated areas became one of the top priorities for Bogdan and his team. Together with the Ukraїner producer, they decided to make a series of video stories and call it ‘De-occupation’: it was meant to spread the word from those people who had survived the occupation, to support them, and give others an example of resistance. The week after Bogdan returned to Ukraine, they went on a ten-day expedition to Trostianets, Sumy, Chernihiv and villages around Siveria, Bucha, Hostomel, Irpin and Chornobyl. Later they also visited localities in the Kharkiv region.

"Perhaps before the journey to Izium I thought I was ready for anything,” says Bogdan. “But there we heard the story of a policeman who had survived torture by the Russians, and I still haven’t gotten over it. Of course, journalists must be pretty cool-headed to keep up the hardest conversations, and I thought I was one of that kind – but nobody is immune from a very personal triggering that may show up in any story.”

Bogdan is convinced that a cool head must not exclude empathy. Once, while covering the exhumation of the locals who’d been slaughtered by the Russians in Izium, he had witnessed the work of some Western colleagues. The latter asked the mother of a man who was missing, and probably murdered, to tell them about her son, which she did while holding back tears, when the cameraman interrupted her suddenly to rearrange his camera, and then demanded that the woman repeat everything from the very beginning. Bogdan felt an urge to punch him.

Sometimes the Ukraїner team reduces the distance between themselves and protagonists by trying to help the latter. Yet their last attempt to be useful became a great failure. It happened in the Kharkiv region. In August, while shooting in the village of Mala Rohan, the journalists were advised by both locals and the military to do a feature on a lady called Liubov whose farm was destroyed by the Russians for her strong pro-Ukrainian stance and support of the Ukrainian army. They decided to raise US$55,000 to restore Liubov’s homestead. As soon as this was done, Bogdan and his colleagues involved managing partners from the Building Ukraine

Together NGO, and began searching for contractors to work on the project. At the beginning of October, though, Liubov called them to demand that the money be transferred directly to her. She even said that she had filed a complaint to the cyber police holding the journalists responsible for criminal liability and fraud. The team made every effort to regain her trust: they had even seemingly managed to get along, but later it became known that it was Liubov’s friend who persuaded her to dig in her heels and put in the application to the regional prosecutor’s office.

Thereafter, the team decided to pass the money to the Come Back Alive charity fund, retaining the option to return the costs to all who wished. Of the 3000 contributors, only three wanted to get their donations back.

“We realized that no one was going to restore a farm in these times, or wanted to support a local business in a war-affected region,” explains Bogdan. “We thought it was a humane and rational solution. I don’t think we’ll stop helping others at all, but we’ll be more cautious in future. We should take a lesson from this case: like, develop our support policies and prepare templates for agreements.”

Not a single member of the Ukraїner team has talked to Liubov since that unpleasant incident, though they keep in touch with almost a thousand of their stories’ protagonists. Some of them have died in the war; one went missing in Kherson; those who ended up under occupation finally managed to get out, as did the project volunteers too. But it was the death of Viacheslav Zaitsev, a historian from Zaporizhzhia, that hurt Bogdan the most. An hour after Viacheslav’s last post on Facebook it became known that he had been killed at the front.

Some ‘peaceful’ stories from the ‘De-occupation’ series have been followed up, for instance, in Trostianets, Sumy and the Chernihiv region. The head of the community of Derhachi in the Kharkiv region even sent Bohdan videos of the local partisan unit of nine people: those people got behind the Russian lines, hijacked their ammunition and armored vehicles, and once even managed to eliminate the crew of a Russian checkpoint in full force. Their story was fully documented after the final liberation of the region. After June, the partisans officially joined the border detachment.

But it was the story of a football fan who happened to be in Balakliya right before its occupation that impressed Bogdan the most. He could not leave the town because he had a lot of patriotic tattoos. So he had been hiding from the Russians for seven months. His leg had been fractured in a recent traffic accident, so he moved around by bicycle in order to not draw attention to his lameness. He also regularly moved between several houses and apartments, and fed a chicken named Putin in a bathroom. The man ate it when the time came, and told his friends that the war was undoubtedly going to end soon because he had killed Putin. He’d lost 30 kg in seven months, but had not crossed paths with the occupiers even once.

Bogdan is quite aware that Ukraїner mostly highlights positive stories avoiding the pessimistic ‘all is lost’ narrative which the traditional media are usually full of. That’s why he is not willing to generalize the view his team portrays of the Ukrainian people.

“I really appreciate our bravery, but it wouldn’t be true to state that all Ukrainians are like this,” he explains. “Collaborators are still among us, after all. Though the brave leaders give us inspiration and faith in victory. It’s easy to generalize the Russians – they are capable of anything. Ukrainians are more complicated. We are not tolerant to the enemy but ready to accept each other’s differences. We can be united or divided, we argue a lot, and we are fond of freedom and democracy. But I like spreading this myth of Ukrainians as the bravest nation across the globe.”

On top of that, Bogdan and his colleagues consider more practical things to promote abroad, thereby maintaining interest in Ukraine. It would be useful to involve international assistance, he says. For instance, they are currently working on a book about Ukrainian wines, hoping that this will help to put foreigners in touch with Ukrainian vintners and their products. They are also thinking over another book on Ukrainian agriculture, pondering the concept of urban gardening, and weighing the possibilities of cultural support.

Bogdan believes that every country will tell their own story of this war, so it’s of crucial importance to make a precise timeline of current events. This is an invisible duty that his team is also carrying out.

“We’ve decided to gradually return to producing peaceful content,” he says. “We’ve been thoroughly prepared for the war, and now it’s time to prepare for what it will leave behind – and, of course, for victory.”