Sevgil Musaieva is the editor-in-chief of Ukrainska Pravda. She speaks here about how the war has influenced the work of the media, about experiencing her own personal tragedy, and her belief in the return of Crimea.
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First days of the war - thoughts, experiences, actions
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For Sevgil Musaieva, the 24th of February began some time earlier. For several weeks before, she had been monitoring the news attentively and talking to senior officials, so her anxiety had already been growing. She was trying to keep her balance and prepare for the war. Her team had partly relocated to the Western regions of Ukraine to establish an additional office in case connection in Kyiv was cut off, so that the audience would have not been left without the news.
Along with that, the paper had only just moved to its new office in Kyiv on the 20th of February. The space was decorated with the works of Ukrainian artists. A lot of unexpected things were found in the old office during the move – such as, for example, the backgammon board which Georgiy Gongadze used to play on. Sevgil put the boardgame on her table, together with a flowerpot and her half-finished cup of coffee. A long time afterwards, she found the dried-up drink and the withered flower.
Sevgil was still working at 11 pm on the 23rd of February. She was editing an interview with defense minister Oleksii Reznikov and discussing the headline with her colleague. His suggestion was as follows: “There will be no Shakespearean questions like ‘to shoot or not to shoot?’.”
“We had the interview mocked up by about midnight,” Sevgil recalls. “It was published under the headline ‘Kyiv is the second Jerusalem: bombing it is unbelievable’. Still, the unbelievable happened the very next morning at 5:30 am when the first explosions sounded in the Ukrainian capital.”
That night, Sevgil had fallen asleep about 1 am after having talked to her foreign colleagues – and cried in anticipation of what was going to happen. Since 2014, she has been accustomed to waking up three times a night. So at 4:20 am she saw a message from another journalist, Mykhailo Tkach, who had texted her that the businessmen who had been present at the Presidential Office had left Ukraine. Sevgil went to the kitchen to drink some water. On her way back to sleep, she saw numerous notifications from the news channels about Putin’s appeal to the Russian people. The phone slipped out of her hands.
While listening to the appeal, she texted the newsfeed editor to prepare a workpiece for a news item about the beginning of Putin’s invasion. The headline was in red capitals. It was 4:57 am.
People were writing comments on her post about where they had heard explosions, and in the meantime, at the NSDC of Ukraine, an emergency meeting was convened. The Ukrainska Pravda team was doing their work in new circumstances: calling officials, launching the English version of their website, writing an editorial entitled ‘I am Ukrainian’, and so on. Colleagues from abroad were asking Sevgil questions about what was going on and pleading with her to leave Kyiv because the Russians would undoubtedly execute her. She was, however, making scrambled eggs for breakfast and working, all while still in her pajamas.
The first air-raid alert in Kyiv rang out at 7:04 am. That unusual sound was baffling. Nevertheless, the journalists at Ukrainska Pravda received a lot of blame for aggravating the situation because people did not want to believe that the war had really started.
“After that, I got a call from the Presidential Office”, Sevgil goes on. “They said that they needed some help. The other journalists had already been there, too; everybody was very stressed. After two hours of waiting, they just told us that it was dangerous in Kyiv and we were asked to evacuate.”
Still, Sevgil didn’t yet have any intention of leaving the city. While her boyfriend, the political scientist Mykola Davydiuk, was speaking live on Radio NV, she got a call from a diplomat who insisted on evacuating her within 48 hours. He said that ‘dormant’ `sabotage groups which planned to capture journalists and activists were going to be activated. Sevgil burst into tears.
In the evening, she got one more call. By that time, Sevgil had already moved to another apartment. She did so just to be on the safe side, after having recalled the drone that she had spotted in front of her window a few weeks ago. Several air-raid alerts sounded during the night, and each time Sevgil went down to the basement. Next day, after all, she went to the Carpathians. Some of her fellow journalists stayed in Kyiv to do the required interviews and reports.
“At first, we didn’t have a plan for going abroad,” Sevgil admits, “but after the threat to Enerhodar and the strike on the Kyiv TV tower it was clear that connection malfunctions could not be ruled out. Thus, I suggested that my team move the office outside the country, but everybody refused. In the end, I found some colleagues in Gdansk and told them that I was going to set up an office there too. After that, some of my team joined me.”
But in a week, Sevgil had to return to Lviv because the Russians killed the documentarian Brent Renaud, her classmate from Harvard University and her sister’s partner.
“You know, when somebody passes away, everyone talks about what an outstanding person they were,” Sevgil ponders. “But in Brent’s case, it’s not a rhetorical statement, it’s the pure truth. He was a very exquisite and empathetic man who paid great attention to details.”
At a presentation he gave one evening in Harvard, Brent showed his film about heroin addicts. Renaud himself did not seem to appear onscreen: he had ceded the focus to his protagonists. Sevgil invited her sister to her own presentation evening, where the introverted Brent had talked to the latter for a surprisingly long time. Next day, both confessed to Sevgil that they had enjoyed their meeting a great deal. Their relationship soon flourished. The couple settled in New York.Brent was interested in Ukraine, its culture, history, and especially Crimea. By that time, he had already started working on his film about refugees, and for that reason he had decided to go to Ukraine in case a full-scale offensive was launched. He came to Lviv on March 5.
Sevgil’s boyfriend had agreed to help Brent and his colleague Juan Arredondo with the filming. They had a lot of work in Zhytomyr, Vinnytsia, and Berdychiv. Sevgil and her sister asked them not to go to Kyiv. So they knew nothing about Brent’s last journey.
On March 13, Sevgil went for her first walk outside in more than two weeks. It lasted for only eight minutes because then a video with Juan Arredondo appeared on the press chat of the Presidential Office.
“To my greatest surprise, he was at the Ohmatdyt,” Sevgil recalls. “He said that he was wounded somewhere near Irpin and he wasn’t sure about the fate of his colleague.”
Sevgil’s boyfriend Mykola couldn’t be reached. Brent wasn’t answering either. Sevgil called her sister and told her that Renaud had been wounded. Shortly after the conversation, she saw the next message on the chat: a photo of Brent’s body and his documents. That’s how the family found out about his death.
Sevgil kept searching for her boyfriend. He had not turned up at any hospital. Finally, Mykola answered to her two hours later, after having driven away from the place where the connection had been jammed. It was only then when he learned about their friend’s death. It turned out that Mykola had been waiting for the journalists in front of the bridge. Brent and Juan had promised to come back in ten minutes, but then they met a local volunteer who took them to a district of the town controlled by the Russians. Their car came under fire there. Juan was sitting in the backseat so he had managed to bend down in time, but another bullet went through Brent’s neck and head. He didn’t have a hope of surviving.
Next day, Sevgil came back to Lviv: she was busy delivering Brent’s body. His friends had come to Ukraine too. They were filming the process, so they could finish the film afterwards. Two weeks later, Brent was buried in the US.
“I still seem to be rejecting this news,” Sevgil admits. “Sometimes I break out in a cold sweat when I think, ‘God, Brent is dead! How could this have happened?’. I could never believe that my Harvard classmate would be killed during wartime near Irpin. You never know where the missile will hit or how it will affect your own family. This is the worst thing about war: it never asks you where it will strike.”
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Today, Ukrainska Pravda reaches between three and four million people a day. At the beginning of the full-scale invasion, it was five to six million. The overall number of views during the first 31 days of the war amounted to 1 billion. At the same time, these days saw the most large-scale DDos attacks in the entire history of the media.
During all this time, Ukrainska Pravda’s readers have been contributing to the journalists’ investigations on the Russians’ activities abroad. Thanks to them, it became possible to prepare three articles about Dubai, specifically regarding a villa owned by Ramzan Kadyrov and various oligarchs who live in the UAE under assumed names. Also, Sevgil receives information from those who remain on occupied Ukrainian territory.
Sevgil says that her war-torn country resembles a, beehive because every Ukrainian is now involved in volunteering. She does not speak much about what she has been doing herself apart from her journalism work, but it is her contacts that have been helping to solve a whole array of problems, from getting people out of occupied areas to delivering thousands of tons of humanitarian aid.
Together with humanitarian convoys, Sevgil has visited Borodianka, Trostianets and the rest of the Sumy region.
“I went to Borodianka on the 13th of April,” she says. “It’s the hardest thing I have ever had to witness. The local people told me about how they had lived there for generations, but then their houses crumbled before their eyes, burying their families underneath. The sight of those apartment blocks from the central streets of the town will remain with me forever. They looked like living beings with their innards cut out. They looked as if they had been slaughtered in this war, too.”
It's also the stench of the Russians’ ‘headquarters’ that will forever remain with Sevgil. That location served them as a water closet, a field hospital, and a place to booze at the same time. It’s the stench of the occupiers. Sevgil will always remember their invisible presence embodied in the things left behind by the people who killed other people – their cups, their half-eaten crackers, their body armor carriers, and bloodstained shoes. She will never forget the signs reading ‘mines’ placed alongside the highway, the kilometers of devastated villages and destroyed streets, which look like scars on the face of the city.
This is the second time that she has suffered this pain. Sevgil’s parents were forced to leave Crimea after the occupation. For a few years they lived in a village near Kyiv. After the 24th of February, Sevgil’s father welded together ‘Czech hedgehogs’ while her mother was baking bread for the territorial defense and supplying them with preserved vegetables. The warfare was intensifying, missiles kept falling nearby, and Sevgil’s sources were warning in the meantime that the village could fall under the frontline as the Russians advanced. Therefore, her parents agreed to move out and go to New York where Sevgil’s sister lived.
“Many people have told me that the beginning of the full-scale war helped them to understand my feelings in 2014,” says Sevgil. “But my trauma has only deepened. Some time ago, my boyfriend took me to his native Volhynia to meet his family. He was showing me the places of his childhood, the school he went to, when suddenly I felt knocked off balance – because this was something that I could not do for him in return. I had already forgotten that feeling in the last eight years. Once, life in Crimea had been a part of me, but now it’s proceeding in parallel, and I’m not able to do anything about it.”
But no matter what, Sevgil is sure that she will return to Crimea. In her mind’s eye, she has a vision of the Crimean summer nature, the sea, and her children sitting around the table where she cuts up a watermelon. This image helps her to keep living.
“I don’t’ think that this will happen any time soon,” says Sevgil. “It’s not as if we’ll be dancing the haytarma next year in Bakhchisarai, but we will definitely bring our territory back. I’m even more convinced of this than I was before the full-scale invasion.”
The world has finally understood that Russia is evil, Sevgil explains. Her foreign colleagues had never paid much attention to her stories hitherto, yet now they are conscious of the threat they have been warned of. For herself, Sevgil is drawing parallels with the processes described by the historian Margaret McMillan in her book The War That Ended Peace: How Europe Abandoned Peace for the First World War. Sevgil read it in 2018. Even then, it was clear to her that the mankind is repeating the same mistakes which will lead to a new catastrophe. We have already come very near to it, though some people are still trying to make some agreements and sit on a two-legged chair.
Back in 2014, Sevgil was confident that the war which started in Crimea must come to a head in Crimea. The broken system of international security cannot be fixed without the return of Crimea to Ukraine. The permission for Putin to do whatever he wanted and the frivolous attitude to Russia’s war on Ukraine led to the full-scale offensive. That’s why she thinks that the decisive role in determining the future of the world will belong to Ukraine.
Sevgil believes in justice, in the collapse of the Russian Federation, and in the Hague for Putin because, in her opinion, the new order always comes to replace the previous one. The international law appeared in this form after WWII owing to the lawyers from Lviv, Rafal Lemkin and Hersch Lauterpacht. Introducing the term ‘genocide’ into it seemed impossible, but ultimately that was achieved, in parallel with the trial of the war criminals.
“I believe in the special role of Ukraine now,” Sevgil states. “I’m rational and critical about our possibilities, but it’s our courage that will help to change the rules and bring truth and honesty back onto the international agenda.”
As for her personal life, Sevgil has finally returned to her normal sleep habits. After the first five sleepless days when she could not afford to absent herself from work for even fifteen minutes, she is now sleeping as well as she did before 2014. Instead, Sevgil has completely lost the ability to cry.
“Now I am full of determination, concentration, and commitment to work,” she says. “I never imagined myself capable of anything like this. My world has turned black and white: I have no right to stumble, because so much effort still needs to be made so that the perpetrators are brought to trial for everything. I cannot stop to grieve because it would harm my efficiency. The time for reflection is yet to come.”