In Ukraine, reporting from the front lines can get you killed, while reporting on the powerful can get you assaulted, smeared or threatened with forced conscription. Russia poses by far the gravest danger, imprisoning and torturing Ukrainian journalists and targeting them with drones, but officials and influential people inside Ukraine are also a serious threat.
Reporters Without Borders has recorded 16 media professionals killed while doing journalistic work in Ukraine since 2022 and more than 180 targeted. In 2025, at least four journalists were killed in Russian drone attacks, among them French photojournalist Antoni Lallican, who was struck by an FPV drone in October while wearing body armour marked PRESS.
At least 26 Ukrainian journalists and media workers remain in Russian detention, some held since 2016, yet the International Committee of the Red Cross has verified the detention of only one. Viktoriia Roshchyna disappeared while reporting in occupied Zaporizhzhia in 2023 and died in Russian custody at the age of 27. When her remains were returned to Ukraine, they weighed less than 30 kilograms and showed signs of torture. The European Union has since sanctioned the facility where she was held.
“Reporters have become deliberate targets for drones while working near the frontline,” shared Polina Kulish, a journalist and multimedia editor at Gwara Media, an independent newsroom in Kharkiv.
“It has become difficult to film with civilians and soldiers in certain areas because the kill zone keeps growing. Fiber-optic drones now reach up to sixty kilometres.” Her newsroom reported in May that Russian units near Kharkiv were using 50-kilometre fibre-optic spools, giving the drones enough range to reach the city.
The threats continue online. Denys Glushko, editor in chief of the Ukrainian news outlet Apostrophe, described waves of coordinated abuse on X.
“When one of my posts passes about ten thousand impressions, the Russian bots attack my page, sometimes hundreds of comments at a time,” he said. “Most of these accounts were created only a month or two ago, and they simply spam at random.” Some warn that he “will be next”, while others call for every Ukrainian to be killed.
Reporting the accounts as spam rarely works, he said, and X only occasionally confirms that a page has been taken down.
“They need to improve their policies,” he said. “If an account has no history and exists only to comment on Ukrainian activists and journalists, they should act, and they should do it in other conflicts too.”
Women journalists face an additional layer of pressure, Kulish said, because they are often taken less seriously than their male colleagues and subjected to gendered abuse that men do not experience. More than 70 percent of Ukraine’s media workforce is female, and 81 percent of those women report experiencing online violence.
Pressure from within Ukraine is less visible than Russia’s attacks, but it is persistent.
Kulish describes Ukrainian journalists as caught in a double jeopardy – one from Russian attacks and one from pressure within Ukraine.
“We live and work on the front line in Kharkiv, and we rarely write about the president or the government,” she said. “But we still face some pressure from the local authorities.”
Ukrainian officials have asked reporters to hold back coverage of towns captured by Russian forces, she said, and journalists investigating corruption face similar demands. Those who refuse may find officials less willing to share information with them.
“When we reported that an FPV drone had reached Kharkiv city and hit gas stations, we faced pressure from the City Council Department of Emergency Service to take the reporting down,” she said. “We were forced to remove the mention of the drone after additional pressure from the press officer of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU).”
Military press officers have pushed back similarly against stories about soldiers who were exhausted and demoralized.
“Because journalists depend on local authorities for the credentials that let them work, withholding it becomes a form of control”, Kulish said. Security is usually cited as the official reason, but she sees the accreditation system as a way to manage what gets reported. Journalists who investigate problems at home are often accused of damaging Ukraine’s image abroad.
Glushko said he has not personally faced pressure from the Ukrainian state because he covers the war rather than domestic corruption but described conscription as a tactic used against colleagues reporting on sensitive subjects.
“If you write something they do not like, you might find conscription officials waiting for you right outside your house,” he said.
Human Rights First, where I work, has documented threats to anti-corruption activists and journalists in Ukraine for nearly a decade.
In 2024, military enlistment officers tried to serve Slidstvo.Info journalist Yevhen Shulhat with a draft summons days after he published an investigation into an SBU general.
In November 2025, Ukraine’s anti-corruption bureau found that a criminal organisation had compiled dossiers on 10 journalists reporting on corruption, although police did not open a criminal case until three months later. Over two weeks in May, Reporters Without Borders documented attacks involving five independent outlets, including a smear campaign against Slidstvo.Info, an assault on one of its crews inside a village council and a Volyn councillor grabbing and smashing the phone of Natalka Koval of Syla Pravdy.
On July 9, a Ukrainska Pravda film crew was attacked by security guards and sprayed with green dye at Edem Kyiv, a luxury hotel complex where Lviv businessman and former member of parliament Ihor Kryvetskyi was holding a celebration.
Of the 16 press freedom violations recorded by the Institute of Mass Information in June 2026, three were committed by Russia and thirteen by Ukrainian actors. Across 2025, the Institute recorded 130 violations, 67 of them committed by Russia.
International law protects journalists as civilians, while Article 171 of Ukraine’s Criminal Code makes obstructing their work an offense, yet enforcement remains weak and investigations rarely lead to convictions.
The threats from Russia and from within Ukraine differ enormously in scale and severity, but the obligation remains the same: journalists must be free to report without becoming targets themselves.
Russia's imprisonment, torture and killing of journalists demand international accountability. Reporters Without Borders has filed 11 complaints with the International Criminal Court, most recently asking prosecutors to examine whether the systematic targeting of the press amounts to persecution as a crime against humanity. Ukraine has opened 132 preliminary investigations of its own, but proving deliberate targeting will require greater forensic support.
Ukrainian authorities must ensure that accreditation, access and conscription are never used to punish critical reporting. Media freedom is part of Ukraine’s European Union accession process, and the European Commission has called on the government to guarantee the safety and independence of journalists and investigate intimidation and harassment swiftly. A country at war does not protect itself by shielding those who exercise power from scrutiny.
