"Weekends Don't Exist Anymore": A Ukrainian Journalist Describes the Battle for His Country's Soul

Romeo Kokriatski ‘s energy is infectious. He is eager to speak to me, greeting me jovially as I log into our Zoom meeting. We exchange pleasantries and talk about our respective experiences growing up in New York City. If you were to eavesdrop, you’d never know that he is living in an active war zone. He recently fled Kyiv, a once thriving city that is now the target of heavy Russian shelling as the war in Ukraine, soon to enter its third week, rages on. His present location is quite safe, he assures me, thus far spared from Russian assaults, and the people around him are trying their best to live a semblance of a normal life.

But weekends “don’t exist anymore,” says Kokriatski, whose career as a journalist took off when he joined StopFake, an organization dedicated to tackling Kremlin propaganda, and who now works as the managing editor for the English-language The New Voice of Ukraine. Journalists in Ukraine are working around the clock, enaged in a fierce battle for the future of a free press, democracy, and their country’s soul, which has thus far resisted Russian President Vladimir Putin’s grip. The fact of the matter is that Ukraine is facing a grave existential crisis and no one, least of all journalists, can afford to be, as Kokriatski puts it, “neutral observers.”

In this wide-ranging interview, he speaks candidly and eloquently about his experience as a foreign correspondent and the pernicious nature of Russian propaganda. Although his life and work have been wildly disrupted, made vulnerable to a crisis much of Ukraine could not fathom actually happening, he is steadfast in his belief in journalism as a cornerstone of democratic and progressive ideals. Perhaps most importantly, he offers valuable insights into the choices Ukrainian journalists have had to make—and what the international journalistic community can learn from their example.

The following conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Why did you decide to pursue a journalism career?

Honestly it was one of those things that I kind of lucked into. When I was a kid I thought I wanted to be an astrophysicist or something. But then as I went from high school I realized that I didn’t like math quite that much. It’s not that I wasn’t good at it, it just wasn’t the most enjoyable use of my time. I didn’t finish college and I was just in Brooklyn, working in a pizzeria and not doing much. When the Maidan [Revolution of Dignity] happened I was watching the protests and I was thinking, “Crap, this sounds like my grandmother might need some help.” My grandmother lives in Ukraine and I thought I could go and support her in some way, so I did. 

At the time, I was reading a lot of The New Yorker and The London Review of Books and I wanted to be a writer of some sort at that point. I started doing copywriting and editing work when I moved to Ukraine and then I realized, “Well, I’m already writing and there doesn’t seem to be a lot of English-language journalism here, so maybe I can help in that way.” 

So I went to a Democrats Abroad meeting in Kyiv in 2015 or 2016 or something. At some point we had some comments, everyone was talking about [former President Donald] Trump. I made some comments and the meeting responded well to them. Afterward, this woman comes up and says, “Oh, I heard that you were speaking eloquently and maybe you’d want to be a guest host on my YouTube series. I do a little thing called StopFake, where we dissect fake news and Russian propaganda.” 

I started doing that and through her and some mixers with the foreign community in Kyiv, I met a lot of people involved in journalism and people who write op-eds who encouraged me to pitch. Eventually I got a call from this one business journalist who has a magazine who said, “The Ukrainian government is doing this project for English-language journalism and I think you’d be a good fit.” And then I started being a journalist. So much of our professional lives is just networking.

You've specialized in tackling disinformation, particularly Russian propaganda. Tell us about a story that taught you something valuable.

To be honest, there’s not one moment that really struck me. I come from the more left-wing traditions in the United States. I was the only openly socialist or communist in high school and especially around Occupy Wall Street, which was my formative political experience. And that was when RT, the Russian state news, was getting really popular. And it was fine, there was nothing super weird about their reporting at the time. This right-wing media ecosphere was larger by the time 2014 came around. I know a couple of people who worked at RT before 2014. And everyone said they paid amazingly, that you could report what you wanted, that there was no interference with editorial or anything like that. 

And then the Maidan happens. Suddenly my friends were sharing obvious propaganda about Nazis in Ukraine and Ukrainians repressing Russian speakers. I had gone to Ukraine every summer from the time I was eight to eighteen, my mother would ship me off to Ukraine for three months and I’m a Russian speaker so I’d start seeing this stuff shared by my friends and thinking that this didn’t track with my experience at all.

Then I started doing StopFake and began encountering the really blatant propaganda, like pieces about Ukrainian Nazis murdering Russian speaking families or something, and you go into this and you start realizing that it’s not just blatant propaganda, this kind of stuff is being fed to the left-wing milieu of the United States through these channels. It was eye-opening because it didn’t only force me to realize how deep this Russian propaganda infiltration had gotten into left-wing places and is still ongoing… It really drove home to me how pernicious this fake news environment is and of course when the Trump campaign kicked in everybody started noticing that these techniques had bled through this Russian state propaganda into basically mainstream media in the United States like Fox News, the biggest, most-watched news channel in the country. They use the same techniques. 

You see Tucker Carlson right now literally just repeating phrases that he may as well have read in a Russian government press briefing. Absolutely no difference… so StopFake really drove home to me how important it is to make sure that you’re never falling into that trap of just regurgitating state propaganda. And it’s something I apply to my own reporting all the time, even when it’s the U.S. government or the Ukrainian government. Governments lie and they lie a lot and you can’t just repeat what they say uncritically, which are the same kind of criticisms journalists are making right now regarding coverage about police brutality. It’s something that’s really stuck with me, how easy it is to just repeat the state line and how important it is as a journalist to make sure that is never what you’re doing, that you’re always trying to report the actual facts of the situation, not the reality that an institution or an agency wants to propagate.

You were born in Ukraine and raised in New York City. Being a foreign correspondent allows you to gain a deeper understanding of the current affairs in the United States. How do you see the U.S. from a foreign journalist's perspective?

I don’t think my personal view of the United States has changed. Being outside the United States has definitely let me draw more historical comparisons. Very often, it’s not that people in the United States are unaware that the rest of the world exists, it’s that the rest of the world exists at America’s convenience and even people who are anti-American, they still ultimately act as if everything has to do with the United States and everything else is secondary. And being a correspondent outside the United States, you see that people have full and fulfilling internal lives outside of the boundaries of North America, which has definitely shown me how well American propaganda has done in the world and how there are a lot of myths and talking points about the U.S. repeated outside the U.S. that are not accurate but absolutely fit into the mythology the U.S. wants to spread.

In a recent interview for Slate, you criticized Western analyses about the ongoing war, now in its 19th day. What is your advice for Westerners who want to understand more about the conflict?

Like always, listen to people with a different perspective. Listen to what Ukrainians are saying and are telling you. This doesn’t mean you have to throw out your brain and just regurgitate whatever you heard some Ukrainian analyst or journalist say, but listen to that perspective, think about how it plugs into what you know and what you can personally deduce or analyze and start from there. Listen to what the Ukrainian government is saying. And of course, governments are going to lie and Ukraine is in the middle of a war so you have to understand a lot of it is going to be propaganda but at the same time if you don’t take that perspective into account, you are denying Ukrainians agency, basically infantilizing them, saying that Ukrainians are not smart enough to handle their own affairs, first off. And secondly, you’re going to turn out analyses that are just incorrect because you are refusing to take into account the actual experience of people living there. 

That doesn’t just apply to Ukraine, it applies to any time you have to cover a topic that is outside your own personal wheelhouse. Always take into account what the people living there are telling you. Sometimes that’s going to be contradictory. Of course it is, because people have a million different opinions on a million different things. Things are almost always going to be nuanced in some way. Being aware of that is something that people absolutely need to do to start improving foreign reporting, especially from the U.S. side because I think a lot of that has always been seen as a secondary concern and as a result newsrooms just get things wrong all the time that you can easily fix by phoning a colleague in whatever country you’re reporting on. 

I’m positive if you’re working for a publication or an outlet, you can get in touch with someone. You can go on Twitter and get in touch with someone living in the country and ask them directly what they think and then work off that. Just work off that.

What does your average workday look since Russia's invasion began?

Weekends don’t exist anymore. There’s no concept of a workday or work week anymore. Basically you just work as much as you can until you just can’t work any further and you rinse and repeat that as much as possible. My typical day is… I wake up, I have breakfast, and I start working. I start reading stories, finding out what’s happened overnight, scrolling Twitter, assigning stories, editing, posting, and I just keep doing that until my brain does not want to focus anymore or just goes, “Romeo, you better stop or else I’m going to start doing things you don’t like.” At which point you stop. You have dinner, you watch TV or something, you wake up the next day and rinse, repeat, and hope that no one you know has died. That’s typically the thing.

I’ve gotten a lot better in recent days about maintaining a bit more objectivity about the whole thing. I don’t know if that’s due to the fact that where I am is pretty safe or that we’re really trying to keep some semblance of a normal life because it takes a real toll on you psychologically. Wondering if anyone I know has died yet as a result of Russian shelling is not a thing I ever wanted to do or thought I would be doing in my life, and now it’s turned out to be kind of a daily habit.

Did you ever anticipate that you'd find yourself reporting in the middle of the conflict or that you and your family might potentially find yourselves refugees?

Honestly, up until the day the Russians literally invaded, pretty much everyone in the country was pretending they weren’t going to even when the signs had been there since last April because that’s when the initial buildup happened and I wrote a piece and I had a podcast episode and I wrote an article about it… but even then it wasn’t something that I personally sat down and thought about, “Oh, maybe the Russians are going to invade us.” I mean, that’s what my analysts said and that’s what I said, as the worst case scenario, would happen. But I didn’t think it was going to personally affect me. It’s 2022. I’m talking to you on video chat on a rectangle that’s 13 inches across and we’re communicating in real time across a continent. It’s absurd that war is still a reality. It’s absurd. I never could even think that this was a possibility, that I would be living in––and through––a country at war. It was not something that I could think of ever happening and to be honest, it’s still pretty goddamn surreal.

The Ukraine that Ukrainians are fighting for right now is free. It is way more free than Russia and is at least as free and, in many ways, more free than the United States. As a friend of mine pointed out, in the United States, the government really is a leviathan. It’s basically present in nearly every interaction that you have with anything. With anything official, there’s always laws, regulations, codes. In Ukraine, a lot of that doesn’t exist or is simply ignored and there’s a lot less government interference, as strange as that might sound, in people’s lives. This freedom is something that Ukrainians treasure.

What Russia has, there was this plan released, unattributed, that is believed to have been written by some Russian think tank. It basically lays out how Russia wants to divide up Ukraine, the rights being suppressed. Being a journalist, I have no desire to report from Russia. I’ve seen what my Russian colleagues went through and I know quite a few Russian journalists who fled to Ukraine because of their reporting, because they could not report within Russia without being targeted. 

I’m a journalist. I tell the truth as I see it. That’s literally my job. That’s the profession I’ve chosen. I don’t want to live in a society where I have to watch what I say. That is the opposite of what I decided to do for a living and the opposite of how I contribute to society. This is something that is very much at the forefront of a lot of Ukrainian’s minds. That’s not the kind of life or the kind of system Ukrainians want and that’s why they’re fighting so hard to stop this from happening because no one in Ukraine wants to live under Putin’s Russia, not a single soul.

Russia has been widely condemned for clamping down on press freedom at home. How have Ukrainian journalists worked to combat the Kremlin's narrative?

One of the things that I think we lucked out on is the fact that the current Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, is from a media background. He was a comedian. He really understands the power of the media. It’s not just an ego-boosting thing or an influence-building thing. He understands that in order to combat narratives, you have to be loud and you have to talk a lot. That’s the biggest thing. You have to put your story, your version of events, out there in front of whatever’s going on, whatever propaganda’s going on. Ukrainian journalists, by and large, have adopted that. A lot of them have started to learn English, have joined Twitter, and have been networking with their Western colleagues specifically because the tighter those connections are, between Western journalists and Ukrainian ones, the more likely it is that our voices will be heard and that our narrative will be able to crowd out Kremlin propaganda. That doesn’t do much to counter Western propaganda but at the moment that’s less of a concern than encountering the narrative propagated by the aggressor state, which wants us to surrender, lay down arms, and be subservient little slaves for the rest of time.

There’s this one anti-corruption activist that I follow on Twitter, Daria Kaleniuk, who has been incredibly vocal about Ukraine needing a no-fly zone; that we need anti-air defense systems; fighter jets to counter Russian aerial assets. She’s been very vocal about this and she brings it up in basically every conversation she has with a Western policymaker. She is very well known and built quite a few well known anti-corruption organizations in Ukraine that received Western funding and she has a lot of these personal contacts. She has not hesitated to be very pushy and rude because that’s what is necessary: Being forceful enough that people cannot ignore you. 

The issue with propaganda is it goes into spaces where other information is absent or where people have reason to doubt. But the more active you are in telling people what the facts of the matter are, what the actual perspective is, the less room that propaganda has to exploit these preexisting doubts and skepticism. 

What can other journalists learn from the example of Ukrainian journalists on the ground?

Journalists are really competitive. We always want to scoop each other. We always want to get our source and never share them with anyone else and we always want to be the first to have the biggest story, get the most clicks or whatever. What I’ve personally seen from this conflict is that none of that matters right now. None of it. Everyone works together, everyone chips in, no one cares who has the story first, no one cares who reports, who gets media appearances or not. The only important thing is to make sure that we’re on message and that we are promoting our country’s interests. And there’s nothing wrong with that because we’re in an existential war. 

If Putin wins, then there is no Ukraine. There is no democracy, no freedom of speech. All of these high-minded, ethical concerns? They won’t matter if Ukraine is gone.

I think that is very important for journalists to understand if they are ever reporting on a conflict that they are involved in, God forbid, or generally if they are reporting and pushing back against propaganda. The seeds of this conflict have a lot to do with Ukraine, but a lot of it is global. A lot of it has been with the influence of these rich oligarchs from all over the world… as a journalist, you’re not just there to be an objective robot. Your job is to continue promoting the existence of the rather historically liberal and progressive society that we’ve built, because if that goes the other way, none of these concerns, let’s say about being fair, won’t matter because you won’t be given the option of being fair or not. You’ll be told what to write and to shut up and take it. Journalists can’t be robots.

To be quite frank, democracy is under threat everywhere. The United States just had a president who had zero care for the truth. The media treated that as a normal presidency when it was a terrifying premonition of what’s going to happen unless people actively work to promote the values of democracy and free speech and progressivism. Acting as if you can be a neutral observer in what is a turning point of human civilization is not going to help you be a journalist at the very least, let alone stop humanity from going back to the days of kings and czars.