“People Want The World To Know The Truth”: The Local Ukrainian Journalists Battling Russian Propaganda On The Front Line

deadline.com:

EXCLUSIVE: Leading Ukrainian journalists have spotlighted the challenges of covering what has become a warzone overnight, as they fight to battle Russian propaganda while facing heart-wrenching personal choices.Speaking exclusively to Deadline, 1+1 Media TV Host Marichka Padalko and Slidstvo.info News Reporter Liubomyra Remazhevska said they are taking each day as it comes, setting their priorities depending on where the news takes them rather than planning ahead.Padalko, who was the first on air when the invasion started last week, is working on United News, which brings together the news might of the nation’s top four media organizations to broadcast 24/7 news with no commercial breaks.“In the very beginning we were faced with a very difficult choice – ‘Do I take care of my kids or do I take care of the audience that has been relying on me for years?’,” she said, in a written statement to Deadline.Padalko’s children were swiftly taken to a hotel in Western Ukraine.

She expected to join them within two days but was “in a state of denial” about the invasion and they are now staying long term with her parents.Padalko’s team has relocated to a back-up studio outside the capital Kyiv due to the “continuous air raid sirens,” allowing them to broadcast during their allocated slot and also take over from colleagues in Central Kyiv when the bombing becomes too bad.“We are uniting our resources so we don’t get terribly exhausted,” she said.Padalko and Remazhevska “do not do long-term planning” but make calls on where to broadcast from each morning.Alongside a colleague, Remazhevska, who was formerly an Investigations Editor but pivoted to News Reporter when the invasion happened as “nobody is interested in corruption at the