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空襲下的記者人生：當家鄉成為前線城市，3位哈爾基夫媒體人的求生和進化

In Kharkiv, local journalists remain under bombardment because their reporting is both a record of Russian crimes and a civic defense against disinformation, fear, and social fracture.

The Reporter · By 劉致昕 · 9 June 2026 · read the original in Chinese →

在烏克蘭抵抗入侵的前線城市哈爾基夫（Kharkiv）採訪當地媒體，會發現他們的辦公室分成兩種：被轟炸過的，和在地下的。這座仍有數十萬人生活的都市，是烏克蘭第二大城，距離俄羅斯大軍只有20、30公里。自2022年俄羅斯展開全面侵略至今，俄軍已在哈爾基夫炸毀超過13,000棟建築。以2026年1～5月為例，哈爾基夫州平均每月遭俄軍空襲198次，累積空襲警報的發布總時數，更等同於131天長。

When reporting on local media in Kharkiv, the frontline city where Ukraine resists invasion, one discovers that their offices fall into two kinds: those that have been bombed, and those that are underground. This city, where hundreds of thousands still live, is Ukraine’s second largest, only twenty or thirty kilometers from the Russian army. Since Russia launched its full-scale invasion in 2022, Russian forces have destroyed more than 13,000 buildings in Kharkiv. Taking January to May 2026 as an example, Kharkiv Oblast suffered an average of 198 Russian air attacks per month; the total number of hours under air-raid alert was equivalent to 131 days.

戰爭進入第5年後，《報導者》前往哈爾基夫，採訪留守當地的在地媒體人，理解戰火下他們如何繼續報導、為什麼繼續留在當地；他們的報導，如何成為抵禦俄軍資訊戰攻勢的堡壘？在當代戰爭中，前線城市在地媒體的存與滅，又有什麼歷史意義？

As the war entered its fifth year, The Reporter traveled to Kharkiv to interview local media workers who have stayed behind, to understand how they continue reporting under fire and why they remain. How has their journalism become a fortress against Russia’s information warfare? And in contemporary war, what historical meaning lies in the survival or extinction of local media in a frontline city?

In the fifth year of the war, Kharkiv has acquired a new name: the Brown City. Buildings bombed by Russia, including city hall, and the doors and windows around them shattered by blast waves, have temporarily been sealed with brown wooden boards, because repairs can never keep pace with wartime destruction. In February 2026 alone, Kharkiv’s municipal government recorded at least 234 buildings, 1,922 windows, and 57 roofs in the city damaged by Russian attacks.

The Kharkiv branch office of Ukraine’s public broadcaster, the National Public Broadcasting Company of Ukraine, hereafter Suspilne, has itself been attacked three times by Russian forces. The office can still operate, but the Soviet-style building beside it is half ruined. Unexpectedly, we were asked to enter for the interview through an inconspicuous small door in a high side wall. After passing security, we went straight down to the basement.

“Let’s just talk inside the air-raid shelter.” The person who received us was Slava Mavrichev, director of Suspilne’s Kharkiv branch. Since the Russian government put him on a wanted list, all his personal information, including photographs of his family and children, his phone number, and his address, has been published online. Because he has been followed, Mavrichev hides his movements whenever he comes and goes, and never takes a taxi to his own front door. Were it not for our interview, he would no longer come into the office to work at all.

We were curious why he was wanted.

“Because I report on Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine. Twenty years: Russia sentenced me to twenty years in prison for ‘espionage.’”「因為我報導俄羅斯侵略烏克蘭的戰事啊，20年──俄羅斯判我『間諜罪』要關20年。」

Mavrichev has worked as a journalist in Kharkiv for more than twelve years, recording the many-sided threats and aggressions Russia has posed to Ukraine since the Maidan Revolution of 2014.

Since February 2022, when Russian forces launched their full-scale invasion and large-scale war began, Mavrichev has tried to lead his team in continuing to report local news. After every bombardment, for example, they must go to the scene of the attack to film it, to prove that the site was not a military facility, to let the world see the civilians who are suffering, and to document the war crimes committed by Russian forces.

As a public media outlet, their latest reporting from the scene is not only an important channel through which the world understands the war situation; it is also the main basis on which local people grasp the reality around them. Thus, when Russian forces use bot accounts and official Russian announcements to spread false or misleading information online, such as “Kharkiv’s mayor has abandoned the city and fled,” “Ukrainian troops have retreated and deserted their positions, and the Russian army is about to storm the city,” or even claims that Russian bombardments are in fact Ukrainian forces firing wildly on their own people, residents still have a trustworthy source of information by which to judge what is real.

That said, the decision to remain means confronting every sort of difficulty and murderous intent.

The Russian army understands that the existence of Ukrainian local media is itself a threat to Russia’s propaganda war. For that reason, not only has Suspilne’s office been attacked repeatedly by Russian forces; its journalists themselves are targets for Russian hunting.

“When the war first began in 2014, we would tape the letters ‘TV’ onto our reporting vehicles, and our bulletproof vests would be marked ‘Press,’ because in the spirit of international law journalists are noncombatants, and they are not allowed to attack us,” Mavrichev said. “But now we understand that, for the Russian army, journalists are live targets. Marking ourselves this way instead exposes us to danger. They deliberately use drones to kill journalists simply because we are recording the truth, because these images will later be broadcast on television stations and social media around the world.”

In the past, the high-risk zone in which journalists might be shot by Russian snipers extended roughly five kilometers from the front-line combat area. Now, however, everything thirty to forty kilometers from the front is within the range in which Russian drones hunt journalists.

The second murderous trap facing journalists is the Russian army’s “double-tap,” an ambush laid at the news scene. Russian forces understand that after every bombardment Ukrainian journalists will try every means to rush to the site and film it, so they calculate when reporters and rescue workers will arrive, then launch a second, backhanded wave of attacks on the same location.

Mavrichev said the Russian army is good at waiting, sometimes even for two hours. “They wait until the largest number of people has gathered, then launch the second bombardment. From the beginning of this year to now alone, in three months, I personally have encountered this kind of repeated attack four times.”

The third murderous threat, Mavrichev pointed out, “is the one you asked about at the start: I have already been wanted by Russia.” Along with that warrant, Russian security agencies also made all his personal information public. “Anyone can use that personal data. Any pro-Russian element might take action, even send someone to seize me. This is a danger that has to be kept in mind at all times.” For safety, he has sent away all his family, leaving only himself and his partner, who is also a journalist, to continue guarding their hometown.

“In any case, for a journalist, simply staying here means being destined to face all kinds of murderous danger.” Mavrichev realized that, without thinking, he had listed too many risks and, afraid of taking up interview time, ended with a smile.

Mavrichev wanted even more to leave time for another subject: beneath layer upon layer of lethal danger, how does Suspilne’s Kharkiv branch maintain news operations safely? Over the past five years, they have developed at least ten lessons and hundreds of pages of teaching materials, instructing every journalist on how to complete reporting assignments safely under the threats of war. This course has now been promoted across Suspilne’s branches throughout Ukraine.

First, they adopted a decentralized mode of remote work. Journalists work dispersed across different parts of the city, reducing the dangers of being followed, wiped out together in the office, or targeted on the commute. In addition, when a news scene appears or a bombardment occurs in one part of the city, the nearest journalist can arrive as quickly as possible. Beyond gaining time to capture images from the scene, this also shortens the distance they must travel under the threat of shelling. “In a combat city that faces all kinds of attacks twenty-four hours a day, around the clock, this is very important,” Mavrichev said.

Next comes learning “risk assessment.” Journalists must know precisely how each kind of weapon causes casualties, including its speed and destructive parameters: for example, what kind of building a certain rocket can penetrate, or what type of concrete or shelter it can break through.

Mavrichev gave an example: if the attack is by ballistic missile, that means the Russian army already has clear coordinates and has locked on to a specific target point. Once an alert is received and they know the second attack is a ballistic missile, a journalist’s reaction time will not exceed forty seconds; it takes only forty seconds for a ballistic missile from the nearest launch site to reach Kharkiv. “Knowing this means you have forty seconds to respond.”

Once they have learned risk assessment, then on every reporting assignment, taking the scene of a bombardment as an example, the first thing journalists do after arriving in the attacked area is find the nearest shelter. Then they complete their filming as quickly as possible and leave the strike zone within a limit of twenty minutes. After that, through military channels, they confirm whether the Russian launch apparatus is still active. Only if it is not can they return to the scene to film supplementary images.

If they are facing the Russian army’s commonly used Shahed suicide drones, the enemy usually launches them in groups, with roughly fifteen minutes between each incoming drone. At such times, the journalists monitor the drones’ flight paths while using the intervals to film.

He cited a personal experience from two months earlier. “That time it was in southeastern Kharkiv. More than twenty suicide drones flew in, at an average interval of fifteen minutes. You go out and shoot for five minutes; rescue workers work for five to ten minutes; then you hear the next one approaching, or see it approaching on the monitoring screen, and you run to the shelter and sit there listening to the explosion. More or less the instant you sit down, the explosion comes. Then you rush out again and film for five to seven minutes. This is how we record the scene, running back and forth.”

“The trouble is that these drones often use warheads packed with large numbers of lethal fragments, or even thermobaric weapons. I myself, for example, have worked under a double-tap with thermobaric munitions. It really is a terrifying weapon: it explodes into a cloud of flame that can bore into any gap, any crack. Even if you are hiding in a shelter, that cloud of fire can get inside.”

The safety rules Suspilne has formulated for journalists give different field guidelines according to conditions such as season, time of day, and the types of weapons used by Russian forces: when to move fast, when to move slowly, when to act immediately, and when to wait. Even route planning for reaching the scene, and whether the route passes hospitals, gas stations, factories, and other locations, must all be taken into consideration.

The manual also includes how to reduce the harm caused by explosions, how to deal with power grids and fallen electrical wires after a bombardment, and even how to avoid being hit by fire trucks and ambulances.

It is written in such detail because every single item can mean the difference between life and death.

Choosing to stay here as a journalist requires one to pay almost everything in life and endure risks ordinary people cannot imagine. Mavrichev said the decision was not difficult for him. In their company manual, he said, there is a sentence: “Our mission: to defend Ukraine’s freedom.”

“Before working here, I had never thought that a news organization’s ‘mission’ could be so important. It is precisely this mission that gives me the clearest possible answer to the question of why I am here.”

Mavrichev cited the example of another journalist from nearly a century ago: Gareth Jones, from Wales. In the 1930s, Ukraine was undergoing the Holodomor, the Great Famine, and Kharkiv Oblast was among the worst-hit regions; roughly two million people starved to death because of decisions made by the Soviet government. But the Soviet authorities blocked news of this crime for nearly a year, until Jones, who had come to report, deceived the Soviet authorities and walked along the railway tracks toward Kharkiv Oblast, photographing those who had starved to death in the streets of Kharkiv and those whose bodies were swollen from malnutrition. Only then could the deaths of millions no longer be concealed.

“That was the work of a journalist one hundred years ago. We are now trying to do the same thing. Besides helping our compatriots here and now, telling them what is flying toward them, how long it will fly, whether they can evacuate, whether it is safe to enter or leave, and so on, we also hope our work can be like that of journalists one hundred years ago: fifty, one hundred, one hundred and fifty years from now, because of our testimony, no country in the world will be able to distort this history, and Russia will be unable to rewrite the crimes it has committed.”

For Tanya Fedorkova, a journalist at Media Port Kharkiv, hereafter Media Port, who has also worked in Kharkiv for more than twelve years, the reason for staying is just as clear: it is because of “people.”

Media Port is a local Kharkiv outlet founded twenty years ago. Although its team now has fewer than ten people, it remains a respected local news brand. But when Fedorkova was interviewed about being a journalist in a city that once had the highest proportion of Russian speakers in Ukraine, what she spoke about throughout was local people, especially those who grew up in a Russian-language environment, and even local people whose thinking had been pro-Russian.

“It has never stopped. This place is the Russian army’s training ground for information warfare. They keep spreading fear, making people weary of war.”「一切從來沒有停過。我們這裡就是俄軍資訊戰的操練場，他們不斷散播恐懼，讓人們厭戰。」

As early as twelve years ago, during the Maidan Revolution, Fedorkova witnessed Russia’s influence over Kharkiv. At the time, hundreds of thousands of people took turns occupying the square in Kyiv to protest the illegal conduct of the pro-Russian president. But in Kharkiv, four to five hundred kilometers away, pro-Russian forces directly bused people into the city, tried to occupy the municipal government, and even began shouting slogans calling for independence from Ukraine.

At the time, Fedorkova livestreamed from inside city hall and heard with her own ears these people from elsewhere, who did not even know how to get around the municipal building or what the next step after occupation would be, constantly discussing “orders from above.” Through her reporting, Fedorkova also directly exposed the truth about these outside infiltrators who claimed to be “Ukrainians.”

Twelve years later, Fedorkova said that after Russia’s large-scale invasion, more than 80 percent of Kharkiv residents identified themselves as “Ukrainians.” Russia therefore simply imitated the pages of local media and directly falsified the news, for instance turning images of Ukrainian troops rescuing monuments and statues into fabricated “evidence” that Ukrainian forces were destroying the assets of eastern Ukrainian cities and punishing Russian speakers.

Fedorkova believes national media cannot help local people everywhere resist rumors so intimate and close at hand. “One of the purposes of local media is to examine how information has been altered, how rumors have been fabricated, and to resist this.” Precisely for this reason, local media that come from the place, are located in the place, and can respond quickly are among the most important defensive forces in contemporary war.

Local media can also reveal the real situation outside the capital and reduce the possibility that citizens will be maliciously divided.

Fedorkova cited a recent tragedy: two emergency medical workers in Kharkiv Oblast were killed by a Russian drone while on their way to a call.

“That ambulance had absolutely no protection, none of those welded-on armor plates or shielding. It was said to have had a drone detector, but it seems they were unable to use it,” Fedorkova said. After the news was published, dozens of messages poured into the newsroom and her personal phone, all of them, astonishingly, from medical workers reporting various problems in the organization of emergency medical work, including labor rights, inadequate protective equipment, insufficient training, and so on. These messages were not complaints, but urgent searches for ways to improve things. Some people were even willing to appear in interviews at the risk of being fired, so that there would not be another victim.

One of them was the fiancee of one of the dead; they had originally planned to marry this autumn. Also a medical worker, she now only hopes to make visible the systemic problems encountered by her profession, and thereby save more lives.

Yet after the interview with the fiancee was published, the victim’s parents instead received a warning from a supervisor in the medical system. “The other side threatened them: ‘If you keep running your mouths, we won’t help with the funeral arrangements.’ It is absolutely rotten!” Fedorkova said, agitated:

“So you see, people find an outlet in the local newsroom and speak out about a whole pile of problems. People use local news to look for answers to all kinds of real-world problems. Of course, truly solving problems is not easy, but media can at least point out the crux of the matter from a certain angle and draw public attention.”

Her efforts were not wasted. Within just forty-eight hours, Ukrainian members of parliament had placed the incident on the agenda. The voices of people in a frontline city truly passed through local media and entered the national legislature.

“For people, it is important to be able to find journalists. Because many terrible things are happening all over the country now, and only local media can continue to hold attention on these stories and write down the important stories of local people,” Fedorkova explained from a local perspective.

Another kind of reporting only local media can do is the courtroom trials of “traitors.” Even in the face of an average of three air raids a day, Fedorkova still diligently attends court hearings and reports on cases involving collaboration with the enemy and treason.

“These cases are not always black and white. We often receive press releases from the Security Service of Ukraine, the SBU, and the prosecutor’s office, filled with statements about ‘how bad this person is.’ But when I attend these hearings, what I see is not necessarily always like that, because in the process you realize that the conditions and circumstances behind how this person ended up in that situation are actually very complex.” Fedorkova smiled wryly and said these reports are not appealing news topics; they are both dull and consuming of time and resources:

“But we still have to track whether these punishments are just, and we must be able to distinguish between those who truly acted out of conscious choice, clearly held pro-Russian positions, and worked for the enemy, and those who were helplessly thinking only of how to survive.”

“I do not want merely to tick a box and record one more ‘collaborator’ in the statistics. What I truly hope for is a calm discussion of the moral questions and personal questions of survival inside this, especially in areas occupied by Russian forces.”

Fedorkova emphasized that these discussions are serious issues from which Ukraine cannot avert its gaze, and only local journalists have the chance to open up the lower layers of society and the sites of sensitive conflict, to understand where the weaknesses exploited by the enemy actually lie. From bombing sites to courtrooms, from fake news fabricated by the enemy to the black holes in Ukrainian society, Fedorkova carries a camera lens, tripod, microphone, recorder, and notebook. She is usually alone, completing the writing, photography, video, and interviewing by herself.

She laughed and said that many of the photographs she takes are sometimes only to send to her family. Fedorkova’s paternal family comes from Russia, and after her father died he was buried in Russia. Her cousin is in Russia’s National Guard; before Russian forces began harassing eastern Ukraine in 2013, he often came to Kharkiv to visit.

“After the full-scale invasion began, my cousin’s mother once sent my mother a message saying, ‘Bear with it a little longer. It will soon be over. Everything will get better.’ What she meant was, ‘We are coming to liberate you,’ because at that time the Russian National Guard was advancing on Kharkiv in columns.”

“When Russian forces began large-scale slaughter in the city and did not even spare children, I began to feel an impulse I could not suppress: I started sending my cousin photographs documenting those horrors, wanting him to see what consequences his actions had caused. For example, once Russia attacked a gas station, and burning fuel rushed into a residential area. An entire family was burned alive inside their home, including an infant.” But her Russian-soldier cousin never replied.

“When I discovered that my blood relative had been brainwashed so thoroughly, placing obedience to Vladimir Putin above kinship, what I felt was not only shock, but intense pain and hatred.” Fedorkova lowered her head as she explained one of the reasons she stayed and works day and night without rest.

“This city has been influenced by Russia for several hundred years. It is truly hard to change, even now. But since 2014, Nakipilo has kept trying to change that.”「這座城市受俄羅斯影響好幾百年，要改變真的很難，連現在都還是。但從2014年開始《忍無可忍》就一直試著改變這件事。」

Napolska joined Nakipilo in November 2022. Why, during a war, would she choose a profession the enemy treats as a target, and stay in a frontline city to work?

The time goes back to March 1, 2022. Russia fired a missile at Kharkiv city hall; at that moment, Napolska was inside. Fortunately, she suffered only minor injuries. But the shock to her heart was such that she could no longer remain in her hometown then, and had no choice but to head straight west and try to heal.

Their broadcasts also once reached inside Russia and became popular with local listeners. “That is why comments like ‘I am going to kill you’ began to appear, along with many cyberattacks,” Napolska said with a loud laugh.

Nakipilo’s reporting mainly focuses on urban life, anti-corruption, social issues, and culture; it also reports on the shelling of the city and civilian buildings.

“Our journalists go to the front line to film soldiers’ daily lives and their stories. A considerable part of our team has also volunteered to join the army and is now serving as soldiers or officers in different branches of the military. So we also go to find soldiers, bring them supplies, and launch fundraisers.”

Napolska said none of these are things traditional journalism would do, but especially in a frontline city, there is truly no way not to invest oneself, not to become involved. “This concerns your life, and your country. I think this is a very major transformation in journalism.” For this reason, Nakipilo has even launched fundraising projects in support of the army, raising more than 13 million hryvnias, approximately NT$9.25 million.

By producing content on different online platforms and providing “services” in different aspects of life, Napolska believes Nakipilo has given local people different choices in how to live, and with them the possibility of change. “Take my mother. She now comes to listen to our events about Ukrainian history, art, and women.” Napolska is the only member of her family who speaks Ukrainian, and for that reason has long kept a distance from her family. But after stepping outside the family, mother and daughter heard together at Nakipilo’s events those “facts that have always existed in our lives, but that we refused to see,” as Napolska put it.

Even so, after more than four years as a media worker, when asked whether Ukrainian media have any chance of winning against the offensive of Russian information warfare, her answer is no: because the work of media is not to fight an information war.

“Because our media are not trying to change their people,” Napolska believes. Ukraine is not the aggressor, and the greatest difference between democracy and totalitarianism is the value placed on freedom of the press and freedom of speech. The work of Ukrainian media workers is not to fabricate facts, participate in official propaganda, or launch cognitive warfare or information warfare against the Russian public. It is to play the role of media well at critical moments, using good news services and professional reporting to accompany the people of Ukraine. This is different from the way totalitarian states and aggressors treat information and media as weapons.

“We, the media, only want to win our own people back. And this, I think, we can absolutely do.”「我們（媒體）只是想贏回我們自己人。而這個，我覺得我們完全做得到。」

Napolska believes that in frontline cities the importance of media stands out all the more. It must transform quickly in extreme conditions, accompany readers through the reporting of true stories and diverse forms of contact, promote public discussion, and bring people together.

She gave as their latest success an F1 livestream party held at six o’clock on a Sunday morning. Even though air raids often occur in the middle of the night, their members still appeared on time early that morning.

“So we gained one more seventeen-year-old reader. He is an F1 fan, and now he has also started watching our news videos, and has even appeared in our videos.” Whether it is gaining new readers or winning people’s hearts back, Napolska said, “It will take a long time, but one by one, slowly, it can be done.” Seeking truth in depth, walking with many voices.

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