The Russian president has carried out his threats and invaded Ukraine with some 200,000 troops. Reports of war crimes are coming in daily. The images from Kiev, Kharkiv and Mariupol resemble those of Grozny, Aleppo and besieged Sarajevo in the 1990s. In Russia, the invasion of the Ukraine is sold as a military operation to denazify the country and put an end to the genocide of ethnic Russians. And much of the population believes it.
For years, Putin had brought the media in his country almost completely under his control. As early as 2004, Volker Schulze, the managing director of the Federal Association of German Newspaper Publishers, criticized the pressure on media houses and foreign journalists in Russia. He said it was regrettable that even a country like Russia, on which publishers and journalists worldwide had pinned great hopes after the fall of the Iron Curtain, was falling back into repressive structures that were thought to be outdated and was obstructing domestic and foreign media representatives.
A few weeks before last year’s parliamentary elections, freedom of the press and freedom of expression were once again restricted in Russia. At least five news sites critical of the regime were forced to cease their work. To this end, the government declared the affected media to be so-called “foreign agents.” Reporters Without Borders has scrutinized the corresponding laws that the Russian parliament waved through during the Corona pandemic. These laws on defamation and alleged false news allow the Russian government to prevent unwelcome information. Barely invasion of Ukraine had begun, the Russian president intensified the pressure on journalists. The war against Ukraine cannot be called a war or an invasion in Russia; in the Kremlin’s view, it is a “special operation.” Those who dare to speak out risk years of imprisonment. That is why Russia’s main independent newspaper, Novaya Gazeta, suspended publication in March. Enormous pressure is also being exerted on foreign journalists. The Russian Ministry of Justice has classified Deutsche Welle as a “foreign agent.” Despite all this, Russian citizens continue to demonstrate against the war, and Aleksei Navalny is also calling for protests from the penal colony.
Ukraine, meanwhile, is considered particularly dangerous for journalists.
According to the Swiss news site www.nau.ch, twelve journalists had been killed and ten injured by the end of March. Attacks on Kiev, Kharkiv and other cities have even increased. Mariupol is completely surrounded and consists largely of burned-out ruins. By the end of the war, the number of killed and wounded journalists in Ukraine will continue to increase. The number of Russian and Ukrainian journalists is also expected to increase during this period.
The art project “Truth Fighters” is a memorial to the independent journalists in Russia and Ukraine. So far, 36 of them have been portrayed. The work of independent journalists in these countries requires a lot of courage. The artists admire this and want to honor it. Since 2015, a total of 500 portraits from all over the world have been shown in an online exhibition and in a trave- ling exhibition worldwide. These portraits can be viewed at www.wahrheitskaempfer.de. Texts about the documented journalists and selected countries complete this memorial to freedom of the press. The project, which is open to everyone, is looking forward to more collaborators who want to help with research, write texts or draw portraits.
- *Erkan Pehlivan is a freelance journalist from Frankfurt/Main and a member of the art project “Truth Fighters”.