For Ukraine’s investigative journalists, the fourth year of full-scale war was the grimmest yet.
It began with a blow from abroad, when Donald Trump dismantled the United States’ foreign aid agencies in early 2025. A key source of journalism funding was effectively extinguished overnight.
The year ended in cold and darkness, as a relentless Russian bombing campaign has laid waste to Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, robbing millions of people of heat and light in a winter harsher than many can remember. The simplest daily chores have become a struggle.
Through it all, Ukraine’s journalists have kept publishing investigative reporting that is resonating with local leaders and capturing international attention.
Most of these journalists are women, and almost all are young. Despite juggling small children and worrying about husbands at war, they continue to interview sources, pore over leaked documents, and sift through data.
“No one in Ukraine has a lot of energy,” says Anna Babinets, editor-in-chief of Slidstvo.info, a long-time OCCRP partner. “But on the other hand, because we are journalists, we can fight… The energy sometimes comes when you discover something.”
Even before the country froze this winter, Ukrainian newsrooms have dealt with challenges few others could imagine.
Babinets lost more than a fifth of her staff when her male colleagues were called to the front. “We’ll wait for them after the war,” she says.
And after journalists from RFE/RL’s investigative Ukrainian unit, Schemes, exposed a Russian effort to recruit Ukrainian teenagers for sabotage, a menacing wave of bomb threats bearing reporters’ names were sent to institutions around the country.
Then, of course, there are the actual bombings, which come almost nightly. (The Russian kamikaze drones, a recent investigation shows, are being mass-produced using European parts). For many, the months of alerts, blasts, and all-clears have become a kind of background noise that disrupts sleep but no longer prompts regular trips to the shelter. But some are less fortunate. OCCRP’s Ukraine coordinator Elena Loginova, a seasoned investigative journalist, had the bad luck of living next to an industrial facility in Kyiv’s Shevchenkivskyi neighborhood. One morning in the summer of 2024, a series of Russian rockets exploded nearby.
“I was just writing in some work chats, and then one goes off,” she remembers. “When one rocket lands, you’re thinking, cool, I’m alive, and off you go. But then a second one comes very quickly, and you’re like — okay, my body doesn’t like this. And then it’s five times.”
Her sense of safety shattered, Loginova could no longer sleep at home. Night after night, she tried to sleep in a nearby parking lot that doubled as a bomb shelter. Finally, she did the only thing that worked — leaving the city for the countryside.
Those that remain in Kyiv have found their energy and mental faculties sapped by the daily grind of trying to survive with almost no power or heating. Electricity had been rationed before, usually on a set schedule. But as the Russian attacks intensified this winter, the repair crews could no longer keep up, making the outages unpredictable and nearly constant.
“At my apartment I have an hour-and-a-half of electricity per day,” says Yanina Kornienko, a reporter at Slidstvo.info. “It’s enough to charge my phone, to charge my power banks … But I wouldn’t say that blackouts are the worst thing. I would say that no heating is much worse.”
“You go to a cold shelter because you want to survive, and after a night with no sleep you wake up,” she says, “You can’t make hot coffee … You can’t take a hot shower. So you just go to work as you are.”
In the offices of the Kyiv Independent, an English-language newsroom founded just before the invasion, temperatures have plunged as low as 8 degrees Celsius.
“You can’t work at home, because at home it’s even worse. Here at least you have a generator, more stable internet,” says Yevheniia Motorevska, who leads the publication’s war crimes investigations unit. “But in the office it’s very cold … you get there, and the first few hours you’re just trying to warm up, you talk about last night’s bombings, and then gradually you can get to work.”
Motorevskaya also left Kyiv after several Russian strikes on her central neighborhood, and now commutes from a suburb. Others find it difficult to get to the office at all. Babinets from Slidstvo.info describes a colleague with two small children who lives on the 24th floor of an apartment building. “When there’s no electricity, the elevators don’t work. And she doesn’t have water because the pumps don’t work. Bringing the children down is nearly impossible. For her it’s really, really hard.”
These constant challenges create a mental fatigue that makes it difficult to focus on anything else.
“Every day, you have to make decisions about what you’re doing with your work, what you’re doing with your kids, what is the best decision for this day,” says Babinets. “It might not be the best decision in two days.”
“Your level of concentration is totally different,” Motorevskaya says. “I see this problem in our team, in the whole outlet — massive exhaustion.”
Amid this relentless pressure, small comforts become victories. Reached by video call in her office, Valeriya Yegoshyna, an investigative journalist at RFE/RL’s Schemes, noted wryly that she was “waiting for an Oreshnik” — a newer type of Russian ballistic missile that carries multiple warheads. But she was pleased to have been able to wash her hair that morning. “It took some strength,” she said.
Journalists described different techniques to keep warm: Kornienko slept in her ski pants and said colleagues erected tents in their apartments. Yegoshyna said she heats a brick on her apartment’s gas stove. “ChatGPT would say that you’re not supposed to do this,” she jokes, “but I’m like, I think it would be more dangerous to live in a home where it’s nine degrees.”
Many journalists describe finding comfort in solidarity, texting each other late into the night as they brace for Russian rockets to land. Others take antidepressants or religiously attend therapy. But sometimes none of it is enough; and the breaking point can come at unexpected moments.
Yegoshyna recalls the first time during the war that she didn’t make it to work. “Already in a bad mood about the blackouts,” she says, she was digging through gigabytes of data from a phone belonging to a Russian general. She withstood, not for the first time, seeing photos of dead bodies and other horrors. But then she came across a video of Russian soldiers torturing a mouse.
“They crucified it. They were laughing and giving it cigarettes and questioning it, asking where are your comrades,” she says. “I saw this video and it broke me. I started crying, maybe for the first time in a year. And I texted my editors, I can’t work tomorrow. I just can’t. And they said, why? And I was like… mouse situation.”
To stay sane, Yegoshyna says, she needs to work — a sentiment the others echoed. The result has been an abundance of investigative stories that will form a key part of the historical record of this war. For her part, Yegoshyna recently published the investigation into the Russian general’s messages, revealing gruesome banter and evidence of possible war crimes.
Despite the hardships, a new crop of journalists is embracing the profession. “I’m really very happy that we have so many new journalists, young ones,” says Loginova. “They could have chosen something else. They’re choosing this profession. Probably they feel that this is something important.”
Among these young journalists is Maksym Dudchenko, a reporter with KibOrg, a distributed group of activists and journalists that came together after the 2022 invasion. He lives in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, with the front lines just a few dozen kilometers away. But the city has not been struck as hard as Kyiv in recent months, and he says life is “much easier” than in the capital. “They’ve even just launched 5G service,” he says.
Still, his building in the center lost heat after a nearby heating station was “smashed to smithereens.” When the electricity went dim, Dudchenko moved in with his mother on the city’s outskirts.
His team does sometimes feel demoralized, Dudchenko says, citing the usual complaints about electricity and internet access. But they’re making progress. Initially working as volunteers, they registered their organization last year and have received several grants, including from OCCRP.
Dudchenko, who has just received a Masters degree, now works at KibOrg full-time. “I like investigations,” he says, “because this is a genre where you can really do something.”
Another, even newer outlet is the Dnipro.media, which launched in 2024. The front-line in Dnipro, Ukraine’s fourth-largest city, is not as close as in Kharkiv — but it is getting closer.
Anna Matviienko, the outlet’s co-founder, said she was inspired to launch it after her husband joined the armed forces. Putting aside her dreams of moving abroad, she says, “I understood that I want to stay here and do something for my country.”
Matviienko’s passion is tracking what happens with her city’s municipal budget, which she says is the second-largest in Ukraine. After the country’s 2014 Euromaidan revolution — the change of government that triggered Russia’s initial attacks — decentralization reforms ensured more revenue stayed in cities. But only a small percentage of Dnipro’s budget is devoted to supporting the armed services, Matviienko says, a state of affairs that drove her first to activism, then to journalism.
Investigations are only part of Dnipro.media’s work. “People aren’t interested only in investigative journalism, because they don’t understand the basics,” she says, “Our mission is to politely educate them” — through explainers, service journalism, or even nostalgia — “to ruin stereotypes about Dnipro.”
For Matviienko, the end of support from the United States came as a powerful shock.
“We lost all the money and we worked for free for eight months,” she says. At one point, she and her colleagues set a deadline for themselves: if they couldn’t replace the support by summer, they would shut down. They ended up surviving on several other grants, including from OCCRP.
Her newsroom’s journalism has prompted pushback. ”We’re becoming more and more visible for our local authorities,” she says, describing an encounter when a local official slapped her in the face.
Amid the understandable focus on Russian brutality — “It’s our duty to investigate war crimes, to try to give a chance to justice to those who suffer,” Yegoshyna says — investigations into Ukrainian corruption haven’t stopped.
“We understand that both [war crimes and corruption investigations] are very important for winning the war,” Babinets says. “It’s very difficult because we are a democratic country fighting with an authoritarian country. In a democratic country, we should talk openly about what’s going on. … This is what we’re fighting for.”
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