Posts Tagged ‘Ukraine’
May 18th, 2010
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MT4no1-Hfqk
On Monday, government officials
attempted to prevent publication of an embarrassing video of President Viktor Yanukovych. The video shows a burst of wind flinging a wreath at the President during an official ceremony with his Russian counterpart Dmitry Medvedev. Despite the government’s best efforts, it was obtained by the website Ukrayinska Pravda from an undisclosed television crew, and posted on YouTube. Yanukovych and Medvedev were attending a ceremony to commemorate World War II veterans.
May 7th, 2010
Journalists of the TSN news programme have issued an
open letter yesterday accusing the 1+1 TV station of
censoring their bulletins. According to the 15 journalists who signed the letter, the “last straw” was the station’s decision to edit out footage of
a fight between the opposition and ruling majority in parliament, during a broadcast on 2 May.
Oleksandr Tkachenko, general director of 1+1 has denied the charges and accused the journalists of lacking “professionalism”.
April 21st, 2010
President Viktor Yanukovych has
said he will support journalists’ right to free expression. Yanukovych was responding a
police attack on journalists at the Ekspres newspaper in the town of Lviv last week. This was the fourth such attack since Yanukovych assumed office in February.
April 15th, 2010
Journalists from television
channel TVi have written an open letter to Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, demanding that he intervene to stop the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) pressuring journalists. SBU has demanded that TVi present them with documents regarding a tender, the deal angered rival companies affiliated with the SBU’s director, Valeriy Khoroshkovskiy, whose wife runs one of TVi’s competitors. Journalists expressed concerns that SBU is turning into “a structure which backs personal and business interests of the head of the SBU, Valeriy Khoroshkovskiy, and members of his family”. And in a seperate incident on Tuesday, Ukrainian police intimidated journalists and camermen at the newspaper Ekspres. The paper’s director was arrested in Livy on charges of tax evasion. Journalists who came to the police station to cover the story claim they were handled brutally by police. The paper had published an investigative report on corruption among lawmakers, triggering protests that disrupted traffic on a busy highway near Lviv. The attack is the fourth such incident involving journalists since the inauguration of President Viktor Yanukovych to the presidency in February.
March 19th, 2010
A
defamation case brought against the chief editor of Rodnoye Priyapovy,
Sergei Shvedko, for doubting aspects of a 1930s famine has been squashed, creating a legal precedent. Businessman Vasily Kovalenko brought the case over an article that stated the Soviet famine — known as Holodomor— was not genocide against the Ukrainian people in particular. Kovalenko cited the constitution which outlaws
Holodomor denial. But the court ruling stated Shevdko’s article “did not deny the fact of Holodomor” and was
“subjective opinion”.
February 15th, 2010
Sergei Shvedko, chief editor of the Rodnoye Priyapovye, is to go on trial for expressing doubts that the
Holodomor — the 1930s famine in which millions of Ukranian starved to death because of the policies of Joseph Stalin — was genocide aimed against the Ukrainian people. Former President Yushchenko’s “Our Ukraine” party bought about the
legal action claiming Shvedko denigrated Ukrainians’ dignity, dishonoured of the memory of the famine’s victims and denied the famine was genocide.
Holodomor denial outlawed in Ukraine.
July 29th, 2009
Ukrainian investigators say they have found skull fragments believed to be those of the journalist, Georgiy Gongadze, who was decapitated in 2000. The find came just days after the arrest of a former Ukrainian general suspected of carrying out the murder. Read more
here
July 23rd, 2009
A former Ukrainian general suspected of carrying out the high-profile murder of journalist Georgiy Gongadze has reportedly confessed to the killing. A senior police official said the former general, Oleksiy Pukach had also implicated senior political figures in the murder. Mr Gongadze’s decapitated body was found in a forest in September 2000. Read more
here
