Ukrainian Witness – a new media project to capture and memorize the terrible events in Ukraine.
Our goal is to show the world the reality
of war that has come to our country. It is the chronicle that our children, and our children’s children, will study in their history lessons.
Content is produced with a global audience in mind, unvarnished with comments in English so the world can see what is happening in Ukraine. Now, we need the worlds media to partner with us and ensure truth on the ground in Ukraine is shown.
Within the first two weeks of its existence, ‘Ukrainian Witness’ has become a full-fledged structure with its own editorial office and well-developed social media accounts. We now produce 2-3 videos per day and have in total shot around 70 videos within the first month of the war. Our YouTube channel has around 1 000 000 views and our Facebook page is more than 275 000 fans.
We are now concentrating our efforts on the distribution of the content – offering it the media in the US and Western Europe on one hand – to make sure it is useful for them when talking about the war and on the other hand – to help Ukraine to be heard and appealing to the audience in foreign countries.
We have already been given a floor by CNN New Day and Morning Joe from MSNBC in the US. Through Storyful, our footage has been taken and used by News Channel 8, Yahoo! News and even Mr. Schwarzenegger in their materials.
We also aim to support people within the Russian Federation to challenge misinterpretation and misinformation of what is happening to Ukrainians and their own people. Currently websites from the Ukrainian mass media are blocked in Russia, so we are increasing our presence on Instagram and Telegram. By the way, the Russian-language channel has already gathered more than 100,000 users.
Ukrainian Witness was initiated by Vitaliy Deynega, a public activist and founder of the International Charitable Fund Come Back Alive
‘I barely remembered the beginning of the war back in 2014. By that time, everything started suddenly and developed very fast. Nobody fixed those events. Only a few photos and videos of decent quality would help our descendants remember what happened. At the same time Russian propaganda was already writing about us, changing how history is recorded and remembered. We were losing the informational battle.
When Russia attacked us again in 2022, the whole story repeated. We were unprepared to document our history. I needed to fix that. Within a couple of days, we mobilised videographers, journalists, editors, and other fantastic people. They work in different locations across our country to ensure we could show rather than retell our children how the things were in reality’
