Why Do Foreign Journalists Keep Leaving Ukraine

As global media interests of Ukraine recede, most foreign reporters have started leaving the country. Many of them are being relocated to Moscow, Russia, where they plan to continue covering neighboring Ukraine, albeit from a distance now. Sabra Ayers, a freelance journalist with decades of experience in covering the region, has decided to leave the country too in order to concentrate on other more ‘in-demand’ stories around the globe. Still, she is skeptical that high-quality Ukrainian coverage is possible to manage from Moscow: “I’ve been a Moscow correspondent myself but have always felt connected to Ukraine because Ukraine was the first country in the former Soviet Union where I lived and sort of got to know… When I moved to Moscow, I always saw Russia issues from a Ukraine perspective. And I think that what we’ve seen in the coverage of Ukraine for years since the breakup of the Soviet Union, is Moscow correspondents that come down and report on Ukrainian issues from a ‘Moscow point-of-view’ and I’ve always tried not to do that, particularly during the last two years when Ukraine has been a leader in the news.”

Reflecting on her experience covering Ukraine, Ayers says she would always see the nature of the Eastern Ukrainian war as a completely manufactured conflict, as one huge manipulative story designed by the Russian government. Nevertheless, with the war still ravaging the country, it is now causing profound changes in the social fabric of Ukraine, she warns. “The way I saw this conflict starting and accusations that there were regional problems in Ukraine, that they were split by the language - I guess I saw that it was very much manipulated and manufactured. I saw this very much as a manufactured war. And because I understood the background of what Ukraine was like, I was able to look at how the residents in the East were affected by it differently from the way they were affected in Central and Western Ukraine,” Ayers says.
Ayers expresses her frustration with the negative mainstream coverage of Ukraine in foreign media.

According to her, the pessimism of many foreign journalists about Ukraine is somewhat not fair, because the country has gone through profound changes in the last two years and ‘they are too deep for the country to slip back.’

Hromadske’s Ian Bateson and Nataliya Gumenyuk talked to Sabra Ayers, a freelance foreign correspondent, on December 17th, 2015 in Kyiv.