In the first days of Russia’s full-scale war, people were glued to their phones for several reasons: their loved ones, coordination and volunteering, and the news. All felt equally vital. Journalists seemed to be among the first to make sense of what was happening, and what to do next.

It is difficult to imagine this time without Ukrainian journalism, and without the international journalists who came from across the world to bear witness alongside them. It is even more difficult to grasp the price they have paid over the past four years of what is now a twelve-year war. Maks Levin was killed in March 2022 near Kyiv during a reporting mission, shot in cold blood by Russian forces, after torture. Pierre Zakrzewski and Oleksandra Kuvshynova were killed when Russian forces opened fire on their car near Kyiv. Viktoriia Roshchyna was detained while reporting from temporarily occupied territories, determined to show the world what Russia was doing there, and died in Russian captivity in 2024, bearing signs of torture. Their names are only a few among too many.

At the European Centre for Press and Media Freedom (ECPMF), we work alongside Ukrainian journalists and local partners, and we are in awe of those who, despite daily threats to their lives, continue to report, document war crimes, and investigate. For four years, through the Hannah Arendt Initiative, we have supported media workers with fellowships, equipment, insurance, safety training, targeted programmes for women journalists and many more.

We believe in nothing about Ukrainians without Ukrainians. In the fourth year of the full-scale invasion, we asked our Ukrainian partners a simple but urgent question: what has changed, what remains most fragile, and what could the international community do that has not yet been done?

Founder and main reporter of the Frontliner media Andriy Dubchak, near front line, Bakhmut, Donetsk region.

Author Danylo Dubchak

Across the Ukrainian media sector, the biggest challenges of the past four years have not been singular events but a stacking of pressures that reinforce each other. What began in February 2022 as an immediate shock to safety, operations, and revenues has hardened into something more entrenched. As AIRPPU’s Oksana Brovko puts it, “the fourth year of the full-scale war is no longer about immediate survival. It is about structural vulnerability.”

That vulnerability is easiest to see in the places where independent journalism has the least margin for error. For regional and local outlets, the financial collapse was abrupt. “Almost overnight, regional media lost their financial base,” as advertising markets collapsed and subscription income disappeared when communities were “evacuated, occupied, or forced to flee.” At the same time, hundreds of journalists were mobilised, newsrooms relocated, and many outlets lost access to the occupied territories they once covered. Angelina Kariakina, co-founder of PIJL, states that the disruption did not simply reduce output. It broke the revenue and distribution links that make independent media sustainable in normal times.

Financial shock has been inseparable from physical risk. Security threats have intensified to the point where, for many journalists, there is “no difference, whether they work at home or at the office.” Reporting in the field has become more dangerous as Russia targets infrastructure and locations in frontline cities where journalists often stay. Working conditions have deteriorated since 2022, with intensified attacks leaving many struggling with “simple survival without electricity, water and heating.” Newsrooms are forced to stay apart, work remotely, and lose the everyday team support that helps journalists keep going under pressure.

These burdens are unevenly shared across the workforce. The war has increased workloads for many women in Ukrainian media due to the mobilisation of men, while online abuse has become a pervasive threat. According to research by Women in Media and UNESCO, in 2025 “81% of Ukrainian female journalists were subjected to online attacks,” including misogynistic insults, sexism, and defamation campaigns. This kind of harassment is a sustained attempt to intimidate and discredit journalists, with real consequences for safety, wellbeing, and the ability to do the job.

Beyond the physical and financial pressures, the long war is reshaping the relationship between journalism and its audiences. Our partners from the Lviv Media Forum point to the “loss of access to audiences,” which made it harder to sell content and subscriptions, alongside major demographic changes that have shifted audience composition and information needs. Meanwhile, “stress and psychological exhaustion among media workers” has become one of the defining realities of the fourth year.

It is against this backdrop that resilience becomes clearer as well. Over four years of full-scale war, resilience has not been a vague quality or a lucky streak. Partners describe it as something built deliberately through rapid coordination, institutional flexibility, and sustained external support, even as the overall environment has become harder and more unpredictable.

Oksana Brovko of the Association of Independent Regional Press Publishers of Ukraine (AIRPPU) captures this most vividly. “Resilience did not happen spontaneously. It was organised,” she says. “I still remember the borscht my colleague served on 24 February 2022, when I stopped at his home while evacuating my children from Kyiv. We were not only seeking safety. We were coordinating how regional media would continue publishing the next morning.” In that moment, resilience was a practical decision, made under pressure, powered by trust, and aimed at preventing paralysis. It also set a tone that many outlets would return to repeatedly: act fast, rely on networks, and keep publishing.

Even with that mobilisation, however, endurance has not been guaranteed. The Lviv Media Forum team stresses that resilience has not been universal. “Not all Ukrainian media outlets managed to remain resilient,” LMF notes, with several hundred forced to shut down or radically change how they operate. And yet the majority have endured. For LMF, a decisive shift came in 2022 with increased international grant support, which became the main source of income for many outlets after commercial revenues collapsed.

A Ukrainian soldier tells Finnish journalists about the consequences of the Russian army’s shelling of a school building in Pokrovsk and shows them the damage.

Author Andriy Dubchak / Frontliner

AIRPPU also underlines that the way support was delivered mattered. They point to flexible international partners who provided direct core funding and “trusted Ukrainian leadership rather than imposing rigid frameworks.” That trust allowed outlets to prioritise what was most urgent, from keeping staff employed and relocating operations to investing in safety and maintaining coverage in high-risk areas.

The Public Interest Journalism Lab (PIJL) adds that resilience has also been shaped by the emotional rhythm of the war itself. When the counteroffensives in Kharkiv and Kherson in 2022 and 2023 brought hope, many newsrooms felt that momentum. As Russian advances and attacks on energy infrastructure intensified in 2025 and 2026, the mood shifted toward discouragement. Even so, PIJL’s Angelina Kariakina says the work continues because there is no one else to do it. In some newsrooms, there is “literally no one to count on, except for the hired staff,” so there is “no sense in asking yourself whether you can keep on going — you just do, because there’s no other way.”

That is why, when our partners speak about what feels most fragile today, they return to capacity instead of formats or platforms. The Ukrainian media sector is still publishing, still adapting, still delivering public-interest reporting under constant fire. But the most vulnerable parts of the system are human, and once they break, they are hard to rebuild.

The Public Interest Journalism Lab (PIJL) is blunt about where the pressure is most acute. “The most fragile, is of course, the people,” Angelina Kariakina says, especially those who have kept working in frontline cities since 2022, including Kharkiv, Dnipro, Zaporizhzhia, Mykolayiv, and Sumy. Many cannot afford to stop, relocate, or take real rest. AIRPPU echoes this, calling “human capacity” the most fragile element across the sector. Burnout, trauma, economic insecurity, and mobilisation are, in AIRPPU’s words, “slowly eroding editorial cores.” AIRPPU also points to a shift in newsroom leadership, with women now forming the majority of newsroom leadership in many regions while carrying additional wartime responsibilities at home. AIRPPU describes this as both a strength and a pressure point, because it concentrates resilience and risk in the same place.

The strain on people is compounded by an information environment that has become more hostile and more technologically accelerated. The team of Women in Media (WiM) highlights another layer of vulnerability that is increasingly hard to contain: online attacks, including harassment amplified by AI-enabled tactics. Female media workers, WiM says, remain exposed to “online attacks, including those using AI technologies,” in an environment where rapid technological development is outpacing regulation.

The Lviv Media Forum (LMF) draws attention to a different kind of fragility that is easier to overlook because it is quieter. LMF argues that niche, thematic media receive “undeservedly little attention and support.” While investigative journalism centres are relatively better positioned due to grant funding, dozens of professional outlets with deep expertise in specific fields are struggling because they do not have large audiences to monetise. Their vulnerability is compounded by limited organisational capacity to prepare and submit large numbers of grant applications, which can leave highly valuable specialist reporting outside the reach of support mechanisms.

Across these perspectives, a second structural vulnerability keeps resurfacing: funding dependency. AIRPPU warns that in several regions donor funding is now the dominant share of budgets, and if emergency-style support declines without structural alternatives, independent regional media will shrink. The most serious risk, AIRPPU argues, is not a sudden collapse but “gradual weakening.” And, as AIRPPU puts it, weakening local journalism ultimately means weakening local democracy.

Looking ahead, partners converge on a shared critique of how support has too often been structured since February 2022. Emergency aid was vital, and for many outlets it was the difference between closing and continuing to publish. But four years into the full-scale war, they argue that what remains missing is a long-term, strategic shift: from short-term crisis funding to durable systems that help independent media stabilise, grow, and integrate into Europe’s media landscape.

AIRPPU frames the gap in stark terms: “Ukraine does not need prolonged emergency media aid. It needs structural integration into the European media ecosystem.” What is missing, in their view, is a coordinated European media recovery and integration facility aligned with Ukraine’s EU accession process. Not another short project cycle, but a 3–5 year multi-donor instrument that combines predictable core funding for independent regional media, investment in rebuilding local advertising markets, safety and insurance mechanisms for journalists, and structured long-term editorial partnerships between Ukrainian and EU outlets.

Andriy Dubchak / Frontliner

Women in Media (WiM) points to another missing piece of sustainability: inclusion and international visibility for women journalists and media workers. WiM notes that despite Ukraine’s integration into global information processes, women remain underrepresented in international discussions, communities, and networks. They also highlight a lack of systemic partnerships with EU media organisations that could support the development of inclusive policies and editorial management. 

Similarly, the team of the Lviv Media Forum (LMF) describes the missing element as a policy shift rather than a single initiative. Support, LMF argues, should focus more clearly on outlets with real potential for growth and self-improvement, that adhere to professional standards and produce high-quality journalism, and that aim not merely to survive but to fulfil functions that matter for society and their audiences.

Ukrainian journalism has already demonstrated resilience through shock, displacement, mobilisation, blackouts, frontline risk, and relentless online attacks. The question now is whether the international ecosystem that supports it will evolve at the same pace. 

If support remains trapped in emergency logic, fragility becomes permanent, burnout deepens, and the slow weakening of local journalism accelerates. If support shifts toward structural integration, long-term partnerships, safety, inclusion, and sustainable funding models, then independent media can do more than endure. They can help shape a post-war Ukraine with stronger institutions, more accountability, and communities that are informed rather than isolated. 

The war is still ongoing, but the foundations of what comes after are being laid in real time, and free, independent journalism is one of those foundations.