“Overnight, we all became war correspondents. »
It was February 24. Russia launched its offensive in Ukraine and the sirens sounded for the first time in kyiv. That day, the twenty journalists from the Kyiv Independent left as one man to cover this war, regardless of whether they had been an economic journalist, columnist or cultural reporter the day before.
“We didn’t really ask ourselves the question,” explains Alexander Query. The war occupied all the news, we rushed to talk about it from all angles. Even my colleague who was in charge of fashion started doing portraits of war widows. And paradoxically, this war gives us more freedom and allows us to explore new formats, which we did not dare to experiment before. »
This Frenchman born in the Southwest did not wait for the Russian invasion to reach Ukraine. From 2014, then a journalism student dreaming of becoming a war correspondent, he was passionate about the insurgents of Maidan Square. But he will have to wait until 2016, when Ukraine no longer interested many people, to land in kyiv without even speaking a word of Ukrainian or reading the Cyrillic alphabet.
“Arriving at the airport, I had five minutes of hesitation. I wondered what I was doing. But it didn’t last. I was quickly swept away by events. I made a bunch of Ukrainian friends, who adopted me. Ukraine has an ancient culture, but its society is very young, and one integrates quickly. It is a country where everything is to be written. »
The stranglehold of the oligarchs
Yesterday as today, the media landscape is dominated by great oligarchs, such as Rinat Akhmetov, Ihor Kolomoisky or Petro Poroshenko, says the journalist. “But we must distinguish between those who use the media to make profits and those who use them for political purposes. That’s why Zelensky shut down the chains of Putin-linked Viktor Medvedchuk, who was openly advocating surrender behind a disguised peace plan. »
According to Alexander Query, at the beginning of the war, however, the situation of the press no longer had anything to do with that time when journalists who investigated power could be beheaded in a clearing or killed in the explosion of their car in full kyiv. “Nevertheless, at the time of the invasion of Ukraine, without necessarily risking their lives, some journalists could still find themselves under pressure and discover microphones in their homes. But it is above all the perception of journalists that has changed. Today, if a journalist is threatened by the henchmen of an oligarch, we will defend him. It was much less the case before. »
the Kyiv Independent was created in 2021 on the initiative of its editor-in-chief, Olga Rudenko, and journalists dismissed from the editorial staff of the Kyiv Post. By closing this newspaper, its owner, the oligarch Adnan Kivan, wanted to muzzle the editorial staff, with which he had been in conflict for months.
Like its predecessor, the Kyiv Independent is published in English. The newspaper therefore primarily targets foreign readers, often members of the large Ukrainian diaspora (including a large number of Canadians). But the newspaper is also read inside the country. With more than two million followers on Twitter, at the height of the invasion it reached more than 100,000 visits per day.
“We couldn’t decently leave the only voice in English in the hands of an oligarch,” says Alexander Query. We needed a newspaper that could be read everywhere, that respected journalistic ethics and that depended neither on the power in place nor on an oligarch. »
Information warfare
Those who want to get an idea of the day-to-day war can browse through the collection of articles in the Kyiv Independent published these days by journalists Maria Poblete and Frédéric Ploquin (Logbook of the Ukrainian resistance, New world). It describes the women who gave birth under the bombs as well as the Boutcha massacres and the daily life of volunteer combatants from abroad.
Everywhere, war is synonymous with propaganda. But Alexander Query differentiates between “the Kremlin’s aggressive and misleading propaganda” and what he calls “kyiv’s communication strategy, which is more transparent, even if it overdoes it, to the point of sometimes being a little heroic anything “. The most beautiful example is the “ghost of Kyiv”. This outstanding aviator would have shot down six Russian planes alone on the first day of the offensive. Unfortunately, we never found his trace.
Urban legend or propaganda? Probably a little of both, believes the journalist. “In times of war, there are obviously secrets related to operations. As for the Russian casualty figures, those of the dead are no doubt inflated, but those of the material are quite easily verifiable. Of course, Ukraine does not always reveal its losses, but if it started lying brazenly, we would know: we all know someone who is on the front lines. »
Ukrainian identity
To describe the abuses of the Russian army, he does not hesitate to use the word “genocide”, which is nevertheless disputed by many experts. According to him, “an article that leaked a week or two after the Russians tried to surround kyiv exposes a real genocidal program”. “After the capture of kyiv, it was planned to eliminate the Ukrainian elites and to substitute the use of Russian for Ukrainian. We have testimonies of mass rapes by Russian soldiers in Irpin and Boutcha,” he said.
Genocide or not, the journalist believes that today we are faced with a conflict that risks dragging on. Even if, he says, “Russia has not given up on invading kyiv, otherwise it would not strike it yet”.
While the Russians use it as an argument to justify their invasion, Alexander Query defends the decision taken by the Ukrainian government in 2017 to make Ukrainian (a language long marginalized by Russian) the one and only language of education in the country. Even in Russian-speaking regions. It is normal that “Ukraine works in Ukrainian, like France works in French”, he says.
In an interview, the Ukrainian poet and writer Serhiy Jadan told him that in Kharkiv, where a large part of the population has family in Russia, Russian speakers are increasingly converting to Ukrainian. “Russian has always been the language of the colonizer, but with the invasion it has become the language of the invaders. The populations react by embracing the Ukrainian identity. Once you see Russian tanks marching past and soldiers raping women, Russian isn’t so welcome. Today, a majority of Ukrainians declare that Ukrainian is their mother tongue: this is a radical change. Anyway, we were always forced to learn Russian…”
Having left six years ago, Alexander Query does not seem about to return to France. Ukraine, whose national and cultural turmoil fascinates him, has somehow become his homeland.