The Council of Europe provided the grant to the Public Broadcasting Company of Ukraine (UA:PBC) aimed at provision of assistance in technical services for enabling sustainability of UA:PBC’s operation during war and at producing journalistic materials debunking Russian disinformation, namely investigative stories about the alleged crimes of the Russian army against the civilian population of Ukraine.
UA:PBC addressed the Council of Europe with a request and the grant was provided within the Council of Europe Immediate Actions Package/ Project “Support to Safety of Journalists, Media, and of Access to Information”. It enabled provision of the following technical services: renting a private cloud service outside Ukraine, television digitization and signal delivery, subscription for LiveU Goplan streaming services. In addition, investigative stories about the shooting of Ukrainian civilian vehicles by the Russian military during the attempt of being evacuated from the occupied territories of Kyiv region in spring 2022 were produced.
Inna Biletska, editor-in-chief at the News Department of UA:PBC, says that the stories about car shootings in the Kyiv region were shown as part of the national marathon "United News", so they had the maximum coverage among the country's television audience.
"Imagine a mother who learnt that her little son was seriously wounded during the shelling of the village where she had taken him from Kyiv in order not to be exposed to danger. She, her husband, her husband's sister (an anesthesiologist) get into the car and go to save their child. They go through many dangerous areas, check points, turn around and look for other ways. They believe that they will save the boy. They cross the river by ford. They don't have time. The child dies. They take the body and take it across the river on the camp-bed. Then they were taking it home. On their way, their cars are shot by Russian soldiers. The dead child's father's sister dies. It could have been an action drama-thriller with multiple screenplay awards. But this is our life. Nowadays. Kyiv region," says Inna Biletska.
In the process of preparing this project, the team of journalists already has certain results regarding the investigation into one of the alleged war crimes against the civilian population in Kyiv region and, as the editor-in-chief says, shared them with law enforcement and is preparing to share with the audience.
"These stories are about a lot of dead people, including children, women and the elderly persons. All these people have added figures to the terrible statistics of Russian war crimes, but they deserve to be not just statistics. Each of those who were shot by the Russians while trying to be evacuated, to evacuate his/her close persons or complete strangers, was shot, in fact, for trying to survive, deserves his/her life, family, and dreams were known. They deserve it because every life has value. And because none of these crimes should be forgotten or left without the attention of law enforcement officers. These are just 15 stories out of hundreds of similar war crimes that happened in Ukraine. The Russian military massively shot at everything that moved, and this proves that they either had such an order or permission to do so," Inna Biletska resumes.
The stories produced under support of the Council of Europe are available on the Youtube channel of UA:PBC in Ukrainian under the separate play-list “Shot vehicules”.
Previously, the Council of Europe has provided a grant to the Public Broadcasting Company of Ukraine to ensure urgent needs of the company due to Russian aggression against Ukraine, namely to cover accommodation of the staff members relocated from the headquarters in Kyiv and other cities affected by the war to Lviv.
Also the Council of Europe organised an intense online training for system administrators of Ukrainian Public Broadcaster on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system, which included work with Red Hat System Administration I and Red Hat System Administration II.
The Project “Support to Safety of Journalists, Media, and of Access to Information”, including communication strategy for the Prosecutor General’s Office in Ukraine is being implemented under Adjusted Priority Action Plan for Ukraine 2018-2022. It aims to support the Ukrainian media community in addressing current needs and consequences of the Russian aggression and war in Ukraine.
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