六合开奖记录

My name is Liudmyla Tiahnyriadno, and I am a host on Ukrainian Radio. I have been working on the radio for almost seven years, since the beginning of the reforming of Ukraine’s National Radio Company into a public interest broadcaster, UA:PBC (now known as Suspilne).

I used to have a programme called Activation, about the development of civil society. I invited public organisations to take initiative, and told stories of how ordinary people can unite and change the country for the better.

Now, since the beginning of the full-scale invasion, everything has completely changed - my work, the content, and my life.

Attempts to cut off communication

At the very beginning, the Kyiv [TV] tower was struck and we understood that the purpose was to completely cut off communication. Without communication, people will be disorganised and will not understand what is happening.

At first, our radio operation was evacuated to Lviv. We moved and broadcast for three months from our Lviv branch.

With the beginning of the war, I returned to my first job, of broadcasting news on the radio. 

You know, at that time I received a lot of messages from acquaintances, friends, even from former classmates, who found me on Instagram, and I received messages saying thank you, it is so important to hear this news. People at that moment were fleeing from Kyiv, and it was not clear what was happening in the city or whether [Russians] had seized power. In certain front-line regions – like Kharkiv region, Kherson region, Donetsk, Luhansk region – in cities that were occupied, or surrounded, the Russians jammed our signal. And that's why sometimes people didn't even know whether the Ukrainian government was still present in the city, whether Kyiv had fallen, what was actually happening.

The [Russian] propaganda on television and radio began immediately and said that the Kyiv government, the Kyiv ‘junta’ - this is what they call our government in their propaganda - had already fled, and that was not true.

A 24-hour-a-day job

In those first months, it was very important for us to constantly produce news content. We referred exclusively to official and verified sources and told what was happening in each region.

For the first months, it was a 24-hour-a day job, with no days off at all.

We had to think about what thematic programmes we could make. What should you do in case of an explosion? What do you do if the windows are blown out of your apartment? Where is the safest place in the apartment, if you don't have a bomb shelter? We informed people about the air raid sirens – so people understood that it is worth hiding and being in shelter when they sounded.

The worst moment

I remember the worst moment was [the siege of] Mariupol. It was important that in addition to the air raid siren information, that we shared the evacuation routes. …The people who still retain their wired radios [an old-fashioned Soviet-style radio) would have a small radio receiver extended into the antenna and it would catch the signal.

I remember how we informed people about the first evacuation routes from the occupied territories. As soon as the official information appeared on the Telegram channels, we reported this information on the radio, within a few minutes. We repeated this information every 20 minutes.

After a while, we realised that the Russians were shelling those evacuation points where people were gathering. And we had to think about how to make it so that, on the one hand, we could tell people that there will be an evacuation, so they might take advantage of it. And on the other hand, we wanted not to expose them to danger. …For example, the locals knew where such and such a corner was, not a street corner, but where a certain shop was. We came up with ways to inform them about evacuation routes in a way that the locals could understand and the occupiers could not understand, so that they would not start shelling.

Lives saved

For me, this is the biggest thing. If there is a person whose life has been saved with the help of our work, then that is of the highest value.

My mother’s friend had a sister in Borodyanka,  which was under occupation at the beginning of the war. She and other relatives and friends were hiding in the basement from the Russian occupiers They were completely in the occupied territory in the region, and they were completely out of touch, They hardly had mobile internet. They constantly saw tanks, they knew about the murders of their fellow villagers. And they said that the only thing that kept them going was that they were listening to Ukrainian radio on the receiver. They heard my last name, and they knew it because my mother is their friend, They wrote to me that they were just waiting every half hour for the news.

And tears came to my eyes when I heard this. They survived because they heard messages from the Ukrainian side, and they knew that Kyiv had not fallen, that they would be released.

It seems to me that now it is very important not only to be in the news marathon (a 24-hour TV 'marathon' of major TV networks), to report current information, but it is also important to look for new formats of reporting about the country and about our people. It's so that we do not forget this, so that the world can see exactly who we are and about all the war crimes Russia commits, so that the guilty are punished. Ukraine now has a huge demand for justice, which it does not have yet. …

It's scary. There is no understanding of what will happen in a year. But there is an understanding of what you want to happen tomorrow and what you want to happen a year from now.

So now we have to tell people to build this perspective, and come up with what Ukraine will do after the return of these territories. What do we want to see for Kherson, and what do we want for Donetsk Oblast? People should understand that there is a future and there is a plan.

Surviving consequences of war

Recently, we talked about how to help people survive the consequences of war. This is one of our main tasks, and helping to clarify what a person feels. Psychological help is also needed for them. For example, maybe someone is afraid of mobilisation [into the Ukrainian military]. What do you do if you have been mobilised? Maybe there are people who lost their relatives, how do you survive the loss of relatives in the war? How do you survive the loss of a child? And how do you explain to a child that she had a limb amputated? We have to help her come to terms with her thoughts, and to understand that she has survived and should continue to live.

I think there are other such topics that people really think about and worry about, It touches them, and they may be looking for answers. The radio is exactly what can help find answers to these questions. And when you are armed with this information, you can use it for psychological help and support for yourself.

I think the main task of radio during the war is providing a complete picture of what is happening in the country and bringing this information to people as much as possible. It seems to me that every Ukrainian in every village, town, and city could hear Ukrainian news, receive analysis, and receive answers to their questions. And listening to the radio, they feel that this country and these people have a tomorrow. Because it's very difficult when you've lost your home, when you've lost your family. A person may have the feeling that their whole life is over, that there's nothing to live for.

But it is not so. Here we tell the stories of people who carry on, for example, because of their trauma and because of their pain, they started helping other people. And every other person saved is like a contribution.

What is currently being heard on our radio airwaves, it seems to me that this will be history in one hundred years. This will all be a reminder that we lived in this war. And this is documentary evidence and documentary stories that we create. Even after the Second World War, those war criminals who committed crimes were sometimes punished in their old age. That's why we need to preserve all the testimonies and all the interviews. These facts are for those times, when it will be for history for our archive, and…that these will also, perhaps, be evidence in court.

Liudmyla Tiahnyriadno is a reporter/presenter for Ukrainian Radio currently living in Kyiv. She is also the producer of , a documentary about the 256 days of Russian occupation of Kherson.

This interview has been edited and abridged for clarity. 

六合开奖记录 Media Action has been working with Ukraine's public broadcaster, UA:PBC (now Suspilne), since 2015, on capacity-strengthening and Lifeline training during wartime. This work is most recently funded by the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office. Read more about our work in Ukraine.