Every journalist has a story they return to when things fall apart. For Andrii Dikhtiarenko, that story is Luhansk.
It is over ten years that Andrii has lived in his hometown of occupied Luhansk. At first, he imagined he’d go home soon. He imagined walking his old office, brushing the dust off the equipment they’d salvaged in 2014, and beginning again.
“I thought we’d go back in a few months,” he says. Instead, he built a newsroom for the long haul.
Realna Gazeta, the paper he founded in 2013, just months before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and subsequent occupation of Luhansk and Donetsk, is now one of the only Ukrainian outlets still reporting from inside Russian-occupied territories. Its reporters, some anonymous even to their colleagues, operate undercover in Luhansk. The rest are scattered across Ukraine, from Dnipro to Kyiv, where Dikhtiarenko leads a kind of shadow editorial team: coordinating, editing, protecting, believing.
“Our superpower is professionalism,” he says. “Journalism from the front lines, informed by years of experience. We know how to survive. We know how to tell the truth.”
In the official histories of the war in Ukraine, Luhansk has already faded. It is occupied by Russia, yes — but also obscured. National media, once eager to cover the region, have moved on. The Ukrainian government has dismantled the Ministry for Reintegration of the Temporarily Occupied Territories. The functions were split, diluted. “Now no one really responds,” Andrii says. “There’s historical inertia. It’s easier to look away.”
But Luhansk hasn’t gone silent — not entirely. Its voice, these days, is quieter, harder to detect.
In the Russia-occupied territories, following Realna Gazeta on Telegram or TikTok can be dangerous. Subscriptions leave a trace. Bookmarks don’t. That simple act — saving a short explainer or documentary under the radar — has become one of the few safe ways to engage.
And for Andrii’s team, it has become a signal. “We track them obsessively,” he says. “It’s how we know we’re still reaching people.”
That’s why Realna Gazeta started making explainers about property rights under occupation, about Russian passports, about how to stay safe. These are not the breaking news stories that make global headlines. But they’re the ones people inside Luhansk bookmark.
“We made an explainer on TikTok, and we saw that a lot of people saved it,” says Andrii. “They want to find it again. Show it to someone. That little video becomes something they pass on — quietly, but intentionally.”
This, in a way, is the new front line: one built on metadata, not maps. While the world waits for the war to end, Andrii is reporting from a liminal space — from a future that hasn’t arrived yet, but must be imagined into being.
You don’t get to build this kind of operation without running risks. Andrii is blunt about this.
There are no Signal messages. No names. No file transfers. Reporters inside the occupation speak only to designated go-betweens. Most of the Kyiv-based team doesn’t even know who’s in the field. Not out of secrecy, but protection. “The less we know, the safer we all are,” he shrugs. Even getting money into the occupied areas requires subterfuge. “There are ways,” he says, “but we don’t talk about them.”
What they do talk about is mental health — or at least, try to. Some in the team work with psychologists. Others, like Andrii, don’t. “It’s not the culture I grew up in,” he admits. “We try to manage it on our own.”
He pauses. “But it’s hard. Everyone has relatives still there. Some have fled twice. And we wake up every day and ask: Is it worth doing this today?”
And the answer is yes.
It’s not the war that changed Realna Gazeta the most. It was the US funding crisis.
After the collapse of US support in 2025, the paper nearly folded. A promised grant didn’t materialise. Staff weren’t paid. “We were close to stopping,” Andrii says. “Then EED came in. They were the first major funder to believe in us again”.
With EED’s support, the team began rebuilding not just their operations but their imagination. A new website. A merchandise line co-created with artisans from Luhansk. A strategic retreat with displaced community leaders to plan for the region’s post-occupation future.
“We had to stop thinking like a temporary newsroom,” he says. “We’re not waiting anymore. We’re preparing.”
The outlet is now producing commercial analytical reports about the processes in occupied territories of Ukraine for international clients. It runs a video studio in Kyiv. It helped launch Occupied.Media, a bilingual site featuring stories from across Ukrainian territories illegally seized by Russia. The newsroom is no longer just a media outlet. It’s a memory bank. A policy actor. A soft infrastructure of the future.
When asked who he admires, Dikhtiarenko names Stas Aseyev, the Ukrainian journalist who reported from Russian-occupied Donetsk — until he was captured and imprisoned for over two years. “Very brave,” he says. “Maybe even reckless. He wrote openly while in occupation, staying in Makiivka. It was easy for him to be exposed. But he did it anyway.”
In many ways, Aseyev’s story mirrors the risks Realna Gazeta takes every day. But where Aseyev wrote alone, Andrii has built an ecosystem — anonymous voices, careful protocols, and a kind of journalism that doesn’t shout, but endures.
In the early days, Andrii used to believe in return. In liberation. In a clear ending. He doesn’t say that anymore. He talks instead about responsibility.
“It’s difficult to report on these topics in the long run,” he says. “But when things get really hard, we remember our mission — we are here because no one else will tell these stories.”
That’s the quiet pivot in his thinking — and in the identity of Realna Gazeta itself. They’re not just reporting on Luhansk. They’re keeping its existence legible. They are the living archive of a place erased from the map, but not from the record.
And that — more than hope, more than peace talks — might be what liberation actually looks like.
This article reflects the views of the grantees featured and does not necessarily represent the official opinion of the EED.
This initiative was supported thanks to the contribution of the European Commission to EED.
