Last week I spent an hour on Zoom in conversation with two remarkable, brave women. The editor of the Kyiv Independent, Olga Rudenko, is on the front of Time magazine this week as one of their “next generation leaders”. Her passionate chief executive Daryna Shevchenko, whose phone was constantly blasting air raid warnings as we spoke, laughed darkly that she should be locking herself in the bathroom for safety. Rudenko was stationed that week not far from the Donetsk region, seeing family she is increasingly concerned about, as fierce fighting moves ever closer. We often talk about resilience in leaders. These journalists epitomise it.
The story of the Kyiv Independent is remarkable for many reasons. Last November, Rudenko — who had spent a decade working at the Kyiv Post, one of the few English language outlets in Ukraine — had left to take up a fellowship at the University of Chicago’s Stigler Centre and didn’t know if she would return. There had been rising tensions between the reporters and the paper’s proprietor, real estate developer Adnan Kivan, who had paid millions for the influential, loss-making publication.
