I lost my job for telling the truth about Ukraine

By Elena Kostyuchenko

The night the war started, I was having really intense dreams. At one point, I went to the kitchen to have a cigarette. The friend I’d been staying with told me that they were bombing Kyiv. I asked her, “Who?!”

I work at the Novaya Gazeta in Moscow, [Russia’s most prominent independent newspaper]. I got to the office early, but everyone was already there. At the morning meeting, my colleague Ilya Azar and I were chosen to go to Ukraine. My assignment was to write about the southern front of the invasion: Kherson, Mariupol, Mykolaiv and Odessa.