When I met Lyubov Rakovitsa, she was coming off a 12-hour workday at the Kyiv office of the Donetsk Institute of Information. Tall, with stick-straight blonde hair and a resolute air about her, Rakovitsa is 40 but looks much younger.

“We’re a Russian-speaking media,” Rakovitsa told me as we settled in at the lobby bar of the InterContinental hotel in central Kyiv, now a hub for foreign journalists reporting on the war as the world looks on. Born and raised in Mariupol, Rakovitsa is also in the business of storytelling, but her audience is closer to the action than most.

The Institute’s online newsroom, News of Donbas, is aimed at people in Ukraine’s Russia-occupied territories.

“In order to reach our audience, we don’t use hate speech,” Rakovitsa told me. “We use the principles of conflict-sensitive journalism, and we don’t label people as orcs and Rashists,” she said, referring to the slang epithets that many Ukrainian media now use to describe Russian soldiers fighting in Ukraine.