Ukrainian and Russian journalists vie to tell the Trump impeachment story
As President Trump’s impeachment inquiry continues, Ukraine has been thrown into the international spotlight. Timing is everything: the country is also embroiled in debate about Ukrainian President Zelensky’s attempts to restore peace in eastern Ukraine. Which means US journalists are scrambling to ‘explain Ukraine’ to their audiences. And debate is raging over how this should be handled. Who gets to control the country’s narrative? Quick breakdowns of Ukraine often convey it as overflowing with corruption, and remind the reader not to use the prefix “The” when describing the country. “I’m getting tired of hearing about how “corrupt” Ukraine is,” Anne Applebaum tweeted on Thursday. “You know which country is corrupt? The United States.” Ukrainian journalist Maksym Eristavi then fired off a frustrated Twitter outburst after Rachel Maddow broke down the Ukraine peace talks for viewers in a segment, concluding that Ukraine was about to settle the war on Putin’s terms. “That’s exactly the kind of misleading conclusions you arrive at if you don’t rely on native Ukrainian perspectives,” Eristavi tweeted.
I spoke to him about it a few hours later. He describes how his attitude towards this kind of commentary has changed over the years: “When I started out it was a constant frustration point, and now I accept it as a culture,” he said, describing how he does his best to amplify Ukrainian voices in the debate whenever he can. “I try to do my part in breaking some of the myths,” he told me.
Others point out — that’s how it works. Fact-based analysis isn’t a myth because it may run counter to a Ukrainian perspective. American journalists’ job is to help their audience understand complex foreign issues in, crucially, an American context. After all, the impeachment story is an American tale for an American audience, with Zelensky playing Puck to Trump’s Oberon, and the Ukraine war news acting as the play-within-a-play.
But let’s look at this from a different angle: what role does Russia have in all of this? Coda Story’s Katia Patin gave us a rundown of how Russian state media has jumped on the impeachment story, using it as ammunition to create a chasm between Ukraine and Western alliances. Ukrainians are being strongarmed into existing in an “American protectorate,” claims Kremlin-backed TV channel Rossiya-24. “If you follow the main programs on Rossiya-24, you’ll see that what they say is that Ukraine is like a puppet state which can be shuffled around,” Chatham House’s Orysia Lutsevych told Patin on Thursday.