War correspondent and freelance journalist Anna Kaliuzhna, also known by her pen name An Zhulak, spoke to Women in Media about how public threats have shaped her life and career and how she has responded.
Anna Kaliuzhna, collage by Women in Media
Case one: 2024
On June 19, 2024, Anna Kaliuzhna published a Facebook post about the situation at the front near Avdiivka. The post was a response to a piece by TV presenter Yanina Sokolova calling for additional reserves to be sent to the 3rd Separate Assault Brigade (now the 3rd Army Corps) in light of intense combat activity.
Kaliuzhna explains that she felt compelled to respond because she had been observing a pattern of public appeals aimed at influencing decisions by the military command. In her post, she also noted that other units of the Armed Forces of Ukraine had been holding their positions for extended periods without similar public pressure campaigns, and expressed concern about the potential impact of media pressure on personnel decisions at the front.
According to Kaliuzhna, the post initially drew support from some colleagues and people involved in military communications. At the same time, it triggered a wave of reaction on social media.
Threats and online harassment — private messages to her phone and separate public posts — began pouring in. The comments contained hate speech, sexist abuse directed at Kaliuzhna, and direct threats against her parents, including: “Your mom and dad will die with a stick up their ass while you watch,” and “Wait for us to meet — you’ll die in agony.”
On June 19, 2024, Kaliuzhna published a separate Facebook post documenting the threats she had received:
“I am being threatened with murder, and they are threatening to rape my parents in front of my eyes. This most horrific and disgusting threat came after ‘promises’ that I would pay ‘for my crime’ from Dmytro Kukharchuk, battalion commander in the 3rd Separate Assault Brigade and a member of the Supreme Council of the National Corps party — after he declared me ‘an enemy for life’ from his Facebook account, and after I received a message from his old personal phone number asking ‘Haven’t kicked the bucket yet?’ Kukharchuk’s reaction to the most disgusting threat against my parents (which, based on my information, was likely sent by one of his subordinates) was: ‘Maybe it’s because you devalued their heroism?’“ she wrote.
Kaliuzhna also told Women in Media that during that period she received calls from unknown numbers. One man who called identified himself as a serviceman and said the 3rd Assault Brigade had once helped him. The conversation started calmly, but, according to Kaliuzhna, turned into threats. Once her post was picked up by media outlets, the calls stopped.
Kaliuzhna subsequently filed a complaint with law enforcement. On June 20, 2024, police opened criminal proceedings under the articles on “Obstruction of journalistic activity” and “Threats against a journalist’s family members.” She also says she noticed signs of possible covert surveillance of herself during this period.
“There were many loud statements from various media figures in Ukraine and those responsible for freedom of speech saying this case was under their control. In reality, no one was controlling anything — absolutely nothing. There were no requests to the police, nothing. The whole thing ended up with the police dumping the case in some small town in Mykolaiv Region, where it has been sitting ever since with no movement: no forensic examination has been carried out, no analysis of the phone numbers used to send the threats,” Kaliuzhna says in her conversation with Women in Media. [Editorial note: these claims are made by the journalist; Women in Media has no means of independently verifying them.]
Anna Kaliuzhna and her colleagues, she says, managed to identify the service members who sent the threats within a matter of days. She notes, however, that as of now, law enforcement has in her assessment produced no results from the investigation.
“The state has, I think, shown in full measure how capable it is of protecting its citizens. And here we’re talking about me — a journalist with a certain public profile. What then about people who don’t have that kind of media presence, public recognition, or support, and face situations like this?” she says.
Case two: two years later
In March 2026, Kaliuzhna says, she faced online attacks and threats for the second time. On March 5, she published a Facebook post criticizing Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine Oleksandr Syrskyi, writing that in her view he was responsible for “channeling the entire Ukrainian army into his assault NON-forces under the deafening silence of everyone involved.”
In the same post, she drew attention to the commanding officer of the 225th Assault Regiment, Oleh Shyriaiev, stating that in her assessment he “effectively commands a division.”
This assessment was, in fact, consistent with information Shyriaiev himself had given in an interview with TSN journalists: that the 225th Separate Assault Regiment under his command had grown to roughly 15 battalions — a scale that could correspond to a division. As Kaliuzhna notes, however, the unit has not been formally upgraded even to brigade level. She says the same situation applies to the assault regiment Skelia.
Kaliuzhna told Women in Media that she had raised this issue publicly before — first writing about the risks of scaling up individual assault regiments in September of the previous year, in a piece for Texty.org.ua. She notes that she does not generally favor reporting based on anonymous sources, but in this case had no alternative: the scaling-up had been announced publicly, while service members from other units were sending her reports of potential rights violations and significant losses. Her sources, she says, agreed to be quoted only on condition of anonymity.
“Unfortunately, the sources were willing to speak only anonymously because of those regiments’ closeness to the Commander-in-Chief,” she told Women in Media.
By March 6, Kaliuzhna had already reported on Facebook that threats were coming in.
“In a night and half a day, over 150 messages in my inbox, mostly from closed or empty profiles. Most identify themselves as service members from the ‘225.’ Some as ‘friends of friends.’ The comments are mostly misogynistic: ‘go cook your borsch,’ ‘back to the kitchen,’ and so on. Also a lot of ‘do you even know how things work?’ I do. ‘You’ve never been with us’ (funny, because I have). Some are completely identical — clearly copy-pasted from a mass message,” she wrote in her post.
Asked how the situation affected her personally, Kaliuzhna says these incidents force her to spend a significant amount of her own time on actions that should, in her view, fall within the remit of law enforcement and other responsible authorities.
“If instead of driving to the front to film reports and write pieces exposing human rights violations in certain units, I had spent my time bombarding the police with constant petitions — maybe the results in the first threats case would have been better. But I’m the victim here, so that shouldn’t be my job.”
Then, on March 17, Kaliuzhna reported on Facebook that she had received a threat from an unknown man on the street, near a supermarket. She drew particular attention to the fact that the man addressed her by name.
“Near the supermarket, a man seemingly passing by said to me: ‘Ania, maybe you’ll shut your mouth already?’ — and then asked if I understood,” Kaliuzhna recalls.
After this incident, she filed a report with the police, believing that physical intimidation could fall under Article 171(2) of the Criminal Code of Ukraine — obstruction of the lawful professional activity of journalists.
The relevant provision reads: “Influence in any form on a journalist with the intent of obstructing the performance of their professional duties, or persecution of a journalist in connection with their lawful professional activity, shall be punishable by a fine of up to two hundred tax-free minimum incomes, or probationary supervision for up to four years, or restriction of liberty for the same term.”
On March 20, 2026, it became known that police had opened criminal proceedings under Article 129 of the Criminal Code — making threats of murder, not linked to professional journalistic activity. The case was subsequently reclassified under Article 171 — obstruction of journalistic activity.
What makes these cases difficult — and how to pursue justice
Attorney Olha Veretilnyk identifies what she considers the main obstacles to investigating cases of this kind. First, she says, the mere willingness of law enforcement to investigate is usually not enough on its own. If for whatever reason they simply do not want to do so, compelling them to act using the tools available under Ukraine’s Code of Criminal Procedure is extremely resource-intensive.
The second problem is the statute of limitations for criminal liability in such cases. As practice shows, the time available may prove insufficient for Ukraine’s judicial system to complete a trial — even if charges are brought against someone.
A further difficulty is proving the connection to journalistic activity. Court records mostly contain verdicts in relatively straightforward cases — for instance, where a journalist identified themselves as such, sought to ask questions or film something, and was physically assaulted or had their camera taken away.
“One can assume that less obvious and harder-to-prove cases — such as threats from anonymous accounts — simply never reach court. The problem in such cases is establishing the link between the incident and the journalist’s professional activity,” she explains.
Commenting on the first case — specifically the transfer of the investigation to Mykolaiv Region — Olha Veretilnyk notes that as a general rule, investigations are conducted at the place where the crime was committed. If the location is unknown, the prosecutor determines where the pre-trial investigation will be conducted based on where the most witnesses reside, where the greatest evidence of the offense has been found, where the suspect is located, where the crime was completed, or where its consequences materialized.
“In our situation involving threats, the place of the crime is unknown. Clearly, the prosecutor has very broad discretion in determining where to investigate. The case could perfectly well be investigated in Kyiv — that too would be sufficiently justified. There are indeed instances where cases are sent to police stations to die. That could very well have happened in Anna Kaliuzhna’s case, given the absence of any progress or outcome,” she stresses.
According to Liza Kuzmenko, head of Women in Media NGO, this case illustrates a typical situation in which a woman journalist is left essentially on her own to deal with threats and fight for a response from law enforcement.
“We can see that after the wave of publicity, the threats against Anna Kaliuzhna stopped — and that shows that public attention can make a difference. That is why it is important not to stay silent about such cases: to write about them publicly, to go to the media, to document every incident,” she says.
At the same time, she notes, publicity alone does not solve the problem: “The fact that a journalist is forced to spend her time documenting threats and communicating with police instead of doing her work — that in itself is part of the problem. In many such cases, we see no tangible progress or outcome.”
Women in Media emphasizes that cases like this show signs of obstruction of journalistic activity, but in practice their investigation is often drawn out or produces virtually no results.
According to the study Her Voice, Their Target: Gendered Online Violence Against Ukrainian Women Journalists, conducted by Women in Media NGO together with UNESCO in 2025, 81% of the 180 media women surveyed reported experiencing some form of online violence. Of those, 14% said threats had crossed from the digital into the physical dimension. Only 19% had turned to law enforcement for help.
If you are a journalist who has experienced online violence and needs support, write to ngo.womeninmedia@gmail.com. Women in Media NGO provides information support, free cybersecurity consultations, psychological assistance, legal support, and other help on request.