Maryna Mukhina is a freelance journalist specializing in the temporarily occupied territories. Posts containing sexualized harassment and hate speech have been appearing on the Starobelsk Aidar.site Telegram channel for several years in a row.
“Posts of that kind started emerging here and there in April 2022, after I attended an anti-Russian rally. They saw me in a video and spread the news, calling to ‘denazify’ me,” Maryna Mukhina said in her comment to Women in Media.
Before the full-scale war, Maryna lived in Starobilsk, Luhansk region. On March 27, 2022, she left for Tbilisi, Georgia. She lived there for a year, working as an intern at International Partnership for Human Rights and writing articles about life under occupation and war crimes for Skhidnyi Variant and Hromadske. In July 2023, she returned to Ukraine.
“They started tracking my activities. Those posts appeared right before I left the occupied town. But my family still lives there — my parents, younger brother and sister, and my grannies. They drew my family’s attention to those texts, even though they had been closely monitored even before that,” Maryna Mukhina said.
There are posts on the Telegram channel in Russian using expressions such as ‘foolnalist,’ ‘cunt,’ ‘stupid provincial Nazi sucking up from foreign media junk piles,’ ‘bigmouthed frog with dirty hair,’ and so on. All those posts may have been triggered by Maryna Mukhina’s professional activity. For example, one appeared on Telegram after she won the People of Action 2024 contest for journalistic materials.
Recently, Women in Media NGO has launched a platform to document cases of online violence against Ukrainian journalists targeted for their professional activities. From now on, the interactive map allows users to track and analyze such attacks, helping to assess the scale of the problem and work toward its resolution.
If you, as a journalist, have been subjected to an online attack or witnessed such an incident, your information is extremely important. Report the case to help us identify threats and protect women’s rights in the media. Fill out the form, share key details, and participate in creating a more secure information environment.
If you have experienced an online attack and need support, we are ready to help. Get free cybersecurity advice, psychological support, legal aid, or other necessary assistance on request. Do not hesitate to contact us at ngo.womeninmedia@gmail.com
This initiative is supported by the Dutch Foreign Ministry as part of the project “Strengthening the Resilience of Women Journalists in Ukraine: Combating Online Violence and Gendered Disinformation,” implemented by the Women in Media NGO.