Inna Vedernykova - attack 21.07.2025

Editor of Dzerkalo Tyzhnia Inna Vedernykova reported a disinformation campaign targeting her and her family in anonymous Telegram channels. She shared this information on her Facebook page on July 17.

According to Vedernykova, this is already the second wave of targeted attacks directed at her personally, the media outlet where she has worked for over 20 years, and her husband, a serviceman in the Armed Forces of Ukraine. She suspects the campaign may be orchestrated by government representatives or individuals affected by Dzerkalo Tyzhnia’s investigations — particularly those involving lawyers named in a case concerning unlawful interference in the Unified State Register of Court Decisions.

One of the anonymous Telegram channels, “Joker,” which had over 122,000 subscribers as of July 2025, published a series of posts about Vedernykova, her family, and Dzerkalo Tyzhnia.

The majority of posts do not critique her professionally as a journalist. Instead, she is discredited through gendered narratives — portrayed as “the wife of a criminal” or “someone shielding her husband.” Her own journalistic work is questioned based on personal and family associations — a common tactic of gender-based pressure.

Posts mock her behavior, editing style, and imply she is “sleep-deprived” or “mentally unstable.” They include offensive AI-generated images with zoomorphic features (e.g., a “pig’s face”), which constitute a form of visual degradation.

Phrases such as “two-faced,” “grant-hustling crowd,” “media pigsty,” “hiding your husband,” “you’ll go to jail” combine hate speech, humiliation, and gendered insults that question her professionalism and moral standing. She is diminished as a “pseudo-journalist,” implying her work lacks value because she is “protecting her husband.”

Vedernykova claims the campaign is not limited to online attacks — she has already received a call from a prosecutor, and law enforcement has shown interest in her husband. “This could not have happened without involvement from those in power,” she wrote.

In her Facebook post, she publicly addressed the accusations concerning her husband, Volodymyr Reznikov. She explained that while he was subject to lustration as a former deputy head of the traffic police, he voluntarily joined a volunteer military unit after the full-scale invasion and established a training ground near Kyiv, which trained over 10,000 soldiers and volunteers.

Vedernykova noted that her husband is now facing criminal charges related to the illegal possession of weapons. She believes this is a provocation intended to sabotage the work of the training ground. After investigations began, the training site was shut down, and her husband formally joined the Armed Forces of Ukraine.

“The anonymous channel is actively encouraging others to ‘subscribe,’ reinforcing the image of a ‘guilty’ journalist who must be ‘exposed,’ ‘jailed,’ and ‘silenced.’ This fosters an atmosphere of hostility, intimidation, and public shaming that produces a chilling effect on her journalistic activity. These publications show signs of a coordinated discrediting campaign using gender-based online violence. The aim is to intimidate the journalist, provoke self-censorship, and undermine trust in her work and her professional standing,” said Liza Kuzmenko, Head of the NGO Women in Media.

Women in Media has launched an initiative to document cases of online violence targeting Ukrainian women journalists for their professional work. With the help of an interactive map, such attacks can now be tracked and analyzed — a step that will help expose the scale of the problem and support efforts to counter it.

This case is documented as part of the initiative “Strengthening the Resilience of Women Journalists in Ukraine: Combating Online Violence and Gendered Disinformation”, implemented by Women in Media with the support of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands.