Iryna Andreitsiv - attack 29.07.2026

On 29 July 2026, Iryna Andreitsiv, a journalist and editor of the Health section at Lb.ua, published a Facebook post about the killing of a doctor who worked for a military medical commission (VLK) in Kyiv.

“Terrible news. During a VLK examination, a 31-year-old man inflicted fatal injuries on a 65-year-old doctor. She died. Judging by the statements of the Territorial Recruitment Centre, he was a draft evader. Unpunished evil is growing,” the journalist wrote at the beginning of her post.

The post sparked significant reactions from social media users. In particular, some accused the journalist of using the term “draft evader” without sufficient grounds in relation to the man suspected of the crime, claimed there was a “lack of evidence,” and posted comments that could be interpreted as attempts to justify the suspect’s actions.

In her next post, Iryna Andreitsiv reported that after publishing the story she noticed an attack by so-called “bots” on her page:

“The post about the murder of a doctor who worked for the VLK shows that a lot of bots are showing up in the comments. This means that at some point you added them as friends, mistakenly thinking they were real people. I assume that I may also have had some of these accounts left over from my student years without cleaning them up,” the journalist wrote.

In a comment to Women in Media, Iryna Andreitsiv said that various bot accounts under her post were spreading similar messages, including insults such as “journalist whore,” “send her to the front,” and similar rhetoric. She deleted those comments and blocked the accounts that had posted them.

This case demonstrates signs of technology-facilitated gender-based violence (TFGBV), primarily in the forms of misogynistic hate speech, sexist insults, online defamation, and a coordinated online attack. After journalist Iryna Andreitsiv published her post about the killing of the VLK doctor, numerous comments from bot accounts began appearing under it with repeated messages, including insults such as “journalist whore” and other gendered humiliations.

These comments were aimed not at discussing the substance of the post, but at discrediting the journalist as a woman and media professional, undermining trust in her professional position, and creating a hostile online environment.

An additional indicator of TFGBV is the use of a network of bot accounts to mass-distribute similar abusive messages, which may point to elements of a coordinated campaign of psychological pressure and online harassment targeting the journalist.