Yevheniia Virlych - attack 19.04.2025

On April 19, 2025, journalist and editor-in-chief of Kavun.City Yevheniia Virlych published a Facebook post sharing that she regularly receives threats because of her professional activities.

She illustrated her post with a screenshot of a comment from user Konstantin Ryzhenko, who called her “the fiercest fighter for a spot near the mayors’ flies” and wrote: “just don’t drink yourself into a stupor again, I barely recognized you in Kyiv last time.”

“These narratives that I supposedly drink, and someone saw me drunk somewhere are the usual tunes of Kherson’s traitors, most of whom already have pending charges or convictions. When the Kherson vata collaborators can’t think of anything else to smear someone with, they resort to stories about drinking,” Yevheniia Virlych wrote on her page.

In a comment to Women in Media, the journalist stated that such threats and harassment are systematic and have been ongoing since 2018. She had previously contacted law enforcement, but these reports yielded no results:

“When I see threats, I only react with public disclosure. Unfortunately, no reports to the police or the SSU have resulted in anything effective. Even the story of a real attack on me in 2018 was prolonged precisely by the police (!) (the investigator violated the deadlines for referring the case to court, which led to the indictment being returned, and court proceedings were delayed for a year due to procedural issues). The experience of my colleagues indicates roughly the same. Over the past year, this is the second time I’ve been threatened with murder or ‘warned’ about the ‘consequences’ of my work,” Yevheniia Virlych noted.