On the occasion of the Journalist’s Day, the Museum hosted a thematic meeting with TSN war correspondents Nataliia Nahorna and Oleksandr Motornyi.
In his opening speech, Yurii Savchuk, the Director General of the War Museum, thanked the journalists for their important work: ’You, the media, are fulfilling an important mission – you convey information, and this is how you shape historical memory today.’
Our guests shared their extensive experience of media coverage of the war and the emotions they experienced when recording the heroic struggle of the Ukrainian Defence Forces. They focused on the realities of the frontline areas. Both correspondents have been working on the topic of war for many years. Oleksandr Motornyi recalled how, back in 2008, he was documenting the events of russian aggression in Georgia and was captured by the invaders in Tskhinvali. Even then, one of the russian security forces told the journalist that Ukraine was next.
Nataliia Nahorna recalled the frequent words of her military acquaintances who, even before the full-scale russian invasion, were convinced that the russians were scaling up their expansion after the occupation of Crimea and parts of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions.
The event was moderated by the Museum’s researcher Liubov Krupnyk. Students from the Faculty of Journalism at the National University of Life and Environmental Sciences of Ukraine participated in the conversation. The frank discussion allowed the audience to learn about the peculiarities of war correspondents’ work, its challenges, prospects, and risks, and, most importantly, to realize the indispensability of this profession for recording the history of the war in real time and spreading the truth about it.
