Interfax-Ukraine

• 1. Introduction

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  Interfax-Ukraine opened its doors on the 24th of November 1992, less than a year after Ukraine declared independence. A team of ten people gathered in Kharkiv with a straightforward aim: to cover the political and economic news of a country that had only just come into being. That founding moment raises a question that would follow the agency for decades. Could a news operation built in the shadow of a powerful Russian media group ever claim to be truly independent? And what does it take to earn that claim in a country whose sovereignty was itself still raw and untested?

• 2. From Kharkiv to Kyiv

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  Kharkiv was the birthplace, but Kyiv became the home. In 1993, the year after the agency was founded, Interfax-Ukraine relocated to the capital. That move placed it at the center of Ukraine's political and economic life, where the stories it was built to cover were unfolding fastest. Oleksandr Martynenko led the agency from its founding in 1992 through 1998, returned to the director's chair in 2003, and held that role until his death in 2024. His successor, Yegor Boltrik, inherited an organization that had grown well beyond its original ten-person team. By the end of February 2022, the agency employed 105 people, and its 50-seat press centre had become a fixture of the Ukrainian media landscape.

• 3. Scale and Reach

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  Forty news products across four languages is the scope Interfax-Ukraine offers today. Ukrainian, Russian, English, and German editions allow the agency to serve audiences far beyond Ukraine's borders. That multilingual output attracted the attention of Reuters and Bloomberg, both of which have drawn on Interfax-Ukraine dispatches for their own coverage of the country. Serving as a primary source for two of the world's largest wire services is a signal of the agency's position in the information chain that flows in and out of Ukraine.

• 4. The Independence Question

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  Until around 2013, some sources connected Interfax-Ukraine to the non-state Russian group known as Interfax Information Services. The shared name made the association easy to draw. Interfax Information Services operates partly through an offshore company registered in Cyprus, a detail that deepened suspicion among those who questioned the Ukrainian agency's autonomy. The agency's founder and its employees pushed back on this framing repeatedly. Their explanation was specific: the only things the two organizations share are a foreign sales system and editorial independence from each other. That rebuttal has not fully dissolved the label in all sources, and the question of affiliation remains a thread that surfaces in coverage of the agency.