Kyiv Post

• 1. Introduction

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  Kyiv Post launched its first 16-page issue on the 18th of October 1995, printed in English in a country where the Soviet Union had collapsed just a few years before. An American businessman named Jed Sunden started it with $8,000, three computers, and seven staff members working out of a small flat in the Ukrainian capital. Two people put out that first edition. What grew from that modest flat would become Ukraine's most prominent English-language newspaper, watched by millions of readers on every continent. The questions worth sitting with are these: how did a scrappy weekly survive oligarchs, libel suits, a global recession, and a newsroom mutiny? And what does it mean for a paper born in Kyiv to declare itself Ukraine's global voice?

• 2. A Founder and His Vision

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  Sunden built the Kyiv Post into a profitable enterprise during the uncertain years after Ukraine gained independence. He held libertarian and anti-Communist views on the opinion pages, but he separated those views sharply from the news desk, where he insisted on editorial independence. He was upfront that this policy was good for business as well as for journalism. The expatriate community flooding into Ukraine in those years saw the country as a potential investment hotspot, and the Kyiv Post served their need for reliable English-language information. Sunden was also controversial: he permitted paid advertisements from women offering escort services, a practice that would become one of the first things his successor removed. By the time Sunden stepped back in 2009, the editorial staff had shrunk to twelve people, the paper had returned to its original 16-page count, and print distribution had fallen to 6,000 copies, a sign of how hard the Great Recession had struck.

• 3. The Zahoor Years

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  On the 28th of July 2009, British businessman Mohammad Zahoor purchased the Kyiv Post from Sunden's KP Media. Zahoor owned the ISTIL Group and had previously been a steel mill owner in Donetsk. His first public act as publisher was to pull the escort advertisements from the paper, stating he did not want to own a publication that promoted such services. He kept the entire editorial team intact and pledged in an August 2009 interview with the paper itself to revive it and honour its tradition of editorial independence. Zahoor invested in journalists, pushed the page count up to 32 pages through much of 2010-2011, and improved the quality of newsprint. The paper never regained consistent profitability under his ownership, as print advertising continued to shrink. To offset losses, the paper developed special publications such as the Legal Quarterly, a Real Estate supplement, a Doing Business supplement, and events including the annual Tiger Conference. An affiliated nongovernmental organisation called the Media Development Foundation also raised money for independent journalism. The limits of that independence were tested in 2010 when Ukrainian billionaire Dmytro Firtash filed a libel lawsuit in the United Kingdom over the paper's coverage of corruption in the gas trade. The Kyiv Post responded by blocking all internet traffic from the UK as a protest against English defamation law. The case was eventually dismissed and the block lifted. After the newspaper's editors endorsed Yulia Tymoshenko over Viktor Yanukovych in the 2010 presidential election, Zahoor issued a policy forbidding any future endorsements of political candidates, saying the paper should remain non-partisan even on its opinion pages.

• 4. Revolution and Reform Coverage

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  The Kyiv Post published its first story about the Euromaidan on the 22nd of November 2013, one day after protests began. The demonstrations had been triggered by then-President Viktor Yanukovych's broken promise to sign a political and economic association agreement with the European Union. The paper published hundreds of stories in print and online about the movement, which ended when Yanukovych fled to Russia on the 21st and the 22nd of February 2014. Coverage then shifted to the formation of an interim government, the Russian annexation of Crimea on the 27th of February 2014, the outbreak of war in the Donbas in April 2014, and the presidential election of the 25th of May 2014, which brought Petro Poroshenko to power as independent Ukraine's fifth president since 1991. The paper had been tracking Ukrainian political history for nearly two decades by then, including coverage of the 2000 murder of journalist Georgiy Gongadze, in which ex-President Leonid Kuchma is a prime suspect, and the 2004 Orange Revolution. In October 2014, the paper launched its Reform Watch project to track anti-corruption progress under President Poroshenko and Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk. A survey released by Moscow-based AGT Communications in 2014, drawing on Factiva citation data from the 21st of November 2013 to the 21st of May 2014, found the Kyiv Post was the most-quoted Ukrainian news source by American and European news organisations and the second-most quoted in Ukraine and Russia, after Russia's Kommersant.

• 5. The Kivan Ownership and Newsroom Split

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  On the 21st of March 2018, Odesa-based businessman Adnan Kivan purchased the Kyiv Post from Zahoor at a price both parties confirmed was more than $3.5 million. Kivan was a Syrian native and Ukrainian citizen who built the KADORR Group, a company specialising in construction and agriculture, and had been active in metals trading in the Black Sea port city from 1991 to 2007. He pledged editorial independence to then-Chief Editor Brian Bonner. On the 8th of November 2021, Kivan's ownership posted a statement announcing a temporary halt to operations, with Kivan expressing a hope to reopen the newspaper bigger and better. The reporting staff replied in a joint statement that the closure followed an attempt to infringe on their editorial independence, and Kivan later said he wanted to make the paper more advertisement-friendly. Several of those reporters founded The Kyiv Independent, which published its first newsletter on the 26th of November 2021 and launched its website on the 2nd of December 2021. On the 11th of November 2021, Luc Chenier, whose professional background is in advertising, was appointed the new CEO. On the 24th of December 2021, Bohdan Nahaylo was appointed Chief Editor and the paper resumed publication. The paper simultaneously removed its online paywall, which had been in place since March 2013, to reach readers worldwide at what Chenier described as a critical moment in Ukraine's history. Kivan died in October 2024, and ownership passed to his son Ruslan.

• 6. Global Reach and Recognition

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  By the third year after the 2021 relaunch, Kyiv Post had 97% of its readership outside Ukraine, with combined website and social media viewership exceeding 6 million per month. In October 2023, News Guard, a global rating platform for journalism standards, gave the Kyiv Post a 100% rating for content transparency and accuracy. Other outlets with that perfect score included The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal. The paper had accumulated notable recognition before that point as well. In 2014, the University of Missouri Journalism School awarded its Medal of Honor for Distinguished Service in Journalism to the Kyiv Post staff; Chief Editor Brian Bonner and then-deputy chief editor Katya Gorchinskaya accepted the award at a ceremony in Columbia, Missouri, on the 28th of October 2014. Five Kyiv Post journalists have won six-month fellowships through the Alfred Friendly Press Partners program administered by the University of Missouri. They included Anastasia Forina, who worked at the Chicago Tribune in 2014; Oksana Grytsenko and Olena Goncharova, who both worked at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in 2015 and 2016 respectively; Yulianna Romanyshyn, who worked at the Chicago Tribune in 2017; and Anna Yakutenko, who began her fellowship in March 2018 at KCUR, the National Public Radio affiliate in Kansas City, Missouri. In June 2022, reporters Anna Myroniuk and Andrei Ciurcanu were runners-up in the European Press Prize's Investigative Reporting Award for a story revealing how Chinese tobacco manufacturers were supplying smugglers with millions of cigarettes destined for Ukraine.

• 7. Leadership and Legacy

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  Across its history, the Kyiv Post has had 15 chief editors since its first edition. The longest-serving was Brian Bonner, an American who became editor in the summer of 1999, returned on the 9th of June 2008, and continued until the 19th of November 2021. Nataliya Bugayova became the first Ukrainian and the first woman to serve as CEO of the paper, taking the role in August 2014 after serving as chief of staff to Economy Minister Pavel Sheremeta. She resigned in December 2015 to become director of development for the Institute for the Study of War in Washington, D.C., writing her farewell column, titled "Kyiv Post's values are made for new Ukraine", in the 18th of December 2015 edition. The paper's original masthead motto was "Independence. Community. Trust." In February 2018, the motto changed to "Ukraine's Global Voice", a phrase suggested by Luc Chenier during his first assignment as CEO. That rebranding now accurately describes a paper whose readers are overwhelmingly outside the country it covers, a paper whose motto changed just weeks before a new owner arrived and years of turbulence followed.