Ukrinform

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Ukrinform, the National News Agency of Ukraine, traces its roots to 1918, when a newly independent Ukrainian state needed a voice to tell its story to the world. The first director was Dmytro Dontsov, a figure who would become one of the most controversial intellectuals in Ukrainian history. The agency he led was then called the Ukrainian Telegraph Agency. What follows is the story of a news organization that outlasted revolutions, Soviet occupation, and modern warfare, and still publishes daily dispatches in eight languages.

• 2. Born in Revolution

  ›

  In 1918, during the Ukrainian War of Independence, the Bureau of Ukrainian Press came into being as the state's official information organ. Within just a few years, it was absorbed into the infrastructure of Soviet power, reorganized as the All-Ukrainian bureau of the Russian Telegraph Agency, known as UkROSTA, in 1920. By 1921 it had become the Radio-Telegraph Agency of Ukraine, or RATAU. During the Soviet period, the agency operated in close association with TASS, the Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union, the central information arm of the Soviet state. That institutional dependency would not lift until the final years of Soviet rule.

• 3. Reclaiming an Identity

  ›

  In 1990, as the Soviet Union was fracturing, the agency was renamed the Ukrainian National Informational Agency, adopting the acronym UKRINFORM for the first time. A further reorganization in 1996 turned it into the State Informational Agency of Ukraine, or DINAU. Then in 2000, the agency reverted to the Ukrainian National Informational Agency name and the UKRINFORM identity it carries today. A Cabinet of Ministers decree from the 19th of February 1997 established that the agency carries out its activities independently of political parties and public organizations. That principle of editorial independence from partisan influence became a formal pillar of its mandate during a decade when Ukraine's post-Soviet institutions were still taking shape.

• 4. Global Reach and Partnerships

  ›

  Ukrinform publishes daily reports in Ukrainian, Russian, English, German, Spanish, French, Japanese, and Polish, reaching media organizations, television and radio stations, official government establishments, foreign embassies, and Ukrainian diplomatic missions abroad. The agency holds Ukraine's seat in the European Alliance of News Agencies, known as EANA, and in the Black Sea Association of National News Agencies, or BSANNA. In 2018, the agency signed a cooperation agreement with the Athens-Macedonian News Agency, ANA, creating a formal channel for exchanging news across all categories. That same year marked the agency's centennial, a hundred years after Dmytro Dontsov directed its earliest predecessor.

• 5. Broadcasting and Wartime

  ›

  In 2015, Ukrinform became part of the Multimedia Broadcasting Platform of Ukraine, known as UA|TV. The platform includes a television channel now called FREEДОМ, formerly UATV, a Russian-language news channel focused on the Russo-Ukrainian War. The channel is transmitted live on its website, via satellite, and through cable television operators, with English-language content available on YouTube. Before a temporary closure in January 2020, it had broadcast in English, Ukrainian, Crimean Tatar, and Arabic. In March 2022, the Institute of Mass Information named Ukrinform a reliable and trustworthy media outlet, a formal endorsement issued as Russian forces advanced into Ukrainian territory. On the 25th of February 2025, Tetiana Kulyk, editor-in-chief of the multimedia department and host of the Nation of Invincibles project, was killed when a Russian drone struck her home in a night-time attack.