How the Trump impeachment scandal is playing out in Ukraine
Known for its Orthodox churches, Black Sea coastline, forested mountains, a simmering war with neighboring Russia and government corruption, Ukraine has struggled for 28 years to find a foothold within Eastern Europe as an independent state.
The nature of its news media environment, largely controlled by powerful special interests, complicates the challenge, according to a group of Ukrainian journalists and educators who visited the suburbs last week and sat down to discuss the issues with the Daily Herald. They said the impeachment drama that riveted Americans last week is not getting much attention in the nation at the center of the proceedings.
They said average Ukrainians are more worried about immediate problems affecting their daily lives: war with Russia, rising poverty and cost of living, making ends meet in a beleaguered economy where jobs are scarce, inadequate social welfare programs, health care reform, and curbing out-migration of young people. The work of the members of the delegation involves monitoring the media sector and promoting media literacy in Ukraine.
"Almost every family in Ukraine has been impacted by war," said Viktoriia Aliieva, visiting researcher from the Kyiv School of Economics. "That's the top issue."
An intensifying war with Russian-backed separatist forces in the eastern Donbas region has heightened tensions brewing since Russia illegally annexed Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula in early 2014. According to media reports, more than 13,000 people have died in the conflict.
Aliieva, who studies the possible effects of Russian-backed media propaganda on voting patterns, and other members of the group said Ukrainian news outlets - largely run by Russian-backed oligarchs - pay little to no attention to what is happening in American politics.
A Washington Post report on the subject last week described the situation with a poignant contrast. On the day that U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland rocked the impeachment hearings with testimony about U.S. President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, a description of "main news" from a prominent Ukrainian media outlet did not have any report on the testimony at all. Its coverage was instead focused on a development in Ukrainian-Russian relations, a lawmaker's past conviction on rape charges and the death of a war veteran following a beating, the Post reported.
"We don't have strong ... truly independent media," Aliieva told the Daily Herald. "Seventy-five percent of the market is owned by oligarchs."
Aside from a few newspaper reports that delve deeper into the issue, delegation members said Ukrainians get little news on the allegations that Trump held up hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid to Ukraine unless Zelenskiy agreed to investigate former U.S. Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter.
What news they do see on television or hear on radio is filtered through agencies with strong political bias.
Russian influence can be seen, for example, on local media outlets in the east of the country pushing pro-Russian narratives in areas where the population also is heavily ethnically Russian, the visitors said. Elsewhere, Ukrainians have growing concerns about a proliferation of "fake news" outlets, bot farms, propaganda, and political misinformation campaigns.
"Ukrainians, they don't trust media, but they consume it a lot," said Lyubov Vasylchuk, program manager for IREX/Ukraine, an agency that helps bridge the digital and informational divide. "And this is a strange thing because actually media influence them in the background. ... Even through TV shows, sometimes you can hear these narratives."
Zelenskiy was elected earlier this year on the promise to end the conflict with Russia and tackle entrenched corruption. He also pledged large-scale privatizations of state companies and land market reform, lifting a long-standing ban on the sale of farmland and potentially increasing investment in Ukraine's agriculture sector. Ukraine is one of the world's largest grain exporters.
Much of the farmland is owned by the government or corporations, and farmers who work the land have no real property rights, Aliieva said.
Public approval ratings for Zelenskiy have declined, but his ability to deliver on campaign promises likely had more to do with that than the Trump scandal, said Volodymyr Malynka, editor of the MediaSapiens website.
The Trump scandal still could hurt Ukraine's image among European Union nations. Ukraine ranks 120th out of 180 countries on Transparency International's global Corruption Perceptions Index, which rates countries and territories by their perceived levels of public sector corruption according to experts and businesspeople. Reporters Without Borders ranks Ukraine 102nd out of 180 countries on its World Press Freedom Index.
For the most part, the Trump scandal hasn't altered Ukrainians' perception of the United States. They view it, delegation members said, through the same prism as that in many other parts of the world - Hollywood movies and popular TV shows like "Friends" and "The Big Bang Theory."
By some accounts, Aliieva said, the Netflix series "House of Cards" caused more damage to the image of an ideal American democracy than all the Russian propaganda.
A nation of nearly 43 million - nestled between the behemoth Russia to the east and Belarus, Hungary, Slovakia, Poland, Romania and Moldova to the west - Ukraine has been a low-key player on the world stage since gaining independence from the former Soviet Union in 1991. The delegation visiting the suburbs was organized through the Open World exchange program, which has hosted more than 29,000 emerging leaders from Russia, Ukraine and other post-Soviet states since 1999.