The news out of Chernivtsi

The distance between the eastern Ukrainian city of Slavyansk and Chernivtsi, a larger community in the embattled nation’s southwest just north of the Romanian border, is a little more than 600 miles. Google Maps tells me it would take about 16 hours to cover the distance by car, but I’m not sure that venerable website is properly accounting for delays caused by the Russian invasion.

It’s about the same distance from Albany to Detroit. I figured this out after checking in earlier this month with Valerii Garmash, the editor in chief of Maye Sense, which was not long ago the primary media outlet in Slavyansk and the surrounding region. As noted in this space in early March, the Times Union and Maye Sense were paired up near the outset of the pandemic for a series of shop-talk exchanges on journalism. We knew their community was close to the conflict zone where Russianbacked separatists — who had been booted out of Slavyansk in 2014 — were still a threat, but had no idea it would someday be caught between Russia’s northsouth pincer movement.

For Ukraine’s defenders, the past week might have been the worst since the invasion began. As I type this, Slavyansk is under heavy assault from the north, along with many other communities in the Donetsk and Donbas regions. On Friday, Ukraine pulled out of the nearby city of Sievierodonetsk, which is about 50 miles east of Slavyansk.

Garmash and his editorial staff made the exodus to Chernivtsi several weeks into the invasion, and are trying to serve their former community — now a diaspora spread across Western Ukraine — while building a new business model in another place.

When we spoke again earlier this month, I confessed that while the Times Union was still running regular reports from Ukraine, those stories had fallen off the front page, where they had been a steady presence through the opening weeks of the invasion. Garmash, speaking through our regular translator, said he understood the journalistic calculus — the longer the war goes in, the less often it would rate 1A coverage.

“The victory of Ukraine deserves to be on the front page,” he said, “but we know it’s not going to be any time soon.”

Maye Sense will not be back in Slavyansk any time soon, and Garmash knows that the place will never, ever be the same. He fears it will become another community like the brutalized southeastern port city of Mariupol, which was pounded to rubble by Russian forces before being overrun in mid-May.

Garmash tried to return to the area around Slavyansk after his initial trip west, but was stymied by the lack of a safe corridor for refugees that could

have afforded access. He takes what solace there is from the fact that his core team of less than a dozen journalists made it out.

“It’s time to move on,” he said. “... You have to build your new life with these people.”

Garmash knows that his former neighbors are still reading Maye Sense: While the number of “unique users” (identifiable individual online news consumers) has remained steady on their site, the frequency of their visits has gone up. His reporters and editors have pivoted to utility journalism on topics such as how to find a place to live as a refugee, how to track down a missing person, and how to determine what’s fake news — pro-Russian disinformation — and what’s credible. They are trying to recruit a new videographer. They know this is the biggest story of their lives.

Maye Sense is pursuing a three-pronged strategy for staying afloat financially that depends on short-term aid from non-governmental organizations; medium-term funds from grant applications and angel donors; and a sustainable longterm business model with a new base of advertisers in Chernivtsi. He’s not the only Slavyansk entrepreneur trying to survive in new surroundings: One old client, a cafe owner, recently opened a new spot in their new city and is once again advertising.

I asked how the legacy media in Chernivtsi felt about the new arrivals in their neighborhood, and Garmash smiled. “Competition is good, and the more competition the better,” he said. I did not reach out to other regional outlets for their takes on that question.

But I tried to imagine how a newspaper publisher in, say, 600-miles-distant Detroit would feel at the prospect of the traumatized staff of the Times Union arriving in the Motor City under similar conditions — in cars loaded with pets and belongings, fleeing from ground forces and aerial bombardment, worried about their relatives, friends and colleagues left behind in the besieged Capital Region. How much common cause would their American analogs be able to maintain as the crisis went on — and as Detroit itself was subject to the occasional air-raid klaxon? That’s life in Chernivtsi these days.

At the end of a long, long news week in this state and nation, with the prospect of another just ahead that will likely push reports from Ukraine off the front page once again, I would ask you to remember that these people are still doing their work in conditions that most of us would consider near-impossible. And in addition to the proximate physical threat of a lethal war machine chewing up their country, they’re worried that the rest of the world is growing bored with their plight — or worse, is willing to sacrifice them for cheaper gas.