The Information Front
Forbes boasts roughly 40 independent editions around the world, the vast majority published in the local language. I’ve had the pleasure to work with great editors from Vienna to Vietnam, India to Israel.
But I’ve never been as honored to call journalists colleagues as with the staff of Forbes Ukraine.
Given Vladimir Putin’s brutal, immoral invasion, the Forbes Ukraine team would be perfectly justified to focus on the safety of their families. Instead, they chose to fight. A few literally: The 30-year-old who previously oversaw fact-checking, Maksym Skubenko, enlisted in the defense force despite no military experience. “I don’t know what is happening,” Skubenko said after his first battle. “I just absolutely know I have to be here.”
Most of the two dozen other journalists combat Putin with a weapon he dreads: the truth, a linchpin of democracy now contraband in Russia. Forbes Ukraine’s editor-in-chief, Volodymyr Fedoryn, and a small team remain defiantly in Kyiv. Others endured harrowing ordeals to get their families out of the capital, clustering in western Ukraine. Ever since, they’ve been doing what journalists do: working collaboratively, reporting what they see and hear, for their country and the world (we’ve been publishing their dispatches at Forbes.com). “The whole team has been working around the clock,” says Volodymyr Landa, the deputy editor-in-chief.
Landa describes his team’s effort as “the information front.” There’s a great tradition of this in Europe, from Hugo to Havel to Solzhenitsyn. It’s inspiring.
The team is now finishing a war-themed print magazine that demonstrates how, despite the devastation Ukraine endures, the free press runs on, literally, with no one telling them what they can or can’t publish.
That’s worth fighting for.