Olga Rudenko

Thank you, @TIME, for this recognition of the work we do at @KyivIndependent. Thank you @LisaAbend for your professionalism and for our conversations. Special 👋 to the quiet, shy little girls everywhere. You can stay yourself and still go places.

I’ve seen Caolan Robertson’s response, where he acknowledges lifting our video. He blames it on his editor but ultimately takes responsibility. It’s always good to see people own their mistakes, it makes this space better for everyone. I appreciate it and accept his apology. The five seconds of video is easy to dismiss, but five seconds of an animated map takes hours of work — research from a journalist and manual work from a videographer and a graphic designer. Our video team is small but we do our best to make sure our video reporting is well researched and properly sourced. Caolan @CaolanReports says he wants to learn from this and improve his practices. I think that’s the right call, especially since other journalists have spoken out about past cases where Caolan used their work without credit. Hopefully, this will be the push to review those practices. It would help to look into the video’s origin before launching a public attack, too. As for further steps. Caolan says he emailed us to resolve it. We have checked our inboxes, including organization’s and my own, and found no messages from him. He is very welcome to reach me or the team directly. A private conversation is always more effective. On the copyright claim. Yesterday, Caolan filed an appeal to our claim with Youtube, which automatically blocks our right to retract the claim while the appeal is being considered. That said, we decided we will not contest his appeal or take legal action about the copyright infringement. If we don’t participate, YouTube will likely remove the strike from his channel. We made this decision because Caolan acknowledged his mistake and pledged to improve. I hope this ends it and we can all move on and focus on our actual work: bringing truthful reporting from Ukraine to the world.

Since a few Kyiv Independent readers have asked, I’d like to explain what happened with Caolan Robertson’s video, out of respect for our supporters. Our team found that a video on Caolan’s @CaolanReports YouTube channel included a fragment of an earlier Kyiv Independent video, used without permission and without a request for permission. It wasn’t just footage. It was an animated map that takes our team a lot of work to produce. Importantly, Caolan’s video cropped out our logo from the fragment. Instead of crediting our work, it fully removed the attribution to the Kyiv Independent. That isn’t citation or fair use. Our team member did what is standard when your content is used this way on YouTube: They filed a copyright report. YouTube reviewed the case and removed the video. We follow the same process whenever our work is used without permission, regardless of who the creator is. Worth noting that a removal like this doesn’t kill the creator’s work: The video can simply be re-uploaded without the copyrighted material. So I was surprised that Caolan instead chose to publicly attack the journalists whose work he lifted, and to appeal to journalistic solidarity in a case where he didn’t demonstrate any. Our team has been reporting on the ground in Ukraine since before the full-scale invasion. We’re independent, funded mostly by our readers, and we earn every dime. We’re very proud of our work, from front-line reporting to war crimes investigations. We respect the work of other journalists and expect the same for ours. I wish Caolan all the best in telling his audience about Ukraine. If he ever wants to use our work, he’s welcome to ask, like anyone else. We are all on the same side when it comes to this: We want as many voices as possible telling the world about Ukraine. But being on the same side means respecting and crediting each other’s work. Credit matters because the reporting everyone draws on has to come from somewhere. Thank you.

This is one of several hits in Kyiv just today. Difficult to convey how much this escalated lately. It’s 10 pm on a Friday now, and the city was under attack for the total of seven hours today so far. The latest air raid alert ended five minutes ago.

Well, a month later, he decided to do it. Zelensky created a rival, and not any rival, but one who takes pages from Zelensky’s own playbook — Fedorov’s positioning mirrors that of Zelensky when he ran against Poroshenko in 2019. Fedorov co-wrote that playbook with him.

Removing Mykhailo Fedorov as defense minister when Ukraine is finally turning the tide of the war will be one of the biggest mistakes on Zelensky’s record, and one that can prove tragic for the country.