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New York, March 27, 2026—Ukrainian authorities must conduct a swift and thorough investigation into recent online harassment against Ukrainian journalist Anna Kalyuzhna and ensure that journalists can work without fear of reprisal, the Committee to Protect Journalists said Friday.
On March 6, Kalyuzhna, a journalist with Ukrainian investigative outlet Slidstvo.Info as well as Novynarnia, which has been covering the war in Ukraine since 2014, reported that she had received more than 150 messages on Facebook containing insults and misogynistic remarks within 24 hours of publishing a Facebook post criticizing the expansion and alleged abuses within Ukrainian Armed Forces’ assault regiments.
On March 17, as she was leaving a store an unnamed man told her “maybe you should just shut your mouth,” and mentioned that he had served time in prison. On the same day, she filed a report with the police, who opened an investigation under Article 129 of Ukraine’s criminal code pertaining to “death threats.”
“Ukrainian authorities must promptly investigate the harassment of Ukrainian journalist Anna Kalyuzhna and ensure her protection,” said Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator. “CPJ is very concerned about online harassment against journalists and the seeming lack of political will to investigate these incidents and hold those responsible to account. Journalists provide an important service to the public by covering the war and need to be able to do so safely.”
“I view these incidents as an attempt to obstruct journalistic activity … and a threat against me as a journalist,” Kalyuzhna wrote on Facebook. She told CPJ she is seeking to add a charge for “obstruction of journalistic activity” to the criminal case opened by police.
CPJ emailed Ukraine’s national police for comment but did not immediately receive a reply.
Similarly, Denys Bulavin, a journalist with independent news outlet Hromadske, faced online harassment after his March 16 report on attacks on employees with military enlistment offices. Also, journalist and blogger Olga Khudetska received social media threats, including ones of physical violence, after posting a March 6 thread on X about the alleged lack of public reporting on donations to a battalion of volunteer medics.
Khudetska does not plan on reporting the threats to police, she told the Ukrainian press freedom group Institute of Mass Information. “I don’t know of any successful cases of investigating online threats,” she said.
Several Ukrainian and foreign investigative journalists have faced surveillance, threats, violence, and harassment over their work since Russia’s full-scale invasion of the country.
In a December 2024 letter to Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky, CPJ pointed to a pattern of a lack of accountability in such cases. In February, news outlet NGL.media reported that the investigation for “obstructing journalistic activities” into the June 2025 smear campaign against Olena Mudra, an environmental investigative journalist in the Zakarpattia region, in western Ukraine, was stalling.
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