Reporters for The Kyiv Independent work in their office in Kyiv, Ukraine, in January 2026.
Elena Kalinichenko/The Kyiv Independent
For four years now, the team behind The Kyiv Independent has lived and reported on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine from the front lines to air raid shelters and artillery-scarred towns. Later this week, staff from the digital newsroom will translate those experiences to a London stage — in the form of a live storytelling event featuring personal, unvarnished dispatches from reporters who’ll reflect on what it’s felt like to live through the news they cover.
For Kyiv Independent CEO Daryna Shevchenko, the event’s goal is to break down what she described as the barrier between reporters and their audience..
“With traditional formats — video reports, podcasts, standard news pieces — there’s a wall between the journalists and the readers,” Shevchenko said about the Oct. 2 event, starting at 6 p.m. at the Kings Place arts and cultural venue. A live event, she adds, gives audiences the chance to see how the stories affect the people telling them, while giving the journalists, in turn, an immediate sense of how their work lands.
The Kyiv Independent Brings Ukraine’s Stories To The Stage
The experiment comes as the nearly 5-year-old Kyiv Independent has grown into a team of nearly 100 people, most of them based in Kyiv, with more than 2 million monthly readers and over 36,000 paying members around the world. But those numbers, of course, tell only part of the story about the conditions under which the newsroom operates.
The site’s reporters continue covering Russian attacks and the front lines while documenting the rhythms of ordinary Ukrainian life, with recent dispatches encompassing everything from a Kramatorsk market operating under the buzz of drones to a country still trying to define itself beyond the war.
Kyiv Independent senior reporter Francis Farrell.
Olena Zashko/The Kyiv Independent
“See, it flies away, and no one even flinches anymore because people have already gotten used to bad things,” a market vendor identified as Serhii recently told Kyiv Independent reporter Asami Terajima in a field report from Kramatorsk as a drone flew overhead. “We can’t do anything about it anyway.”
For Shevchenko, Friday’s event is a chance to bring some of that lived experience out from behind the screen, with five storytellers presenting original pieces that draw not only on their reporting, but on what it’s actually felt like to live and work through the stories they cover.
“It’s definitely not journalists recounting their reporting from the stage,” Shevchenko told me. “Some are based on their reporting, but they also draw on their own experience of what it felt like to report on the issue, not just the facts. Other stories are personal accounts, stories from the other side of the screen.”
In an email to subscribers, Kyiv Independent editor-in-chief Olga Rudenko recalled the team’s first rehearsal in Kyiv, where air-defense sounds accompanied roughly the first 30 minutes of a table read of the five stories. By the end, Rudenko wrote, everyone had cried at least once, leaving her convinced that the stories deserved a life beyond the London stage:
“We need to figure out what to do with it after the event,” she said. “It’s too good to just do it one night.”
‘Human To Human, From Kyiv To London’
For a digital news organization, staging an original storytelling production for hundreds of people is a considerably different proposition from publishing stories, newsletters or videos online. Doubly so, when it comes to the circumstances surrounding this particular production.
In an email to readers on Tuesday, Shevchenko wrote from a 15-hour bus trip on the way from Kyiv to Warsaw, where she planned to catch a flight to London. She and her colleagues, she explained, were leaving home at an especially difficult moment; a Russian drone had also just struck a building belonging to the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences as she was finishing packing.
“Our event in London is one more attempt to bring our truth closer to you,” Shevchenko wrote. “Human to human, from Kyiv to London: What it feels like to live the war, and what it takes to protect the rest of the world from it.”
There’s also a business dimension to the experiment. Shevchenko told me The Kyiv Independent is considering events as a possible addition to its business model.
London, for the moment, will provide a significant test. The newsroom is going from roughly 150 attendees at its first, smaller storytelling event in New York to around 400 this time — an experiment that could help determine whether bringing its journalism off the screen becomes something more than a one-night event.
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