Support the mental health of the Kyiv Independent's team

The Kyiv Independent is raising $68,000 to fund a full year of mental health support for our entire team — so the people who live through this war and report on it can keep going.

Journalism always takes a mental toll before you add a war to it. In Ukraine, our journalists live through the same attacks they report to the world. And it is not only the reporters: our newsletters get coded from bomb shelters, community letters written from subway stations, marketing campaigns launched from behind a bathroom wall — the safest corner of an apartment during a strike. Everyone here carries the same weight.

The story the world likes to hear is that people in Ukraine are resilient and unbreakable. We are resilient. But we are not unbreakable. In the first year of the full-scale invasion, 93% of Ukrainians surveyed for one study reported at least one mental health issue at a moderate or severe level. That was year one. We are now in year five, and the pressure keeps growing.

This past winter was one of the hardest yet. Due to Russia’s campaign targeting Ukraine’s critical infrastructure, Ukrainians lived with severe energy cuts for months, while temperatures inside apartments did not rise above 16°C (around 61°F). Our team worked by laptop light and turned to our community to help support us in the cold.

Then came May and a new wave of Russia’s brutal aerial attacks on Kyiv. Ballistic missiles give almost no warning — it takes them only minutes to reach the capital — and sometimes the sirens sound only after the explosions. When the subway station itself shudders from a strike while people are sheltering inside, you start to wonder whether anywhere is still safe.

And through all of it, the newsroom keeps working. As one of our colleagues once put it, the workload is so intense that there is no time for burnout. It is half a joke, but it reflects a real and growing crisis in the Ukrainian media industry. According to one 2025 study, 92% of the media workers surveyed showed symptoms of burnout.

To help our team members get through this challenging time, we launched our Mental Health Support program over a year ago. It covers individual therapy sessions or provides access to an online psychological support platform. Some rely on it all year; others only in an emergency. Either way, it is part of what keeps the newsroom running.

"I believe in this program because I have felt what it does. Just knowing the support is there — already taken care of, whenever you need it — lifts a quiet weight, in work that never really switches off. For anyone on the team who wants it, that reassurance is essential."

— Daryna Shevchenko, CEO of the Kyiv Independent

Therapy is not a magic cure for any of this. But it gives you a way to cope, the space to find the mechanisms that work for you, and a place where you are heard and understood..

Support our team and help the people behind this newsroom keep going.