Co-founder and editor

In 2022, I co-founded Context, an independent Romanian media start-up that aims to grow and expand the community of investigative journalists in Romania via mentoring programs for young reporters in the eastern European country. Since we are partnered with the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, we actively promote cross-border cooperation between investigative journalists.

 

Between 2022 and 2024, I managed and edited a small team of Ukrainian journalists, whose work focused mostly on the effects of Russia’s full-scale invasion of their home country, which neighbors Romania.

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​Ukraine reporting project - managing editor

 

The project began with a simple idea: to compile and publish periodic news bulletins spotlighting potential war crimes committed by Russian forces in Ukraine — written by journalist Yana Skoryna, our first Ukrainian employee who had fled to Romania after the invasion. Back then, in the fall of 2022, the return of conflict to Europe was little more than six months old, and the shockwaves continued reverberating through the continent. 

As the breadth of evidence of war crimes was rapidly mounting and shocking the world, it felt important to raise public awareness of the alleged crimes and to log them in the historical record — along with countless others, including the Ukrainian authorities, the U.N., and the U.S. 

For Yana, however, zooming in on the horrors playing out in her home country, was no easy task. Occasionally, during the editing process, she’d challenge impartial language that was often edited in. Still, she understood it was crucial that we depicted things objectively, and accurately — and knew they were stories that needed to be told.

The first bulletin she produced included a mass burial site that was uncovered in the northeast town of Izium, where more than 400 bodies were discovered and some of the exhumed bodies showed clear signs of torture.  

At the beginning of 2023, another Ukrainian journalist joined the team as we looked to expand our coverage from war crimes bulletins to more in-depth news features. Taisiia Bakharieva’s first article, “Hell on Earth”: Civilians recount Russia’s deadly Dnipro strike, covered the harrowing case of the missile that tore through a nine-story Soviet-era apartment block, killing at least 46 people.

“A horror movie is nothing compared to what we saw,” Yuriy Vasetsky, a martial arts coach from Dnipro, told Taisiia. “This is not a war, but a real genocide of the Ukrainian people.”

In 2023, after more than two dozen war crimes diaries had been published which compiled scores of potential cases, we decided to wrap up the format and focus on growing our number of news features, which we felt enriched our war coverage. We also welcomed two more Ukrainian journalists to our team, Alina Okolot and Alexandra Stara. All four of our Ukrainian employees were funded by the National Endowment for Democracy, an independent U.S.-based nonprofit foundation.

Throughout the project, we published dozens of articles in both Romanian and English, all of which were vigorously fact-checked by our colleague, Iulia Stanoiu — one of Context’s senior investigative reporters. 

As well as focusing on Russia’s brutal attacks as the aggressor country, we also homed in on another issue that hampers Ukraine’s war effort: corruption. Articles such as, In Ukraine, anger grows over reckless public spending as war drags on, and Corruption and bureaucracy hinder Ukraine’s reconstruction efforts were reported by Alina, who remains with Context today, but is working in a different capacity. 

Other articles in our Ukraine project focussed on the fallout of war: a mental health crisis that gripped Ukraine; how the war affects children’s education; the dangers that Russian mines pose to civilians; multiple cases of Ukrainians who claim they were tortured, and more recently, how some men in Ukraine fear draft after the conscription age was lowered this year. 

“Without military training, I could become cannon fodder,” Petro, who did not want to give his last name due to the sensitive nature of the topic, told Content. “My friends weren’t taught anything and were sent straight to the frontlines.”

We’re proud and thankful for the work produced by our Ukraine team throughout the project. The range of topics and stories they covered, many of them tragic but also often containing heartwarming anecdotes, is a testament to the importance of journalism in a time of war — to highlight the horrific impact it has on people’s lives.