Here’s what you helped us achieve at this critical time (Patreon)

Dear members of our community,

The Kyiv Independent team welcomes our new patrons on board and thanks those that have been with us! We are enormously grateful for your support in our time of need. It is thanks to you that we’ve been able to do our job since Russia started its attempted invasion of Ukraine.

There are 6,559 of you today and we want you to know that for us your contribution is much more than just the money. We see each and every one of you as our ambassadors in the world, the ambassadors of truth – and the ambassadors of Ukraine.

We do apologize for the long silence, but since the beginning of the war we have had to intensify our news coverage and make arrangements for the team to continue to work in Ukraine. But we are now ready to get back to talking to you regularly. To begin with, here are a few things we achieved together lately:

We put our contingency plan into action. Thanks to your donations we’ve been able to withdraw some cash from our accounts, help relocate some of our staff to safer places and even provide one-time financial assistance to all the members of the team to take care of war-related issues, such as relocating their families to safety.

Right from the first hours of the war we switched to 24/7 work mode. For days, our editors and reporters have barely slept to make sure the world knew what was really going on in Ukraine.

We turned our Twitter account into a fast-running digest of war updates. We see that that’s what was needed: The account grew from 30,000 followers before the war to 1.9 million today.

We went on Telegram and Instagram to deliver the news on those platforms as well. Do sign up and share our accounts with your friends. We already have nearly 50,000 followers on each of the platforms.

We launched a crowdfunding campaign on GoFundMe. The campaign ended up being one of the most successful fundraisers on the platform.

We helped launch and promote a crowdfunding campaign to help other Ukrainian media in need. All of us in Ukraine need support now more than ever, but the role of independent media is crucial for Ukraine to win this war eventually. You can still donate to support independent Ukrainian publications.

Our journalists are reporting in the field (in Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities), to bring first hand information from the front line. Check out the Exclusives section of our website and share our stories in your communities.

Unfortunately, we don’t know when our work and our lives will come back to normal. But we will do our best to grow and develop even in times of war.

In the near future we hope to expand to more platforms, conduct further online discussions and develop new formats. None of this would be possible without you.