My wife, who grew up in a village in Western Ukraine, recalls
her mother always telling her, "You can't do that. People are watching."
The good news is that the outside world really is watching Ukraine, as
shown by materials in such prestigious Western publications as The Economist
and The Washington Post criticizing how the current President is
pulling out all the stops in order to get reelected, trampling on the freedom
of expression.
As Yana Moiseyenkova makes clear in this issue, the authorities have
laid siege to The Day along with a number of other media outlets
around the country. The issue here is not the editorial support of many
(but by no means all) of these papers of Yevhen Marchuk's presidential
candidacy; the issue is their right to support him or any other
candidate they see fit, a right that is an inalienable part of freedom
of the press. In other words, the Constitutionally guaranteed freedom of
the press is being openly trampled on by the officially designated guarantor
of the Constitution. Everything possible is being done to have the incumbent
face in the runoff a hard leftist whose negatives are so high that most
people would rather vote for Mickey Mouse. This means creating the impression
that Yevhen Marchuk is saying and doing nothing by means of a strict ban
from the officially controlled media. Readers of this paper know that he
is saying and doing things (decide for yourselves what you think of it),
but, with our press run of around 50,000 in a country of almost 50 million,
most people in Ukraine do not read us. Banning candidates from access to
the media most capable of reaching people makes a mockery of free elections.
What is poorly understood here is that freedom of the press also exists
in an inverse relationship to the ease with which public officials can
sue a newspaper for libel. Internal Affairs Minister Kravchenko's court
victory over Kievskie Vedomosti some months ago shows that under
Ukrainian law John Peter Zenger, whose 1735 trial established the freedom
of the press in what would become the United States, would have lost.
We are doing the best we can to survive this siege, and we appreciate
the fact that the outside world is watching and speaking out. We will continue
to keep you up to date to the best of our abilities. Thank God that people
are watching.






