The first award for the “journalistic platoon”

Friends, acquaintances, and volunteers who help the “journalistic platoon” are now congratulating its commander Viktor Ozhohin, as Senior Lieutenant Ozhohin was recently awarded a medal “For Distinguished Service.”

“The command signed an order to that effect back on October 7, but I got the medal only recently. We are manning checkpoint No. 7 which guards a highway intersection. The site is strategically important, as roads go from here to Mariupol, Berdiansk, Crimea, and Zaporizhia. The situation here is unstable,” the officer told us by phone. According to him, the separatists are now trying to bypass and encircle Mariupol. “This is the very place on the outskirts of town where we were in September,” he said. “As for this reward, it is not just mine. The whole ‘journalistic’ platoon, every soldier has served with a distinction. This reward is recognition of all my men,” Ozhohin modestly remarked.

In our turn, we in all-Ukrainian newspaper Den are joining the congratulations for the commander and his soldiers. This unit of National Guard of Ukraine got to be called a “journalistic platoon” after our colleague Ozhohin was assigned to command it, following holding senior positions in the Dnipropetrovsk Regional State TV and Radio Company for years. He volunteered for the frontline service in August as a platoon commander (let us recall that The Day covered it in No. 65 on October 10 this year). Journalists from Dnipropetrovsk and Kyiv as well as Den and our contributor historian Stanislav Kulchytsky, who donated for the needs of this unit 10,000 dollars he had received in Washington in 2011 as an award for his work on the Holodomor (see No. 61, October 9), participated in supplying the soldiers with every necessity.