cracking *down

That way any corrupt police who raided the office would also end up seizing my files and having to deal with the headache of cracking town on a foreign journalist

Also, lol, one of the others charged with treason, Dubinsky, actually tried to get my Ukrainian colleagues at slidstfo.info charged with treason. I left a poison pill at the office in case it got raided: a manila folder in my name with a printout of Dubinsky's wikipedia article and a picture of Alf

Omg @nikamelkozerova.bsky.social is on Bsky too! She was there that day as we reported side by side on this mess. That day with Kulyk still makes my head hurt. It would have been even worse for her.

Thanks. I've got some I haven't used yet either though

I don't know either. I ended my posting in Ukraine 5 months before the war started and I live on the opposite side of the world now

I actually tried really hard to follow the leads they were giving me, but they lead nowhere. The only people who actually picked them up were sloppy / ideologically motivated enough to not care. Hence, Rudy Giuliani and his faithful scribe at The Hill, John Solomon

The funny thing is these guys would all dump shit on each other, and say that, "yes, maybe the other guys are working for the Russians, but I am a true Ukrainian patriot." I heard every Biden conspiracy theory back when they were still being beta tested, and then watch as they took hold and evolved

Honestly, no idea. It's a very easy thing to suspect but a hard thing to prove. Also, it's really hard to overstate how infiltrated so much of the Ukrainian state + politics was at the time. There were so many people who everyone sort of knew were compromised

in an empty outdoor cafe in Kyiv. I desperately tried to understand the story he was telling, but it was clear it was chaff, designed to set people off into never-ending rabbit holes. His other colleagues in the prosecutors office warned me at the time "this guy is a Russian agent".