This is Olga Rudenko, editor-in-chief of the Kyiv Independent.

I’m here to invite you to share something special with us, with me. I can hardly believe I’m writing these words:

On Nov. 11, 2025, we celebrated the fourth birthday of the Kyiv Independent.

What were the odds of this happening? Slim, to put it mildly.

Four years ago on this day, we took a brave step — and a stupidly naive one for that matter — to start the Kyiv Independent.

Consider the circumstances: We were freshly fired from a newspaper for standing up for editorial independence. The timing was depressing — journalism seemed to be on decline everywhere and people were getting out of it, not getting in. Here in Ukraine, oligarchs largely ruled the media. If that wasn’t enough, a threat of all-out war was looming, with Russian troops gathering near Ukrainian borders.

Somehow, we looked at all that, and still decided to launch the Kyiv Independent — simply because we believed that Ukraine needed to have a truthful and independent English voice, one that sounds louder than algorithms and propaganda.

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What followed was four years of building, fighting, resisting, and surviving.

That was just one of the two great decisions we made four years ago today.

See, we had this ambitious goal to make the Kyiv Independent really independent. After having seen first-hand how an unscrupulous publisher can try to bend a newspaper to serve his interests, we needed to ensure the Kyiv Independent was bullet-proof — but how could we do that?

A newspaper’s independence is fragile if all or a large chunk of its funding depends on a single source — like a “benevolent” owner or large advertisers.

So we bet on our readers. If we can get enough readers to back us, we can do it, we thought. That’s a bold idea, but how do you persuade thousands of people to fund your new website? There’s always an obvious choice: slap a paywall on it! Close all stories and make people pay to read.

Except that it didn’t feel right. We didn’t want to close our stories — we wanted to share them far and wide. Also, we didn’t want to lure in customers. We wanted to build a community.

So we launched as a member-funded media outlet — asking people to back us voluntarily, ensuring that everyone can access our news, whether they can pay or not. The idea is that it is so diversified that no one gives so much that they can have any editorial leverage against us, and we only rely on the communities we serve.

Editor-in-chief Olga Rudenko signs birthday cards for the team on Nov. 11, 2025, on the Kyiv Independent’s fourth birthday, in Kyiv, Ukraine. (The Kyiv Independent)

Four years later, how is it going? Let me answer with this story:

A journalist asked me recently, how we can be sure the Kyiv Independent is immune to outside influence and pressure. “Well,” I said, “it would be somewhat difficult to persuade 23,000 people from around the world to put pressure on us.”

But our community contributes more than funding — it has become a much-needed source of support. This year, especially so.

Our fourth year was a challenging one. The exhaustion of the war builds up, making every next year a harder one. But also, the news cycle was… something else.

Donald Trump returned to the White House, and we had a whole new challenge: How to cover Trump’s chaotic peacemaking efforts on Ukraine and Russia in a way that cuts through the noise — and how to avoid the dangerous mistake of being completely led by him. We had to quickly learn to separate his statements from actions, and not get excited on the days when Trump seemingly woke up pro-Ukrainian. For a newsroom that has been around for only four years, we passed that challenge well.

Who helped us through it? Our community. Never have we gotten so much support and appreciation from our readers and members as during this tumultuous year. On behalf of the whole team — thank you all so much.

That’s why this is not a letter to brag about how far we’ve come in four years.

This is a letter of gratitude to everyone who has been standing with us: Look at how far we’ve come in four years, together.

Our story is about a community of people who share strong beliefs and values triumphing over a malicious force. Four years ago, an ultra-rich publisher thought he ended an independent newspaper — but he only created a stronger one.

And that’s why I don’t think of our birthday as just our day — it’s for everyone who shares our values to celebrate. If you’re one of the many people who stand for the truth and share our mission to keep telling Ukraine’s story to the world — please know that we are raising it for you, too.

Finally, here’s our birthday pledge: We’re going into our fifth year with no thoughts about giving up or going away — instead, we want to do even more. More stories, more reports, more investigations, in an even louder voice.

The Kyiv Independent’s videographer Olena Zashko and reporter Francis Farrell during an embed with an infantry unit near Toretsk, Donetsk Oblast, in July 2024. (Olena Zashko)

As attention to Ukraine is unstable, we want to tell its story even better and louder. As the front line is getting more infested with drones and deadly for journalists, we will find a way to keep bringing you the truth of this war. As Russian disinformation gets faster and cheaper, aided by algorithms and AI, we will keep exposing its lies.

It’s not us who decides whether we do it — it’s you. On our birthday, we’re kickstarting a daring effort — we want to grow our community to 25,000 members before the end of the year. To get there, we need just over 2,000 new members to sign up.

So from today on, we are on a search for 2,000 believers who will stand with us. If you are one of them, you can become a member of the Kyiv Independent right here. It’s safe and easy.

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