OLGA RUDENKO

THE STAFF OF THE KYIV INDEPENDENT KNEW WAR WAS coming. They had spent long days in February reporting on an invasion that high-level sources had told them was imminent. Editor in chief Olga Rudenko and the other senior editors had consulted with the outlet’s two dozen or so staff members to make sure each had an evacuation plan and had withdrawn cash so they could keep operating if the banks closed. They had handed over passwords and instructions to contacts in North America on how to keep their website online in case their internet was knocked out. And yet as Russian President Vladimir Putin declared a “special military operation” in the early hours of Feb. 24, none of them could quite believe what was happening. “We thought they would try to take more territory in eastern Ukraine,” says Rudenko. “Not that it would be a full-fledged war.”

In the days and weeks to come, the Kyiv Independent would become the world’s primary