Ukraine’s president, the head of the President’s Office, parliament speaker, prime minister, along with dozens of others, have all expressed condolences on the passing away of Oleksandr Martynenko, the founder and general manager of Ukraine’s largest information news agency Interfax-Ukraine.
Oleksandr was also my boss. We first met in the early 2000s when he was press secretary to former President Leonid Kuchma. We were talking about China’s Peace Plan in his office just a few days ago and he was fine, right?
He was interested in separating Ukraine’s reality from bullshit. Sometimes the mark of a great journalist is that you work very carefully documenting chaos and come out the other side with a wordy edifice. Other times, you're circling around a kind of idea and someone can just pinpoint it, put your fingers on it and say, "Yes. This is what actually happened.”
We did not agree about everything, you don't agree about everything and I don't agree about everything with anyone, really. About Ukraine, however, I agreed with Martynenko about most things. It was very, very easy to talk to him about a whole bunch of things and we are not going to be able to do that anymore, which is terrible.
Martynenko was not only a hugely important person for independent Ukraine, but also a very nice person. He was certainly one of the country’s most approachable publicly influential journalists, and we don't have many of those.
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Stefaniia is a Ukrainian journalist who leaving the Reuters news bureau in Kyiv to attend Columbia University’s graduate school of journalism in New York City. So, she needs all the money she can get, as quickly as possible.