Olga Rudenko
Thank you, thank you for this honor. I’m afraid I’m not such an eloquent speaker as Prime Minister Boris Johnson, and I, I’ve got to say, I approached him before the reception, and I asked him to make sure that his speech is bad for ours to look good after him, and he promised me that it will be. So this is something about journalists and politicians and how much trust there is in our relationship. I want to thank you for this recognition of our work. Thank you to CEPA. It’s truly inspiring what you’ve built over 20 years, and it means a lot to receive this award. I don’t want to take a lot of your time and, but I do want to say a few things about what this means. I don’t think of this as a personal recognition as much as the recognition of the work of our team at The Kyiv Independent and, indeed, the work of all Ukrainian journalists who cover the war in their country and who continue doing their job under incredible challenges. We are a very young organization, and CEPA just turned 20. We will turn four years next month. So, thank you, and it amazes me that we’ve been able to do so much in four years that, you know, I’m standing here on the stage with you, and this is something that Mr. Buffett said in his conversation with Alina earlier, how war accelerates things. And I think we all feel that. If I can, if I can ask you of something. Can you, for one secon,d remember a photo or a video that you’ve seen at some point over the past three years, something from Ukraine that was the most gruesome thing that you’ve seen? Remember one photo. Maybe it’s a mutilated body. I’m sure for many of you it’s, it must be a photo of a dead child or a baby. And now try to imagine a young journalist, a Ukrainian, who comes to work every day to look at hundreds of photos like that, to dig through hundreds or 1000s of photos and videos, all to try to find the truth, to try to find who’s responsible, who gave the orders, who needs to be held accountable. That person you’re thinking about is my colleague, our journalist, Olesia Bida. Her work investigating Russian war crimes, I’m sure is part of the reason I’m here on this stage and why I’m getting this award. Or think about all the frontline reports that you’ve seen. Imagine a young female Ukrainian journalist who spends 24 hours at a time in a trench, in a cold trench in eastern Ukraine, surrounded with soldiers. It’s cold. She’s wearing warm clothes. She’s wearing a bulletproof vest that is very heavy, and a helmet, and she’s there for 24 hours with the soldiers to document what their fight is like. And when that young journalist gets out of the trench, she goes to her hometown in eastern Ukraine to evacuate her family because the war that she has been reporting on just came to her hometown. That person you’re imagining is my colleague, Olena Zashko, who has been producing incredible video reports from the, from the front lines. That’s the people I really want you to think about because these, these are the people that are your eyes. These are the people who tell the story and who are really on the front line of this fight for the truth. And you know, who understands it really well? Who doesn’t need it to be explained? It’s Russia. Russia knows the importance of independent journalists, and that is why Russia targets them. Just last week, two photojournalists were attacked by Russia in eastern Ukraine. French photojournalist Antoni Lallican was killed on the spot. His Ukrainian colleague who was with him, Grigoriy Ivanchenko, survived, but it was to luck. Here’s one detail, and I really want this one detail to stay with you. It was an attack that was done with a first-person view drone, and that means that whoever was pressing the button knew who they are targeting. They saw the target, and they saw the press badges on them. They knew that they were killing journalists, and they knew why they need to do that, because journalists, it’s what stands between Russia and accountability, and Russia understands it well. Independent journalism today has a lot of enemies, but it doesn’t have enough allies, and it deserves to have more allies.

Sevgil Musaieva
Thank you and good evening, all. Do you have a handkerchief? That’s how the German writer Herta Müller began her Nobel lecture in 2009. A simple, ordinary, almost tender question that her mother used to ask her every single morning. But it was never really about the handkerchief. It was about love, about the kind of care that fits into something small, something you can carry in your pocket, even when your mother is gone. Müller said that she sometimes deliberately left her handkerchief at home just to hear that question again, because the true meaning of handkerchief is not to wipe away your tears, but to remember. Somewhere thinking, someone is thinking of you. Someone loves you. I thought of this story recently when I was standing in Saint Michael Cathedral in free Kyiv holding my own handkerchief in my hands. Surrounded by candles and flowers, we were saying goodbye to our colleague, Victoria Roshchyna. Victoria’s mission was simple and brave: to tell the world the truth about people who live in occupied territories of Ukraine. In summer 2023, she went to the occupied territories of Ukraine, and she never came back. A year ago, the same day, her father received a message. Victoria was killed in Russian captivity. We began to investigate what happened to her. We traced her final journey. Enerhodar, Melitopol, Taganrog, Novorossiysk, Perm. Four prisons, torture, electric shocks, beatings, exhaustion. When Victoria’s body was returned to Ukraine, it was so badly mutilated that it was unrecognizable. And then we learned something even more horrifying. Russians returned her body, without brain, without eyeballs, and without a trachea, trying to erase the traces of torture, trying to erase her. But we didn’t let them happen. Together with 1000s of journalists from different countries, we finished Victoria’s investigation. It was about 16,000 of civilians holding by, illegally held in Russian captivity, in Russian prisons and torture chambers. We documented stories of beating, of rape, of electric shock torture. And sometimes, listening to those testimonies, I would realize I couldn’t breathe. It was the hardest story in my entire career, but it had to be told so the truth would not die, so that Victoria’s voice could live on. Before coming here, I ran into my old university friend, a woman from Mariupol. She hasn’t seen her mother for four years now, Russia won’t let her into the city, and her mother can’t leave occupied Mariupol. She cares for her own mother, and she’s afraid she’d never be allowed back. My friend told me she hasn’t heard about her husband, a soldier, for three months now. He is missing near Pokrovsk. Maybe there is still hope that he is alive, but that feeling of uncertainty, of not knowing, this is the hardest part. And every day her two children, nine and thirteen years old, ask her: Mom, where is our dad? She can’t answer, and I could either. So I just hugged her, and she cried on my shoulder. We Ukrainians live in the state of uncertainty every single day. We don’t know what tomorrow will bring. We are tired, we are wounded, but we hold on because we have no other choice, and now more than ever, we need your solidarity. We need your compassion. We need humanity, your words, your attention, your presence; they matter. They help us endure. Dear friends, this is not just a story about my colleague Victoria Roshchyna and one woman from Mariupol. This is a story about democracy in our time, because something is deeply wrong with the democracy if Russia can illegally torture, kill, and imprison 1000s of people and the democratic world remains often powerless for that. Victoria believed that even one voice matters. She risked everything, and she paid the highest price. I too know what it means to lose your home. I’m a Crimean Tatar. My family was deported from Crimea in 1944 by Josef Stalin. I grew up in Crimea, but for 11 now, years now, I haven’t been able to return to my homeland because of Putin’s occupation. A part of my life remains there, and people I love remain beyond my reach. And of course, I cannot liberate Crimea by myself and alone, but I can do something every day. I can speak, I can write, and I can bear witness. For me, freedom of speech is not a slogan, is not a declaration. It’s my daily work, my handkerchief – a symbol of love, resilience, and responsibility. And I want to say this clearly, democracy is not given once and forever. It doesn’t exist itself. Democracy is daily work, a daily act of responsibility, of love, of support, and of solidarity, a daily reminder of what truly matters, even when there are so many reasons to forget, because democracy is not born in one day, and it doesn’t die in a moment. It lives as long as we are willing to carry it with us, like a symbol, symbol of love, like a simple symbol of care, like that handkerchief that is always near, but, at the same time, as the greatest duty of our generation. Thank you so much.