Fall of the USSR
The USSR dissolved 30 years ago this week, so Terrell sat down with two people in a former Soviet colony who are living through the aftermath.
Olga Tokariuk and Illia Ponomarenko are journalists in Ukraine where Russian troops are currently occupying Crimea. With the threat of a larger invasion always literally on the eastern horizon, people in Ukraine have learned to prepare for the worst while continuing to build the country they want to live in.
Olga Tokariuk
Olga Tokariuk is an independent journalist and researcher based in Kyiv, Ukraine. Her professional interests include Ukrainian and international politics, study of disinformation and its impact on democracies worldwide.
Olga has vast experience working with Ukrainian and international media, such as EFE news agency (Spain), RAI, ANSA (Italy), BuzzFeed News, NPR (USA), ABC (Australia), RSI (Switzerland). She is a former head of foreign news desk at the independent Ukrainian Hromadske TV.
Olga co-authored an investigative documentary about a controversial trial of Ukrainian soldier Vitaliy Markiv in Italy, and published a research paper on the role of Russian disinformation in this case
Olga Tokariuk holds an MA in political science and international relations from the University of Bologna (Italy) and in journalism from the Taras Shevchenko University of Kyiv (Ukraine). She is an alumna of the disinformation research program at the Atlantic Council’s DFR Lab. Olga speaks fluent English and Italian.
Illia Ponomarenko
Illia Ponomarenko is the defense and security reporter at the Kyiv Independent.
He has reported about the war in eastern Ukraine since the conflict’s earliest days. He covers national security issues, as well as military technologies, production, and defense reforms in Ukraine. Besides, he gets deployed to the war zone of Donbas with Ukrainian combat formations. He has also had deployments to Palestine and the Democratic Republic of the Congo as an embedded reporter with UN peacekeeping forces. Illia won the Alfred Friendly Press Partners fellowship and was selected to work as USA Today's guest reporter at the U.S. Department of Defense.