From 20,000 pre-war subscribers to two million today: the story of the Kyiv Independent’s very young editorial staff

Daria Shulzhenko was a fashion columnist. His colleagues Natalia Datskevych and Alexander Query, a French journalist living in Ukraine for six years, covered economic subjects while others were interested in political news or investigated corruption in Ukraine. There was also, already, an author specialized in defense, Illia Ponomarenko, accustomed to reporting in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, in the Democratic Republic of Congo and especially in Donbass, the south-east of Ukraine controlled by pro-Russian separatists since 2014. But when Vladimir Putin gives the order, on February 24, to his army to cross the borders of Ukraine, it is the entire editorial staff of the Kyiv Independent which has switched to war reporting.