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Angelina Kariakina had barely slept, in the early hours of January 8th, when her phone rang. Kariakina is the editor-in-chief of Hromadske.TV, Ukraines independent, collectively run online-and-satellite-based television station, and before she fell asleep, she had been cordinating Hromadskes coverage of Iranian missile strikes against U.S. air bases. Now, a colleague who was on vacation in a country a few time zones ahead of Ukraine was calling to say that a Ukrainian passenger plane had crashed soon after takeoff from the Tehran airport. Kariakina got up and started reporting.

Kariakina, who is thirty-four, was in a unique position to report the story and grasp its context. She was, until very recently, married to an Iranian-born Ukrainian citizen, and lived briefly in Tehran, in 2008 and 2009. Her father and an entire community of family friends are pilots.

She called her father first. The crash was being reported as an accidentan early theory had it that an engine had caught on fire right after takeoff. This would have been the first fatal accident in the twenty-seven-year history of Ukraines national carrier, Ukraine International Airlines. Her father immediately questioned the official version. He said that a Boeing 737, which he had flown, can stay in the air for up to half an hour with one of its engines on fire, giving the pilots enough time for two attempts at landing. Kariakina made more callsto family friendsand they affirmed her fathers opinion. She also learned that the crew included three experienced pilots. She began to suspect that the plane had been shot down, but she felt that Hromadske couldnt advance this theory until an official source did. (Iran has since admitted to mistakenly shooting down the plane, killing a hundred and seventy-six passengers.)

While they waited for official information about the crash, Kariakina asked a young reporter to go to the international airport outside of Kyiv to learn all she could about the eleven Ukrainian pilots, crew members, and passengers who had died in the crash. After the reporter returned, Kariakina assigned her to report on the life and work of flight attendants in general. Using another editor as a go-between, the reporter communicated that she was having trouble with the story. She said that she couldnt sleep because, every time she closed her eyes, she flashed back to her conversations with the surviving relatives of the crew, Kariakina told me. She was upset that I was handing out these assignments so quickly, without talking them over. My immediate reaction was outrage at her being so sensitive. And then I thought, Maybe I should be outraged at myself for being insensitive.

For Kariakina and her generation of Ukrainian journalists, the crash is the latest in a long line of tragedies to report on: more grief, more dead bodies, and, she fears, more that will never be known. Her experience of life in Iran tells her just how difficult it will be to obtain full and accurate information about what happened. (Iran initially denied that a missile was responsible for the crash.) Her experience of working in Ukraine has taught her too well just how damaging not knowing can be. I feel like I live in a country of constant injustices and unanswered questions, Kariakina said.

She is probably best known for her coverage of the investigation and prosecution of the killing of eighty-two protesters during the 2013-14 Revolution of Dignity in Kyiv. Kariakina and her colleague Anastasia Stanko were some of the only journalists to interview some of the special-forces officers accused in the killings while they were in pre-trial detention. The investigation lasted more than five years, but, at the end of last year, the five defendants in the case were released on personal recognizance. They are now believed to be living in separatist territories in eastern Ukraine, and Kariakina fears that they will never have to testify in court.

Kariakina also reported on the 2014 downing of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17, or MH-17, which was shot down by Russian-backed Ukrainian separatists, killing the two hundred and ninety-eight people onboard. Because the plane went down in territory controlled by the separatists, Ukrainian journalists could not access the site, and had to rely on information passed on by Western colleagues. This investigation, too, dragged on for years; a criminal trial will finally start in March, in the Netherlands, where the flight originated, and Kariakina and her colleagues will be covering it in the hopes, she said, that at least one of the recent tragedies will have its full story told.

The continuing unspooling of the story of MH-17 provides an eerie echo to the Ukraine Airlines crash; its one of the reasons this latest tragedy has been painfully easy to absorb. Many people here also remember the downing of a Russian airplane over the Black Sea, in 2001that time it was a Ukrainian missile that went astray during military exercises. Bizarre as it may seem to most people in most countries, here, the possibility that a commercial passenger plane was accidentally brought down by a surface-to-air missile is very plausible.

Kariakina thinks that this long string of apparent terrible luck has created a kind of victimhood mind-set. People say, Why did MH-17 get shot down over our land? Why did Russia attack us? Why did our plane get shot down for nothing? For a young journalist, this is an unappealing line of questioning. I dont want to spend my life talking about [Vladimir] Putin and the Kremlin. I would rather direct my gaze inside the country. But its very hard to express doubt, to ask difficult questions in the face of so much grief and injustice. It feels like we have to finish grieving first. And so people can always tell you that its not the right time to ask questions.

The inability to tell complete stories can only compound this sense of victimhood, and the conspiracy thinking it can breed. It can also make a whole country feel smalland it doesnt help when your politics and your tragedy seem like footnotes or externalities of other countries problems. Kariakina reminded me, and perhaps herself, that Ukraine is a large European countryit occupies an area far larger than Germany and a bit larger than France, and its population is roughly equal to that of Spainwith, among other things, a highly developed aviation industry. Ukraine is home to the Antonov plant, which once manufactured the largest and most powerful freight airliners in the world. Kariakina said that she would like to report stories on the network of airports that feel like imperial leftovers, on the large numbers of highly qualified pilots, like her father, who hardly fly anymore;, and on the aviation job market, because Ukraine International Airlinesthe only airline that pays its pilots wellhas only so many jobs. But the loss of wealth and dignity are the sorts of things journalists tend to overlook when all they seem to cover, all the time, are dead bodies.

Original post:
How a Journalist in Kyiv Responded to the Downing of a Ukrainian Passenger Plane - The New Yorker