As muckraking journalists, Nayyem and Leshchenko had contempt for Ukraine’s politicians. So they became politicians. Illustration by Paul Rogers

When Sergii Leshchenko was at university, in Ukraine, he dreamed of working in television news. He is the son of two Soviet-trained engineers, and grew up in Kiev, where he studied journalism. He aspired to become an on-air correspondent, but his speech was mumbly and imprecise. After an unsuccessful summer internship at a local news channel, in 2000, he heard that a new online publication, Ukrayinska Pravda, was desperately looking for reporters; in recent weeks, nearly all the staff had quit, fed up with low pay and worn down by pressure from authorities. His interview took place in a cramped and sparsely furnished three-room apartment, where he was met by the site’s founder and editor-in-chief, Georgiy Gongadze, a thirty-one-year-old reporter. Gongadze regularly received threats from Ukrainian officials because of his muckraking investigations. The power was out in the apartment, so Leshchenko and Gongadze sat in darkness. After a few minutes, Gongadze told him that he could start right away.

Two weeks after Leshchenko began work, Gongadze disappeared. “I thought maybe he wandered off somewhere, went on a bender,” Leshchenko recalled recently. “He could have met a girl, gone to L’viv, or maybe Georgia.” Two months later, Gongadze’s body was found in a forest outside Kiev. He had been decapitated, his body doused in chemicals and burned. Leshchenko had never expected journalism to be a deadly profession, but now that it was it didn’t seem right to do anything else. “There was no going back,” he said.

At Ukrayinska Pravda, Leshchenko was left to work alone with Olena Pritula, the site’s co-founder and publisher. “He never raised a question of his own safety,” Pritula told me. “He just quietly and calmly showed up at work. This was akin to heroism.” Leshchenko rapidly mastered the maze of relationships among Ukraine’s oligarchs and the intricacies of its natural-gas trade. He was “rigorous to the point of being a bore,” Pritula said, and prone to a stubborn and inflexible precision that made him a trying conversationalist but a brilliant reporter. In time, he became Ukraine’s premier investigative journalist. He is now thirty-six, with a trim beard, thick black eyeglasses, and a regular uniform of slim-cut dress shirts and dark jeans.

In contrast, the path that led Mustafa Nayyem to journalism was marked by happenstance. He was born in Afghanistan, where his father was a deputy education minister. His mother died when he was young; in 1989, when Nayyem was eight, his father moved the family to Moscow, and then, in the waning moments of the Soviet Union, to Kiev. Nayyem is thirty-five, with a sculpted goatee, heavy black eyebrows, and an immaculately shaved head.

As a child, Nayyem quickly became fluent in Russian—Ukrainian came more slowly—but his immigrant status made him an outsider at school. He compensated with wit and charm. At university, in Kiev, he studied aerospace engineering. When he graduated, in 2003, he couldn’t find employment, so he bounced between various jobs, played drums in a rock band, and performed in an experimental theatre troupe. In 2004, he began work as a political reporter for a local news agency. “I found I liked to get to the bottom of things,” he recalled. “To reveal all these arrangements and internal stories.” He soon found himself covering one of modern Ukraine’s foundational events.

In the 2004 Presidential election, Viktor Yanukovych, an old-school political roughneck from the country’s industrial east, ran against Viktor Yushchenko, a shrewd political insider who presented his candidacy as signalling the pursuit of a more open, European future. During the campaign, Yushchenko was mysteriously poisoned with dioxin, and his face was left pockmarked and scarred. In November, in what was widely considered a fraudulent vote, Yanukovych was declared the winner.

Thousands protested in Kiev’s Maidan, a central square that serves as both the commercial and the civic heart of the city. Shortly afterward, under pressure from Western governments, the authorities called for a new vote, and Yushchenko won. The Orange Revolution, as it is called, marked a euphoric moment in Ukraine’s post-Communist history, a chance to become a modern liberal state. “It seemed like magic,” Leshchenko told me not long ago, recalling the promise of a new regime. “One leaves, another comes in his place, and everything changes.”

But in Ukraine’s years of independence its political culture had become dysfunctional. It had not managed to create strong institutions, relying instead on clannish relationships among the country’s rich and powerful individuals. Before long, Yushchenko was pursuing the same oligarchic and nepotistic politics that he had promised to transcend. Six months after he took office, he was questioned at a press conference about allegations that his nineteen-year-old son was dropping cash in night clubs and speeding around Kiev in a hundred-and-twenty-thousand-dollar BMW. Yushchenko lashed out at the reporter who had published the initial article. “Act like a polite journalist and not like a hit man!” he said, adding that he had told his son to take his restaurant bills and “throw them in the journalist’s face.”

The journalist was Leshchenko. Nayyem was also at the press conference. The two men kept running into each other in Ukraine’s tight journalist circles, and eventually decided to work on some articles together. They became allies and confidants, their profiles and stature rising in tandem. Nayyem’s poise and gift for repartee made him an obvious fit for television, where, as an on-air host, he deployed his natural ease and charm to discomfit politicians. Savik Shuster, a journalist who hired Nayyem as a correspondent for his political talk show, recalled that he was skilled at asking blunt questions: “ ‘And so how much money did you steal yesterday?’ That sort of thing.” In 2013, Nayyem, along with some friends and colleagues, founded a television channel, Hromadske, and he became its most visible correspondent. It was the country’s first independent news network, run without the backing of an oligarch or interference from the state.

Yushchenko’s Presidency became so ineffective and mired in scandal that in the 2010 election Viktor Yanukovych, the original villain of 2004, managed to defeat Yulia Tymoshenko, a charismatic populist, known for her political cunning, who had been one of the heroes of the Orange Revolution.

Yanukovych’s return to power was guided by the American political strategist Paul Manafort, who helped to reinvent his client as a businesslike manager—not necessarily likable but an antidote to the disastrous political circus overseen by Yushchenko and Tymoshenko. Manafort also counselled Yanukovych to seize on the country’s geographic and linguistic divides, and play to the grievances of his home region, the Russian-speaking Donbass, in the country’s east. Leshchenko described Manafort’s approach: “He tried to create fissures within Ukrainian society and use them to score political points.”

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Yanukovych constructed a corrupt machine that answered to him and his two sons, a network known as the Family. The siphoning of wealth that had long defined Ukrainian politics soon reached grotesque levels. The country’s customs and tax services were transformed into agents of feudal tribute, and Yanukovych used inflated state-procurement contracts to enrich those close to him, making little attempt to mask the corrupt nature of the deals. In 2011, the state paid four hundred million dollars for an offshore oil rig whose market worth was two hundred and fifty million, with the difference disappearing into Yanukovych’s inner circle. By 2013, Yanukovych’s son Oleksandr, a former dentist, was running a five-hundred-million-dollar business empire.