KIEV, Ukraine — The industrial zone outside the town of Avdeevka in eastern Ukraine was for years a half-abandoned concrete wasteland. Today, it serves as a strategic outpost on the front line of a simmering war between Ukrainian government forces and pro-Russian separatists, which flared up again this summer with a vengeance. At 2 p.m. on July 6, machine-gun fire shattered the usual afternoon lull. From inside an empty warehouse, the Ukrainian army’s 81st Brigade began moving to hold off a rebel advance when a 120 mm mortar shell ripped through the ceiling, sending slabs of concrete crashing to the ground. From beneath the rubble, comrades retrieved 31-year-old paramedic Oleg Lysevych, who died on the spot, and heavily wounded soldier Volodymyr Sergeev. The 23-year-old had received shrapnel wounds to the head, stomach, and both legs and arms. As Sergeev was given treatment, a second mortar strike left another soldier wounded. Four were loaded into an ambulance that day, flanked by an armored personnel carrier as it sped to the hospital. Less than an hour passed before Sergeev was pronounced dead by medical staff. Two days later, the Ukrainian online news channel Hromadske TV, which had embedded with the 81st Brigade, posted its dispatch from the scene to YouTube. In the clip, Hromadske reporter Nastya Stanko applied a tourniquet to Sergeev’s bleeding leg. Her cameraman, Konstantin Reutski, carried another soldier to the ambulance. Neither the warehouse’s location nor the soldiers’ evacuation route was shown. An article with graphic images and video of the battle, titled “War Has Returned,” was published by Russian opposition newspaper Novaya Gazeta. In Kiev, the government erupted in outrage. Ukraine’s “anti-terrorist operation” (ATO) against pro-Russian rebels has its own public relations team, and, via its Facebook page, it essentially accused Hromadske of treason. It charged the channel with exposing army positions, condemned its collaboration with Russian media (a reporter with Novaya Gazeta had accompanied the Hromadske team), and demanded its staff be disciplined. “The video clearly shows the positions of Ukrainian soldiers, their faces and weaponry, objects which can be used as orientation cues by the enemy,” the Facebook post read. “This is a serious violation of the rules of conduct in the ATO zone.” But even more unexpectedly, the public, too, turned on Hromadske. The press center post received more than 3,000 “likes” and shares — completely out of keeping with the response most ATO statements get. Users hurled accusations at the channel, often in abusive tones. “It’s not their accreditation that should be withdrawn but their freedom, as accomplices of terrorists. Lock them up, and don’t let them near our boys,” Facebook user Irina Osypenko wrote. Three hours after it went live, Hromadske removed the video. But the damage had been done. On July 11, the journalists were stripped of their front-line accreditation pending a probe into their activities. It marked the end of an era for Hromadske — and perhaps for Ukraine. When it launched in 2013, Hromadske quickly emerged as the unofficial mouthpiece of Maidan, the protest movement that ousted President Viktor Yanukovych. Just as Maidan inspired something new in Ukrainian politics — a commitment to transparency — so Hromadske gave hope of something new in Ukrainian media: a commitment to the facts. The channel brought no-holds-barred coverage of Ukraine’s political upheaval and the subsequent Kremlin-backed insurgency in the east. And that coverage helped keep the country’s democratic transition on track through incisive reports of the fight for reform and damning investigations into official corruption. But, three years on, the country’s post-Maidan transition has stalled. There have been few political reforms, and corruption is still rampant. Members of Yanukovych’s administration still occupy key positions in the government. The war in eastern Ukraine shows no signs of ending. And the harmony between Ukraine’s new political life and its most ambitious media venture has become a dissonance.Hromadske is now under growing pressure from the public and the government to choose between its loyalty to the nation and its journalistic ideals. “The situation has changed,” said Stanko, who has been covering the military conflict since May 2014. “A ‘patriotic’ wave has swept over the media. Journalists are either traitors or servants of the state. There’s a feeling that truth no longer matters.”

Pro-EU activists stand opposite riot police during a demonstration organized by the Ukrainian opposition in Independence Square in Kiev on November 22, 2013. Photo credit: AFP PHOTO/ SERGEI SUPINSKY

Ukraine’s post-communist television industry has traditionally been dominated by the country’s oligarchs. The few dozen men who had exploited the 1990s privatization drive to build business empires from the ashes of the Soviet system also gained control of the television airwaves. They have used them ever since to wage business feuds and champion the politicians who pledge to safeguard their wealth.

Billionaire Ihor Kolomoisky controls the channel 1+1 and its English language spin-off, Ukraine Today. Steel magnate Victor Pinchuk has ICTV. Rinat Akhmetov, Ukraine’s richest man, runs Ukrayina, while the exiled oligarch Dmytro Firtash owns Inter. Between them, these men bankroll Ukraine’s 10 most-watched TV channels. Billionaire confectionary magnate Petro Poroshenko was elected president in 2014 on a pledge to sell his businesses and “focus on the well-being of the nation”; today, he still controls Channel 5, where, for the right sum of money, anyone can spread his or her message over its airwaves. It’s a media landscape that the Ukrainian economic elite designed to further its interests, and one the country’s political elite learned to navigate to further their own, at the expense of the 90 percent of Ukrainians who rely on television for their news.

The seeds of Hromadske TV (“Public TV” in Ukrainian) were sown in April 2013. That month, TVi, a channel known for its investigative reports, changed hands in a highly publicized ownership dispute. Owner Konstantin Kagalovsky accused businessman Alexander Altman of a corporate raid to seize the channel, carried out with help from Ukraine’s secret service. Following the firing of high-profile staff, and allegations of censorship, 31 journalists left the station. In June, several of them combined forces to launch Hromadske.

Hromadske chose an unprecedented business model. In announcing the project, presenter Mustafa Nayyem promised a “genuinely transparent” news source without oligarchic involvement. With little upfront capital, it registered as a nongovernmental organization (NGO), in the hope that nonprofit status would insulate it against government or oligarchic intrusion. The move also meant Hromadske would rely solely on the goodwill of donors in taking on competitors worth billions of dollars.

Crowdfunding among Ukrainians was slow to gather momentum, but the West was quick to lend a hand. Various European and North American state and private entities helped keep the channel afloat at the outset and since. In July and August 2013, George Soros’s Ukraine-based International Renaissance Foundation and the U.S. Embassy in Kiev provided crucial funds to kick-start the project, and Canada’s Department of Global Affairs has been a source of regular grants. (In a sense, Hromadske is a microcosm of the broader Ukrainian economy, which is dependent on Western support in staving off collapse.)

Hromadske had planned to go live at 6 p.m. on Nov. 22, 2013, but an 11th-hour decision was made to push that time forward four hours. The previous day, under pressure from Russia, then-President Yanukovych had abandoned an agreement on closer trade ties with the EU. In the hours that followed, protests had erupted: Some 2,000 activists had gathered on Kiev’s central square, or Maidan, and Ukraine was poised on the brink of a full-blown political crisis.

Hromadske followed the revolution from its first hours, offering 24-hour live coverage of the protest movement and the violence into which it soon degenerated. While other channels linked live to reporters on bridges overlooking the Maidan or outside government buildings, Hromadske jumped into the fray, sending its reporters into the heart of the protests. From the start, Hromadske was unequivocal in its support for the revolution; its founders even played key roles in it. Nayyem, who has since entered opposition politics, is widely credited with writing the Facebook post that inspired tens of thousands of people to gather on the Maidan, thus sparking the protests that led to Yanukovych’s fall in February 2014.

Hromadske’s on-the-ground reporting and accessible analysis quickly earned it an audience. By December 2013, it had become the go-to source of information for Ukrainians and foreign observers struggling to make sense of the unfolding revolution. Its streams regularly reached 100,000 viewers, and contributions were flowing in from the public; in the first half of 2014, the station received donations totaling more than $120,000. That September, the channel launched a service called Hromadske International. Its English- and Russian-language content was designed to grow the channel’s international audience — and, many Ukrainians suspected, to counter the information war that Russia was accused of waging in their country.

But for Nataliya Gumenyuk, Hromadske’s head, the channel’s focus has always been on delivering facts to the Ukrainian public. The channel takes the BBC as its model, she said. “Dealing with propaganda is the state’s task,” she told me. “Journalists should provide the news and the facts. We may debunk or fact-check stories, but our primary goal was always to be in places first, to go after the least covered stories.”

That approach has not been without risk. On Nov. 29, 2013, a week after the channel went live, two Hromadske journalists were beaten and had equipment stolen in the center of Kiev. Dmytro Gnap and Yakov Lyubchich subsequently claimed that they were jumped by a group of government-hired thugs, who reacted aggressively when questioned. In June 2014, Nastya Stanko was captured on a reporting trip near the border with Russia and kept for three days in a basement before being released in a prisoner exchange.