From Telegram’s threat to quality shrinkflation – what defines Ukraine’s media market in 2025

Editor’s note: this article is published as part of The Fix’s partnership with LMF. Held annually in Lviv (Ukraine) by NGO “Lviv Media Forum”, LMF has been the biggest media conference in Central and Eastern Europe since 2013.

Are Telegram channels a bigger threat to Ukraine’s legacy media than the war’s economic upheaval? 

Three years into the full-scale war Ukraine has retained a robust independent media sector and a considerable level of press freedom. Yet Ukrainian publishers struggle with challenges that are both specific to a wartime country and familiar to media managers worldwide.

There are physical risks in covering the invasion, of course. Last month Ukraine’s top journalism prize went to Ivan Lubysh-Kirdey, a Reuters camera operator severely wounded in a Russian attack on a hotel last year. There’s a decline in advertising caused by the war’s economic impact. And then there’s competing for attention in a world where legacy media no longer has a monopoly on news and information.

To pinpoint key trends that inform Ukraine’s media sector in 2025, we spoke with Yaroslav Yurchyshyn, member of Ukrainian parliament and the head of its freedom of speech committee, and Otar Dovzhenko, Ukrainian media expert and Lviv Media Forum’s Chief Creative Officer.

When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Ukraine’s media defied predictions of imminent doom and survived. Very few major companies shut down – partly thanks to increased grant funding from donors like the US and European countries. 

Lviv Media Forum has just published one of the most comprehensive studies on Ukrainian media during the war. The research shows that advertising as a proportion of publishers’ revenue declined by 13%, while the share of grants rose by 17%.

2025, though, brought a huge upheaval – the dismantling of America’s international aid by the new Trump administration. The decision impacted news media across the CEE region and beyond, but especially in Ukraine, where US grants have accounted for a considerable portion of institutional funding. 

Otar Dovzhenko says the end of US aid hasn’t been a seismic event across Ukraine’s media as a whole, but high-quality independent media were hit particularly hard.

“We won’t see mass extinction, but we’ll definitely see the worsening of standards. With the loss of American money, it will be much harder to have a conversation about ethics, standards and quality of media again”, Dovzhenko says. He compares the situation with grocery shrinkflation – consumers are still getting the same product but at a slightly worse quality. 

(As a side note, Dovzhenko says that Ukraine’s media about media like Detector Media and media market research have been among those hit hardest – a problem for the whole media sector in the long term). 

Yet, given how many challenges Ukrainian publishers have gone through over the past three years, people aren’t despairing, Dovzhenko concludes. “The vibrant segment of the Ukrainian media is determined to find a way out of this problem”.

In the latest press freedom ranking by Reporters Without Borders, Ukraine is 62nd among the world’s countries, roughly the same as last year. That’s far from stellar but still noteworthy for a country under martial law. 

Yaroslav Yurchyshyn, the member of Ukrainian parliament who chairs its freedom of speech committee, says Russia remains by the far the biggest threat to press freedom in Ukraine. He cites research by the Institute of Mass Information that shows Russia having committed over 800 crimes against media and journalists in Ukraine.

Russia’s most egregious crimes are killings of journalists, such as the notorious death of Victoria Roshchyna and deliberate targeting of hotels. Yurchyshyn says an important priority for his committee is putting international pressure on Russia to free captive journalists. Successful cases include the release of Nariman Dzhelyal, but some 30 reporters remain in captivity.

Internally, independent media are able to conduct high-profile investigations that hold the government to account, though not without challenges. Yurchyshyn says his priorities include fighting SLAPPs – abusive lawsuits used to target journalists – and parliamentary control over cases on crimes against journalists. 

Existing freedoms stem from the wide diversity of online media and social channels. TV channels are regulated much more tightly – Ukraine’s joint telemarathon that emerged as an initiative of top TV channels in the first days of the full-scale invasion but soon became a legal requirement has since become a target of criticism over censorship. Yurchyshyn himself criticises the telemarathon and considers it a waste of resources, but points out that it’s not a threat to freedom of speech as most Ukrainians rely on other sources of news.

Since the start of the full-scale war millions of Ukrainians turned for information to Telegram, a messaging app that doubles as a news platform. Top Telegram channels, which have amassed millions of subscribers, offer rapid updates on everything from political news to real-time vectors of Russian rocket attacks. 

News publishers struggle to compete with anonymous Telegram channels that aren’t obliged by journalistic standards like rigorous verification of information. For example, top news channel Trukha, often criticised by media analysts for lax standards, has close to 2.8 million subscribers – more than any journalistic outlet. 

Otar Dovzhenko says the issue is that large chunks of people in Ukraine not only read Telegram channels more than news media, but actually trust them more than journalistic outlets. Telegram channels often offer faster updates – at the cost of reliability – and use more engaging language. (They can also broadcast in Russian, while media outlets switched to Ukrainian as a primary language because of legal requirements and public consensus, making the latter less relatable to the segment of Ukrainians who still use Russian as their first language). 

Dovzhenko believes that the Telegram ecosystem “ruins all advantages of traditional media” and in the long term threatens to undermine Ukrainian publishers more than the loss of revenue. 

Despite all the gloom, Ukraine’s media market has been a place for intriguing experimentation with formats and business models. There are publishers that have learned how to capture international audiences, build a sustainable reader revenue model, earn money with live events, and experiment with AI.

Otar Dovzhenko highlights the rise of premium print products, a global trend that’s particularly visible in Ukraine. Several online outlets like Reporters and Cukr have launched illustrated magazines that often break even or turn a small profit without grant support.

Dovzhenko says these publishers have cleverly repurposed what appeared to be declining print technology, filling it with quality content to create products that generate genuine consumer demand.

Source of the cover photo: Courtesy of Lviv Media Forum