by Scott Douglas Jacobsen
How can wartime journalists balance personal safety, digital security, empathy, and rigorous reporting?
Andrii Bystrov is a Ukrainian journalist, editor, and media manager formerly at Ukrainska Pravda. His career spans television, online media, newsroom editing, and media leadership. Drawn first to the speed and adrenaline of TV news, Bystrov later focused on team management, editorial judgment, and investigative impact. He emphasizes curiosity, fast thinking, and the discipline of asking “why” as core habits for responsible journalism in democratic and wartime contexts.
In this interview, Andrii Bystrov explains how Ukrainian journalists have strengthened personal safety, digital security, and editorial protocols during wartime. Speaking with Scott Douglas Jacobsen, he emphasizes drone-detection tools, backups, authentication, and practical training that once seemed theoretical. The discussion also explores ethical interviewing after missile strikes, the need to give traumatized people emotional space, and the deeper compassion of accurate, impartial reporting that serves both survivors and democratic publics with care and discipline.
Andrii Bystrov is a colleague and expert associated with the National Union of Journalists of Ukraine and the Journalists’ Solidarity Centers. The Journalists’ Solidarity Center of the National Union of Journalists of Ukraine is a vital wartime hub helping Ukrainian and international reporters stay safe, connected, and operational through frontline danger, blackouts, displacement, and daily pressure on independent media.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: This one, I think, is important. Television journalists can remain in a studio. They might not necessarily be safe from a cruise missile or a Shahed drone, but they are generally safer than journalists who are directly in the line of artillery fire or missile strikes.
The National Union of Journalists of Ukraine has established Journalist Solidarity Centers and published materials outlining best practices based on wartime experience for the safety of media workers, particularly journalists.
In your category of journalism, what is most important for personal safety and digital security? What currently works robustly as best practice? Obviously, the tools change over time, but for now, what matters most?
Andrii Bystrov: Personal safety and digital security are extremely important. Of course, I have attended many trainings on protocols and personal safety. As I said, we now have good drone-detection equipment. I also completed two courses on digital security.
I think we are much stronger now than before. We have skills, we understand the processes better, and we know we need backups of our materials. We understand that we need protocols at both the editorial and personal levels, including mobile phone authentication and other protections.
So I think we are much more prepared for these challenges now because, before the war, these issues felt theoretical to us. It was like reading a textbook about journalism ethics.
Of course, it was important, but we never really practiced how to interview a person who had just experienced a missile strike or lost family members. In university, ethics classes were presented academically. Yes, ethics mattered, but it remained theoretical for students.
Jacobsen: It is also about intuitively knowing when to pump the brakes rather than press the gas pedal and ask more questions.
Bystro: Practically, you are standing in front of a woman or a man who can barely raise their head, and you still have to decide whether you should ask questions.
Jacobsen: The professionalization of journalism and information gathering also means knowing when it is not appropriate to continue asking questions. There is a boundary between human empathy and professional responsibility.
You may want to hug and comfort people, but you also have to respect their space, their time, and your role as a journalist. It is a very thin line between appearing cold and dismissive versus simply doing your due diligence to tell the story accurately and impartially.
I remember discussing this with the team at the Kharkiv Journalist Solidarity Center during one of our interviews. People outside of Ukraine often seem to have a simplified idea of what war is actually like.
People outside of Ukraine sometimes seem to imagine war as if it were a Hollywood movie. There is a joke by Richard Pryor in the United States where he says that if someone robs you and stabs you, there is no dramatic music playing in the background. There is no “dun-dun-dun.” You were just stabbed.
Similarly, I remember interviewing five older adults in Kharkiv who had lost their homes and livelihoods. They were crying during the interviews. I stopped fairly quickly with each of them because the emotions were immediate and real.
There is no cinematic soundtrack in those moments. Subjectively, the emotions are extremely acute and significant for them, but they are not “Hollywood production” emotions.
So the most respectful thing to do, particularly as a foreigner, is to sit with them and be present as another human being, while also understanding the boundaries involved. They need space to feel their emotions, but it is not my role to cross into behaving like family, comforting them through grief, because our paths only intersect very briefly.
The impartiality of journalism can sometimes appear cold, but it is not. In fact, adhering carefully to impartiality can seem even colder from the outside.
At the same time, the more sophisticated, nuanced, and subtle form of empathy in journalism is simply doing the job properly: getting the story and telling it as faithfully and truthfully as possible.
That means separating the facts from the emotions. For example, someone may say, “I think Russians are pigs,” to use your earlier point. But the accurate reporting is this: an older adult lost their home, lost all of their savings and security at the age of seventy, has physical injuries, is crying because they lost everything, now lives in a different city, and is completely dependent on others because they are too old to rebuild their life.
In that sense, doing our work rigorously is actually the most compassionate and empathetic thing we can do.
To your point about not trying to induce emotions when presenting stories, simply reporting accurately is enough. Most people already possess the emotional capacity to respond appropriately. If something is deeply wrong or tragic, most people will naturally understand that.
If someone lacks empathy or is deeply traumatized, you cannot force them into the appropriate emotional response anyway.
That is why many people on YouTube look for bloggers who constantly amplify emotions with the same dramatic pacing.
So I think, building on my earlier conversation with the Kharkiv Journalist Solidarity Center team, that doing your job rigorously while giving people emotional space, which is not necessarily a formal journalistic principle, but more an intuitive understanding of where another person is emotionally, allows them to feel what they need to feel while also allowing you to do your work accurately and fully.
Of course, journalism is often fast-paced, and sometimes you are short on time. But when you create that space, you can produce a much better interview, opinion piece, or news article.
In doing so, you serve both the person whose story briefly intersects with yours and the wider public you are serving in democratic societies. Doing that work well helps strengthen democratic culture and fulfill your professional duties as a journalist, regardless of the branch of journalism you work in.
That is my perspective so far after speaking with wartime journalists here, while also approaching the situation with fresh eyes as a foreigner and as a non-establishment, independent journalist.