Inside our most memorable stories

For the third anniversary of The Counteroffensive, we want to show you how our favorite (and most hated) pieces were created.

Editor’s Note:

We’re marking three years of The Counteroffensive.

For three years now, The Counteroffensive has been bringing you human stories. Our main mission is to keep you informed about places where authoritarianism threatens democracies.

But we do more than that. We also strive to support, train, and develop Ukrainian journalists — to show how international newsrooms operate and what standards they set. That’s why we regularly work with interns and help them grow professionally.

This week, Myroslava and Zoriana gave a lecture to students at a university in Kyiv on visual storytelling at The Counteroffensive — about how we tell stories through words and images.

If our work resonates with you, especially our commitment to developing new journalists, please support us with a subscription.

KYIV, Ukraine — Before you get a notification about a new story from The Counteroffensive, it has already taken us days – sometimes weeks or even months.

Finding the right character, breaking through a wall of interview refusals, staying awake at four in the morning — these are challenges our small newsroom faces almost daily. And honestly, they’re the kind of challenges we welcome.

Each story begins with dozens of unapproved ideas, reporters’ heavy sighs, meeting editors’ skeptical tongue-clicks.

Every piece is argued for until it is proven to deserve your attention.

Today, we finally shed light on our mishaps in the trips and anecdotes that never made it past drafts into the final versions.

After paywall:

• Why Myroslava was scared of a priest;

• How it feels to jump off the bridge for a story;

• How Sasha can talk without saying a word;

• Who hates reporters’ notebooks;

• And other behind-the-scenes stories!