Ukrainian Peace Builder Olena Zinenko Puts Her Trust in People

After fleeing her home and finding refuge in Poland and Germany, the longtime journalist and activist is hopeful to someday return to Ukraine.

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Olena Zinenko recalls the early morning hours in late February when she woke up to hear her husband and mother talking in the kitchen while bombs exploded in the distance. The long-anticipated Russian attack had begun.

“My older daughter started crying,” she recalls in an interview. “We gathered our backpacks, knowing we had to move. I paced the floor in my flat, frustrated, and tried to decide how to leave, what to take. We didn’t have a car. It was around 6 a.m., and we had to make a decision.” 

And that decision, made by millions of Ukranians, was to flee.

“Human rights issues are about humans—a concept wider than only discrimination against one group. Sometimes, when we fight against discrimination, we discriminate another group.”

A native of Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest city of 1.5 million near the border with Russia, forty-six-year-old Zinenko is a Ph.D. candidate in Journalism at V.N. Karazin Kharkiv National University. A veteran journalist, editor, and mass communications strategist, she is the program coordinator for the Kharkiv Regional Foundation Public Alternative, a non-governmental organization.

Zinenko’s husband and two daughters packed amid the confusion, deciding what essentials to take and what to leave behind. They arranged for a friend “with a big car” to drive them to the train station so they could move to the western part of Ukraine and then to Poland. The journey took three days. Her elderly mother stayed behind.

The family stayed briefly with a friend, then moved to another apartment where Zinenko continued her academic work at the Polish Jagiellonsky University. After six weeks, the family relocated to Germany, where Zinenko continues her work at Frankfurt’s Viadrina University.

Since the outbreak of the war, nearly 5.2 million Ukrainians have left their homeland, and more than seven million people remain displaced within Ukraine.

“I remember living through the Soviet era and not being happy about the strict rules,” says Zinenko, who has been a media consultant at the Centre of Gender Culture’s Media Laboratory where she designed multimedia reportage workshops which she refers to as “creative journalism.” 

“Creative journalism [goes] beyond the dry mainstream presentation of facts, to convey a message with multimedia tools—visuals, video, etc,” Zinenko says. “For those starting out as journalists, we taught them how to go beyond presenting just facts to construct and convey visual messages.”

Zinenko emphasizes how journalists have the critical responsibility of helping those unaware of various issues gain a better understanding by using new, creative approaches, including training youth activists in media literacy and helping promote gender equity.

“Human rights issues are about humans—a concept wider than only discrimination against one group. Sometimes, when we fight against discrimination, we discriminate another group,” she says. “It’s not about how Russians are better than Ukrainians, or how people have no ethnicity. Such issues previously created a communication barrier.” 

After seventy-two years under Soviet rule, on August 24, 1991, Ukraine officially declared its independence. Since 1922, Ukraine had been one of the key constituent republics of the Soviet Union. “I was born during the Soviet era, in Kharkiv,” Zinenko recalls. “Although I speak Ukrainian, I was born in a Russian-speaking family, so my native language is Russian. My grandmother was a Russian philologist but anti-Soviet.”   

In 1990, when she was in tenth grade, Zinenko traveled to a village in the western Lviv region to celebrate Christmas with a Ukrainian family, which helped recover her Ukrainian traditions. When Zinenko’s husband received a Fulbright scholarship in 2014 to conduct research in Ohio, the family spent a year in the United States where they met local Ukrainian community members who became their “family in America.”

“We spoke Ukrainian and English, and I completely understood that I’m Ukrainian,” Zinenko explains. “But on another occasion, when I was in Moscow, and was speaking with the Russians and joking around, I realized the Russians didn’t quite understand my jokes. I feel we are not the same people–which is neither good nor bad. I feel that the Russian and the Ukrainian context has changed.”

While in Poland, Zinenko monitored Russian news, listened to her favorite Russian musicians, knows the Russian “narratives” and appreciates the anti-war sentiments from Russians despite safety risks. She knows there is a need “to conduct research to find not only the gaps, but points of connection where dialogue can begin.” Hopeful that these “connection points” will make dialogue possible, she considers the vast differences between Russians and Ukrainians.

“Women are the most vulnerable group in this war, both in Ukraine and in Russia,” she says. “One of the most important groups is the mothers of those who fought and died in Ukraine.”

Some Ukrainian women, Zinenko says, feel the need to be armed for their own safety as they watch the atrocities against women on the battlefield. She calls for “accepting and understanding women who rather take up arms to defend themselves against attacks by their aggressive neighbor.”

And what does the future hold for Zinenko, as she settles in Germany, continuing her research at the Viadrina University?

“It’s a hard question. I’m a person who wants to have a plan,” she says. “For now, I have a plan that is OK, but when I know I can return to my city, I will. I don’t know when that will be, but I will return. But for now, I must improve myself and be strong so that when I return home, I will have the power and the strength to do good.”

Committed to dispelling stereotypes about Ukrainians and other components of the “Russian narrative,” Zinenko’s core belief is the need for “respect and trust.”

“When propaganda corrupts humanistic narratives, we must trust people, because this is a complicated situation,” she says. “We need time to reflect.”