For us Ukrainians, freedom of speech holds a special meaning. Today, my people fight for this right every single day — because we know that with Russian occupation comes a fog of lies, censorship, and prohibitions.
But if you had asked me — a Ukrainian journalist forced by the war to evacuate with my family to Finland — back in 2021 what freedom of speech meant to me, I would have said: it’s the ability to raise any topic, to express one’s thoughts freely, to receive and share information that matters to society.
That’s exactly what my colleagues and I stood up for in 2013, when President Yanukovych’s regime tried to impose repressive laws limiting media freedom. It was a challenge that society met with the Revolution of Dignity.
Today, my stance has not changed, but my understanding has grown deeper.
Living in Finland for three years now, I’ve come to realize more clearly than ever: freedom of speech is also the right to be heard. It’s the right to speak about your feelings — pain, anger, rage — without being silenced. We live in constant anticipation of bad news. If you opened my messaging apps, you’d find dozens of subscriptions to Ukrainian news channels reporting daily on missile strikes. My Facebook feed is full of fundraisers for friends and colleagues fighting to defend Ukraine, along with news of the wounded and the dead.
But speaking about this in Finland is hard. Our pain and our anger at a common aggressor often go unheard. Such conversations are politely shut down. I know many people who, in the end, simply fell silent.
In 2023, a friend of mine wanted to speak at a rally in support of Ukraine, but she was denied the chance — supposedly because her speech was “too radical.” It ended with the words: “Russia must be destroyed.” This wasn’t aggression; it was a reaction — her family history is deeply rooted in the shared Karelian-Ukrainian tragedy, where the empire always came with war. Back then — to seize your land. Today — to flood with blood our land.
Why can’t we speak openly about this? Why can’t we voice our vision of a just peace and our own security? For us, that will only be possible when our neighbor is no longer a threat. And that means modern Russia must transform — to break apart into smaller states capable of self-reflection, restoring their own cultures, and honestly confronting their history.
I know the story of Ukrainian parents who asked for Russian flags to be removed from a kindergarten because they scared their children. But the teachers replied they had to “preserve Russian culture.” But what do we really mean by “Russian culture”? This question remains taboo. Isn’t it important to recognize that “imperial” Russian culture is actually a collection of achievements of many colonized peoples — including Ukrainians?
A friend of mine, an activist, already in 2021 tried to get the Ateneum Museum in Helsinki to acknowledge Ilya Repin (Illia Ripin) as a Ukrainian artist. Only after the full-scale invasion did the museum correct the label — the Ukrainian painter was finally no longer listed as Russian.
After tragedies like Bucha, I’ve seen Ukrainians try to express their defiance symbolically — through words on t-shirts, ribbons, colors, or social media posts. Yet even these peaceful gestures often faced requests “not to provoke” — because someone’s offended “self” always seemed louder than our pain.
In the end, I, too, faced the impossibility of speaking. During a brief collaboration with a Finnish media company, I was pressured to coordinate topics for the Ukrainian audience with the head of the Russian desk. I explained that this was unacceptable to me — both as a journalist and as someone who had survived the war. But I wasn’t heard. When I reached out to HR, they replied: “You do understand you work for a Finnish company, don’t you?”
My contract was not renewed. At my exit interview, the manager asked: “What exactly did you dislike about working with the Russian desk?” That question stunned me. I had never intended to work with them — I was being forced into it. And the very fact that I had to explain this was humiliating.
So freedom of speech is not just the right to speak. It is the right to be heard.
I want the voices of those who have seen the war up close, who have lost their homes and fled the shelling, to be heard freely. Not only in Ukraine, but in every country that calls itself democratic. Because we Ukrainians understand the price of freedom like no one else — in all its forms. After all, it is an inseparable part of our security and the foundation for building a trusting dialogue between us and other peoples.
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Read Svitlana Yeharmina’s text in Ukrainian
Svitlana Yeharmina is a Ukrainian journalist who was forced to evacuate to Finland due to the war in Ukraine.
