By Yury Osmakovsky | Vice-Coordinator
Almost immediately after our previous report, since mid-September, regular Russian missile strikes began on Ukrainian civilian energy infrastructure facilities.Our city was no exception, having been subjected to them more than a dozen times. And if now blackouts usually do not exceed 3-4 hours a day, then in December blackouts often lasted 7-8 and even 12 hours.
Of course, this dramatically increased the demand for humanitarian aid. On the one hand, on December 1, the Kharkiv municipal authorities opened the distribution of free hot food in schools, and the state began to equip street "points of invincibility" where you can warm up and charge your gadgets for free. At the same time, so many people have lost their jobs due to business closures or have lost wages due to employers compensating for losses caused by blackouts from the workers' pockets, that volunteer groups still have a lot of work to do. The contact form at the bottom of the home page of our site is very helpful for people to contact us for targeted aid. You can see the results in the screenshot below: even at the peak of the December blackouts, when views of all media dropped sharply, our magazine showed a positive trend. In the last month, we overtook the municipal media by almost 25 thousand visits!
Along with this, one of our participants, who lives in a private home in the relatively quiet southern area of the city, has set up a self-powered community heating station with LiFePO4 battery and 11 solar panels on the roof, open to anyone with a long commute to the more comfortable city center. The photos are below.
This is all made possible thanks to your donations from all over the world. During the full-scale war, advertising revenues of Ukrainian media dropped so much that self-sufficiency became almost impossible. For this reason, even a number of Ukrainian oligarchs decided to get rid of their TV channels became unprofitable: according to the All-Ukrainian Advertising Coalition, in 2022 the volume of direct TV advertising decreased by almost 80%, and sponsorship by 87%.
Your invaluable support gives us a unique opportunity not only to maintain independence and stay afloat, but also to help people around us do it. We are actively working on monitoring the anti-war struggle in Russia, providing information assistance to persecuted fighters (including sharing their fundraising calls) through our international blog on Libcom.
Recently, a number of materials have also been published on our own resource that have become resonant in the city - for example, about how the mayor's office does PR for itself among municipal workers by distributing food packages from foreign organizations under the guise of its own. No less important was the presentation, exclusively covered by us, of several urban development horizintal collectives appeared in Kharkov last year to discuss how to make the city comfortable for everyone and have an active community after the war.
Thank you so much for everything! We promise to maintain the achieved level in the new year and will strive for new successes. Stay with us!
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