Suspilne Ukraine and International Media Support (IMS) have concluded a Memorandum of Cooperation. The document was signed on January 20 in Kyiv by Rodion Kochubey, a Member of the Managing Board of Suspilne Ukraine responsible for operations, and Gulnara Akhundova, IMS Regional Director for Europe.
The Memorandum between Suspilne Ukraine and IMS is aimed at strengthening the institutional capacity of the company by involving it in European Union programs and initiatives, developing professional competencies of specialists, preparing and implementing joint grant initiatives, as well as strengthening sustainability, media and digital literacy.
“IMS is among the top ten organizations for media development in the world. We work with partners all over the world, and everything we do is for our partners. However, IMS as an organization is worth nothing without our partners. Therefore, I am very grateful for the opportunity to be at Suspilne Ukraine today. I have been waiting for this meeting for a long time and I believe that we are only at the beginning of our cooperation journey,” said Gulnara Akhundova, IMS Regional Director for Europe.
“We are sincerely grateful to the IMS team for the personal visit to Suspilne Ukraine. We greatly appreciate this meeting and understand how difficult the path to it was. Such support from partners is extremely important for us,” said Rodion Kochubey.
The IMS delegation also included Gohar Khodjayan, Head of IMS Projects in Ukraine and IMS Representative Office in Kyiv, Olena Vasina, Manager of the U-MIIND Project from IMS, Roman Kifliuk, IMS national advisor for Ukraine, and Yulia Grytsenko, Media Resilience Adviser. They learned more about Suspilne’s work during the war, in particular about the news team, and visited the newsroom, television studios, and the new digital complex of the full production cycle.
“The level of trust in Suspilne Novyny is 79%, and we are truly proud of our news team, which works not only in the central office, but also in all regions of Ukraine. Our teams did not stop working even in the first, most difficult days and weeks of a full-scale war. This is why we have achieved high levels of trust and recognition. News remains our key direction, and most of our resources — from finances to human capital — we invest in news production and information broadcasting,” Rodion Kochubey emphasized.
As a reminder, International Media Support (IMS) is an international non-profit organization working in the field of supporting independent media and freedom of speech on four continents. IMS has about 160 specialists from over 45 countries around the world. The head office is located in Copenhagen (Denmark), and the organization also has regional offices in various countries. IMS was founded in 2001 after the conflicts in Rwanda and the Balkans, where the media were used as a tool for inciting war. The organization works with the local context in mind, pre-assessing the needs of the media sector in each country and building partnerships with local and international organizations. IMS programs focus, in particular, on supporting gender equality and involving representatives of minorities in the media as an important component of democratic development.
Suspilne Ukraine is an independent media company with a strong presence across all platforms: the TV channels Pershyi, Suspilne Kultura, Suspilne Sport, and a national network of local channels; the radio stations Ukrainske Radio, Radio Promin, Radio Kultura, Radiotochka. Find only verified news on suspilne.media, as well as on our national and local digital platforms. We broadcast in minority languages, represent Ukraine at the Eurovision Song Contest, develop the children’s platform Brobaks, and train media professionals through the Public Media Academy. Our Suspilne Mediateka platform offers unique video and audio archives dating from the 1920s to today. Defending freedom in Ukraine.
Photographed by Valeriia Mezentseva
