HUBZ staff appeals to the Commissioner over salary delays

The HUBZ editorial team and project managers are appealing to the Verkhovna Rada Commissioner for Human Rights, Dmytro Lubinets, senior editor Ihor Tykholaz reported to the Institute of Mass Information representative Valentyna Troyan, sharing the letter.

“We have reached the point of despair, we have been humiliated, devalued, and our families have been reduced to poverty. The HUBZ management has been withholding our promised salaries for five and a half months. We have been hearing many promises since November 2024, but none have been kept, and then we were cynically confronted with the fact: there would be no salary for October. Still, we continued to work, because we believed in the project, we believed in the management. But we had to get into credit card debts in order to somehow survive, because we were promised that we would get paid later. No one has paid us anything so far,” the address says.

The address also notes that the management, represented by chief editor Olha Dontsova and operations director Oleksandr Podobnyi, stopped making promises in February 2025 and neither the team nor the HUBZ senior editor have heard from them since early March.

“Messages and calls are ignored, as if we no longer existed. The names of our editorial team were removed from the project's website without any explanation, and we have been barred from updating it. We, professional journalists, who had been filling the website with high-quality content for three years, were reassigned... bloggers. And earlier, there was a copyright violation incident, which we reported to Detector Media journalists and they recorded this case,” the team added.

The staff noted that the HUBZ project had been growing throughout the years of the war and that the editorial office consisted of four people as of late November 2024. Website traffic amounted to over 120 thousand readers – without a single hryvnia of advertising investments. In December 2024, HUBZ was included on the Map of Recommended Media Outlets in Ukraine, becoming one of the 17 national media recommended by the DM and the IMI.

“We have always adhered to journalism standards and provided our readers with important, relevant and much-needed information about physical and mental health. We have implemented many important educational and communication projects, our partners have always appreciated our professionalism. But the management did not appreciate it...” added the applicants.

The address was signed by senior editor Ihor Tykholaz, analyst Hanna Shubina, news editor (Ukraine) Nataliya Bilotil, news editor (World) Liliya Naboka, project manager Hanna Dyachenko, advertising manager Yulia Vasylenko, sales manager of educational product Anna Hrinenko, designer Olena Khoruzha, targetologist Dmytro Hryhorov, YouTube specialist Andriy Tupchiy.

The HUBZ media website says they are a modern media outlet about health. The project was launched in March 2019 and registered as the news agency HUBZ Inform on September 2, 2022, receiving an official certificate from the Ministry of Justice of Ukraine. According to the documents, its founder is Olha Dontsova.

On March 12, the staff of the Ukrainian media outlet HUBZ reported that they had been receiving no salaries since October 2024, and journalists are being told to submit backdated resignation letters.