In Ministry of Defense, one needs to fill in questionnaire to take interview

The Ministry of Defence of Ukraine introduced a new request form for recording an interview with any official of the ministry, including the Minister.

To record an interview with any official of the Ministry, now one needs to fill in a special form, where in addition to the journalist’s name, agency, type of the media outlet, phone numbers – personal and office ones, e-mail, several questions will need to be answered: 
• Topic of the interview?
• Which aspect is the interview focused on?
• What is the background and point of view?
• Who else will be interviewed?
• How well this aspect is studied?
• Does the journalist need any background information? 
• Time of publication
• Journalist’s deadline for preparation of the material for publication
• Will the interview be on air, or will it be edited for broadcasting?
• Where will the interview take place?
• How will the interview be conducted?

The officials claim that the questionnaire is based on the analogous NATO document, yet some questions were considerably distorted in translation. For example, in the initial version of the document the question “what is the story or angle?” was translated as “what will be the manner of story coverage (positive, critical, etc.)?”. 

Before, there was also an announcement that the journalists will not be allowed into the zone of hostilities without being accompanied by the military. As the external consultant of the Ministry of Defence from Ukrainian Crisis media center Tetiana Popova claims, this standard was dropped on December 1.

These changes related to introduction of new standards are related to the planned reinforcement and reformatting of the press service of the Ministry of Defence, announced on November 18.