The Kyiv Independent journalist Danylo Mokryk has filed a complaint with the Verkhovna Rada Commissioner for Human Rights against Ukraine’s President’s Office (PO) over their refusal to publish his online petition calling for a press conference with Volodymyr Zelenskyi. Danylo Mokryk reported this in a Facebook post.
The journalist said that the complaint had been prompted by the PO’s refusal to publish the petition or to explain who was behind the decision decision and what legal requirements the petition supposedly failed to meet. He added that the President’s Office had not responded to his request to see a copy of the ruling saying that the petition was invalid.
“In the complaint, I’m asking, among other things, for administrative penalties for the PO officials responsible for these violations of the right to petition and the right of access to information. The Commissioner has such powers. The fact that, having blocked my petition, the Presodent’s Office went ahead and published a different petition on the same topic of a press conference, essentially identical in content (which I happily signed), just further confirms just how arbitrary Bankova’s decisions on petitions are,” Danylo Mokryk said.
The journalist stressed that he considered it necessary to stand up for his own rights in dealings with state bodies in order to prevent similar violations from happening again in the future.
Previously
President Zelensky last held a press conference following the “Ukraine. Year 2025” forum in February 2025. There have been no large-scale, open press conferences with the President that would involve a broad range of Ukrainian media outlets — a concern journalists have previously raised.
On 27 August 2026, a petition calling for a separate, open press conference with Zelensky involving independent and critically minded media outlets was published on the President’s website.
The petition was also backed by Yaroslav Yurchyshyn, chair of the Verkhovna Rada Committee on Freedom of Speech, who said that society needed direct dialogue with the President and that the largely one-way communication format of evening addresses no longer met public demand.
On 1 September 2026, journalists from several independent Ukrainian media outlets recorded a video with questions they would like to put to Zelenskyi. They said they did this because they had no opportunity to ask him these questions in person at an open press conference.
As of late 2 September, the petition had gathered more than 17,000 of the 25,000 signatures required for it to be considered.