MOST journalist prevented from attending a Kherson CMA meeting with doctors, which she considers of public interest

Olena Hnitetska, journalist with the online news outlet MOST, was not allowed to attend a meeting between the chair of the Kherson City Military Administration, Roman Mrochko, and the administrative staff of the Y. Karabelesh Clinical Hospital of Kherson City.

Olena Hnitetska reported this to the regional representative of the Institute of Mass Information in Kherson oblast.

When Olena Hnitetska tried to enter the meeting, showing her editorial ID and Defense Ministry credentials, her path was blocked by four people in camouflage bearing machine guns.

Olena Hnitetska, photo by Olena Hnitetska on Facebook

“The Kherson CMA chief of external communications and media relations, Denys Putintsev, came out and called this meeting a 'closed meeting with doctors,'” Olena said.

On the audio recording of the conversation, which Hnitetska shared with the IMI representative, he does call it a “closed meeting” and says that “even he will not be there.”

However, when we called him on the phone, he did not pick up and texted that he was at a meeting. “There will be issues discussed that should not be public, in particular financial ones,” Putintsev added.

As the doctors told the IMI representative, they were summoned to a meeting to discuss the contract with the Karabelesh Clinical Hospital general director, Alla Malytska, not being renewed.

IMI lawyer Roman Holovenko commented on the situation as follows: "The thing is, this is not a meeting of a collegial subject of government authority, to which public access is guaranteed by the law. Consultations, meetings with employees, etc. involving government representatives are not regulated in such detail, therefore they can be either restricted or open, depending on the participants' choice."

As the IMI representative notes, Malytska’s dismissal gained a lot of traction on social media over the weekend. The doctors wrote an open address to the President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, calling on him to intervene in the situation. They said that they were outraged by the actions of Roman Mrochko, who on January 10, after her contract had expired, dismissed her from her position, even though two weeks earlier, at a meeting with the hospital management, “he made no comments about the work of the hospital nor complaints about the management's actions.”

Journalist Olena Hnitetska believes that the issues that could have been discussed at the meeting were of public interest.