The Tomashpil District Court of Vinnytsia oblast has overturned the police decision to close the proceedings on obstruction of reporting by the online news outlet Anzhur.info.
The ruling was announced on 28 July 2025, the media outlet reported in a Facebook post.
Journalist Tamara Burbeza filed the complaint with the court, saying that the investigation had been superficial and the Tulchyn District Police investigator Captain Oleksandr Shpykuliak’s conculsions were premature and unfounded.
The case concerns access to information. Since the journalists were not provided with full information, they view this as obstruction of their reporting.
The police opened the proceedings on 18 February 2025 following a statement by the journalists Tamara Burbeza and Volodymyr Halkovskyo, who reported obstruction by the director of a Tomashpil municipal company, Viktor Nemirovskyi.
According to the applicants, on 14 February 2025, the municipal company director denied journalists access to some documents and later provided them in part. The journalists regarded these actions as an attempt to restrict their access to public information, which falls under Article 171 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine (obstruction of legal reporting).
However, on 26 June 2025, investigator Shpykuliak closed the case, stating that he saw “no intent to obstruct the journalist’s work,” and pointing out that Burbeza had eventually viewed the requested documents.
Tamara Burbeza insisted that the decision was unlawful and made without fully analysing the evidence. She said that the investigator had not examined the bodycam audio and video footage and had not ordered their examination; had not checked whether the information requested by the journalists was provided in time and in full; ignored the denial of access to documents on 14 February; and taken the testimony by the company’s director, who cited the query’s “valitidy term expiration” and the documents having been moved to the archive, at face value.
The investigating judge agreed that the decision to close the proceedings was unfounded and premature. The court’s ruling listed a number of serious violations:
- the person responsible for providing public information was not identified;
- it was not specified which documents regulate the deadlines for archiving the papers;
- the footage provided by the journalist was not reviewed as material evidence;
- no steps were taken to improve the quality of the audio and video footage.
The court stressed that proceedings can only be closed after a full and objective investigation of all circumstances.
In the end, the court satisfied the complaint in part: the investigator’s decision to close the case was canceled, but the court refused to order the police to conduct specific investigative actions, citing the investigator’s procedural independence. Anzhur.info later reported that the disciplinary commission of the Vinnytsia Oblast National Police HQ had officially confirmed that unlawful actions had been committed, but only issued a “strongly-worded instruction” instead of real penalty.