Chetverta Vlada journalist Anastasia Savliuk faced obstruction by employees of the Rivne housing and maintenance department, who took away her phone, tried to forcibly detain her in the building, and threatened her with police inspections, Savliuk reported in a comment to Hanna Kalaur, the Institute of Mass Information representative in Rivne oblast.
After the incident, the journalist contacted the police and filed a statement on obstruction of reporting.
Savliuk said that she had visited the Rivne housing and maintenance department, which oversees real estate owned by the army, on 10 June to personally submit a request for access to public information about the abandoned Officers’ House in Rivne, which is a historical building.
She had unsuccessfully searched for the right contacts to send a query by e-mail the day before, so she decided to go in person to submit the request and talk to the management.
The journalist said that she had entered the premises and the building without issues and learned from a staff member that the department head was absent. The staff member then offered her to leave her contact info so they could reach out to her later. Then a woman entered the office and urged the journalist to leave the building, claiming that it was a restricted access facility. Savliuk was holding her phone and filming the conversation in case she would need to report it in the future. The dispatcher noticed it and asked her to stop filming, and the woman, hearing this, approached the journalist, grabbed her phone and tried to run away with it, but Savliuk managed to get it back. The woman refused to identify herself.
Then other people arrived at the scene and threatened the journalist with inspections by the SBU, counterreconnaisance, and the police.
“One of the men forcibly held me by the arm, and the people around us told him to hold me down so that I wouldn’t run away. I called the chief editor and the police, still standing in the hallway,” Savliuk said.
After that another woman pushed the journalist out into the street, where she remained waiting for the police. When they arrived, they spoke with Savliuk and took her statement.
“I have filed a statement about obstruction of reporting, I will be waiting for the police’s response,” the journalist said.
The Institute of Mass Information lawyer Volodymyr Zelenchuk says that if the journalist could freely enter the building then it was not a restricted area and that filming in public places is not prohibited.
“It is quite doubtful that recording the process of filing a request to the housing and maintenance department could lead to the disclosure of secret information, classified information, or information that would harm the defense forces,” Volodymyr Zelenchuk commented on the situation.
IMI representative Hanna Kalaur tried to get a comment from the head of the Rivne housing and maintenance department, Dmytro Zakon, regarding the incident. However, the phone number that was at IMI’s disposal was invalid.
She also called the department number that the agency’s employee had shared with Anastasia Savliuk the day before. In response, the dispatcher said that IMI should file an official query and refused to share the department head’s current phone number.
The IMI representative has reached out to the police to learn whether criminal proceedings had been registered based on the journalist’s statement.
In March 2026, the Rivne police only opened an investigation into obstruction of Myroslava Prymak’s reporting after an address by MP, Chair of the Verkhovna Rada Committee on Freedom of Speech, Yaroslav Yurchyshyn.