Question to the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs, what steps her Department plans to take to support the independence of the press in Ukraine following the recent closure of the English language newspaper The Kyiv Post.

The FCDO is committed to supporting freedom of the media, and preserving media plurality, in Ukraine. We do this through targeted project interventions and advocating on media freedom issues in our political messaging, both in public and in private. We are currently providing support to the Ukrainian Public Broadcaster, working with BBC Media Action, and have previously funded projects assisting a number of independent media channels.

The FCDO remains committed to the Global Media Freedom campaign launched in 2018. Through the UK's co-chairing of the Media Freedom Coalition we are working to improve media freedom domestically and internationally. We support, and encourage our European partners to support, the Global Media Defence Fund, managed by UNESCO, to which we have pledged £3 million over five years. The Fund has already supported over 1600 journalists globally, including in Ukraine.