Sevgil Musaieva-Borovyk: Ukrainska Pravda editor-in-chief takes leadership role in Ukrainian journalism

Name: Sevgil Musaieva-Borovyk

Age: 29

Education: Journalism School of Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv

Profession: Chief Editor of Ukrainska Pravda

Did you know? She was a commentator on Sport First channel

At age 29, Sevgil Musaieva-Borovyk is chief editor of one of the Ukraine’s most-read sources of news, Ukrainska Pravda (Ukrainian Truth), which gets more than 600,000 views a day.

Musaieva-Borovyk was born in Uzbekistan in a Crimean Tatar family that fled the peninsula in the wake of Josef Stalin-era deportations. When Musaieva-Borovyk was 2, her family returned to Kerch, a city of 147,000 people in eastern Crimea.

Her passion for journalism started when she was 13. By the time she finished high school, she had written around 90 articles. In 2004, she moved to Kyiv to study journalism at Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv.

Her career as a business journalist started in Ekonomichni Novyny news agency, followed by Delo, Vlast Deneg and Forbes. She rose to prominence with investigations of politicians Sergey Kurchenko, Nestor Shufrich, Nikolai Rudkovsky and Yuriy Ivanushchenko

In 2013, Musaieva-Borovyk quit Forbes after its owner, UMH media holding, was sold to Kurchenko, the fugitive businessman believed to be a front for ex-President Viktor Yanukovych’s interests.

After Russia’s invasion of Crimea, she became a co-founder of the Crimea SOS nongovernmental organization, which helps people who fled the peninsula. Then she got the offer she couldn’t refuse when Olena Prytula, a co-founder and owner of Ukrainska Pravda, offered her the chief editor’s job in the wake of the election to parliament of Sergii Leshchenko and Mustafa Nayyem.

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“It was a complete shock,” she said. “But it also was extremely interesting.”

She wanted to inject the passion of the departing Leshchenko and Nayyem into Ukrainska Pravda and she also wanted to lead better coverage of Russia’s annexation of Crimea. She hasn’t been home to the peninsula in more than two years and her parents had to to sell their Crimean house and move to Kyiv.

Musaieva-Borovyk restructured the management to an editorial board style of governance and created such new projects as lifestyle BZ and a journalism school.

“There always has to be a challenge. I am interested in things that are complicated. When something becomes easy, I realize that I have outgrown it and that I need to move forward,” she says.