vitalii atanasov

I’m based in Kyiv. For the past fifteen-plus years I’ve worked at the intersection of media, environment and platform culture — combining reporting and documentary practice with open-source research and the study of digital media.

I documented press freedom violations across Ukraine, including conflict-affected regions, as Ukrainian correspondent (2016–2019) for Mapping Media Freedom, a pan-European monitoring project on threats and attacks against journalists run by Index on Censorship, and monitored media and social networks for the OSCE/ODIHR election observation mission. My reporting and research have appeared in openDemocracy, Index on Censorship, Osteuropa, springerin and Ukrainska Pravda — most recently War and Network Control, on the territorial capture of internet infrastructure as an instrument of occupation.

I edited Digital Capitalism and Internet Utopias (Kyiv: Center for Social and Labor Research, 2020), which introduced Christian Fuchs, Nick Dyer-Witheford and Evgeny Morozov to a readership that had no critical vocabulary for platforms yet. The opening essay is mine.

I design and run programmes for practitioners. With the Center for Social and Labor Research I ran Grammar of Dialogue — six trainings across six cities, fifteen journalists at a time, ninety in all, on covering war, displacement, torture and hate speech (2015–2016). As the ground shifted it turned to platform capitalism, bringing Katarzyna Szymielewicz of Panoptykon and Vladan Joler of SHARE Lab to Kyiv (2018). In 2019 I convened the Digital Labor Symposium, four days near Kyiv. I run digital security trainings for journalists, human rights defenders and trade union activists, and lecture on artificial intelligence and employment for trade unions in Ukraine and Central Europe.

I also work with a camera. My video installation Desalinate A Sea, Build A City, Blow Up The Sun was shown in the main exhibition of the Kyiv Biennial at Augarten Contemporary, Vienna (2023); earlier work appeared at GfZK Leipzig and the Lysychansk Local History Museum. I co-founded Commons: Journal of Social Criticism and produced the English-language podcast Ukraine the Possible on the impacts of Russia’s war against Ukraine.

I started in journalism in 2003, writing about economics, banking and finance before moving into open-source research and analytical writing. I hold an MSc in Computer Science and combine open-source verification with Python-assisted data analysis.

Short bio (for press use — please copy)

Vitalii Atanasov is a Kyiv-based journalist and researcher working on media, infrastructure and labour. He was Ukrainian correspondent for Index on Censorship’s Mapping Media Freedom project (2016–2019) and has monitored media for OSCE/ODIHR election observation missions. His reporting and research have appeared in openDemocracy, Index on Censorship, Osteuropa, springerin and Ukrainska Pravda. He edited the collection Digital Capitalism and Internet Utopias, co-founded Commons: Journal of Social Criticism and has worked on the environmental and infrastructural aftermath of war, including the video installation Desalinate A Sea, Build A City, Blow Up The Sun (Kyiv Biennial, Vienna, 2023) and writing on the Kakhovka reservoir’s Great Meadow floodplain. He holds an MSc in Computer Science.

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