anastasiia lapatina

National Reporter, Kyiv Independent

Anastasiia Lapatina is a national reporter at the Kyiv Indepenent, Ukraine’s only independent English-language media outlet. After graduating from Brentwood in 2019, she went to UBCO hoping to do the Philosophy, Politics, and Economics program, but eventually transferred to UBC’s Vancouver campus to pursue political science. In the Fall of 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Anastasiia went back home to Kyiv and did her second year of university online. At the same time, she first interned and then worked at the Kyiv Post – Ukraine’s first and only English-language newspaper at the time. While at the KP, she covered human rights issues and wrote about life under Russian occupation, mainly focusing on occupied Crimea. She also wrote about Ukrainians in the Middle East, covering the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, the war between Hamas and Israel, and the life of Ukrainians in Syrian refugee camps.

A year into her job, KP underwent a highly-publicized scandal due to an attack on staff’s editorial independence by the newspaper’s owner. The entire newsroom, including Anastasiia, were fired without notice. The team stayed together and launched the Kyiv Independent – Ukraine’s now-leading outlet. Meanwhile, in her third year of university, Anastasiia also did an exchange year at Sciences Po in France, continuing to freelance for KI. When Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine began, Anastasiia left France for Poland and then came back to Ukraine to report on-the-ground. She wrote opinion pieces for the New York Times and The Guardian, and launched a podcast about the war called Did the War End?. In the Fall of 2022, Anastasiia and her colleague Jakub Parusinski launched a new podcast, Power Lines, where they interview experts to discuss the impact of Russia’s war on global geopolitics. Anastasiia’s coverage of the war on Twitter earned her over 636,000 followers. She hascommented on the war for TV news programs and podcasts. For her contributions, Forbes placed her on 30 Under 30 Europe list in Media and Marketing category, while Teen Vogue recently included her in their 21 Under 21 list of 2022.