On 19 January 2023, journalist Oksana Orsach from “NikCenter”, a local investigative media outlet, filed an information request with the city council of Mykolaiv, a major city in Southern Ukraine, asking for information on salaries and all other payments in 2022 made to Mykolaiv mayor Oleksandr Sienkevich, his deputies and aides. Her request was refused on the basis that providing such information violated martial law, wrote IMI, a Kyiv-based media rights defence group. Orsach contested the decision in court. As a result, on 11 April, judges in Mykolaiv obliged the city council to provide the information requested by Orsach: according to judges in the case, information on local officials’ salaries constitutes public information, access to which cannot be limited. The court added that martial law cannot itself be a reason to refuse or delay the delivery of requested public information, wrote IMI. The arguments of the city council, representatives of which claimed they could not make the information available, as the computer on which they were allegedly stored had been destroyed, were discarded by the court on the basis that paper copies containing the requested information were also available.