On 9 June 2023, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) reported that officers with Ukraine’s SBU security service had repeatedly questioned journalists seeking accreditation from the country’s military, while also pressuring others to take certain approaches in their reporting.

The report echoed previous cases publicized by journalist Ben Smith in an article for online media outlet Semafor. In one case, Ukrainian photographer Maxim Dondyuk complained that a Ukrainian military press officer was threatening to revoke his accreditation after frontline images taken by him appeared in a New Yorker article. Dondyuk told CPJ that the officer said he would be “punished as a traitor of the motherland.” The photographer said he had not received any notification about changes to his accreditation as of June 8. In another case, New York Times reporter Thomas Gibbons-Neff, a former U.S. Marine who covers the Ukrainian military, had his credentials revoked and his renewal denied in separate incidents, after reporting that the Ukrainian army was using banned cluster munitions. Gibbons-Neff’s accreditation was ultimately re-issued. Additionally, photographer Antoine D’Agata lost his ability to report in Ukraine after publishing a photo essay in the New York Times Magazine that documented soldiers’ psychological trauma from inside a mental health facility, according to two people familiar with the incident.

Additionally, according to CPJ, Ukrainian freelance photographer Anton Skyba had, as of June 8, not received an accreditation decision after being interviewed twice by the SBU since April. He eventually had his accreditation documents delivered on June 14. Skyba, who reports for Canada’s Globe and Mail newspaper, said he applied for accreditation for himself and eight Canadian-citizen coworkers in early March. His colleagues all received their accreditation, many within a week. Skyba said that during his first interview on April 28, SBU officers asked him about his previous travel to Russia, Belarus, and Russian-occupied territories in Ukraine, his connections to those areas, and whether his parents, who live in the occupied area of Donetsk, had Russian passports. At a following meeting on May 19, SBU officers were reportedly harsher and “started bombing” him with questions. Officers alleged that Skyba had a Russian passport, which he denied, and asked him about his contacts with officials of the self-declared Donetsk People’s Republic in charge of issuing accreditations to work from separatist-controlled territories. At the end of this interview, an SBU officer asked Skyba whether he would be willing to take a lie detector test, which the officer said was the SBU’s “standard counter-intelligence measure.” Skyba said he considered the request to be an attempt at intimidation, and did not take the test.

Aside from Skyba, CPJ reported that there was at least one other Ukrainian journalist who was asked by the SBU to take a lie detector test. That journalist, who asked to remain anonymous, said he refused to take the test and later received his accreditation anyway.

Another Ukrainian journalist working for a Western media outlet told CPJ on the condition of anonymity that he received his accreditation after being questioned by SBU officers about his previous trips to Russian-occupied territories and his contacts with Russian security services. That journalist said an SBU officer implied that he could receive his accreditation if he agreed to become an informant for the security services. “They said that as a good citizen, I should inform them about my contacts with the FSB [Russian security services] and the separatists,” the journalist told CPJ.

In an unsigned email to CPJ, a representative with the Public Affairs Department of the Armed Forces of Ukraine said that since the adoption of the new accreditation rules, “only one” accreditation was canceled “because of a rude violation of the rules of work of a media representative in the combat zone” and that the cancellation was “not related in any way to the report content.” The representative said the military had approved 90% of accreditation requests, and that accreditations were issued “as fast as possible.”