Natalie Sedletska

Natalie Sedletska was selected for the 2023 Shortlist with Ukrainian Supreme Court Judge with Russian Citizenship.

Natalie Sedletska is Kyiv-based Ukrainian investigative journalist and editor who works in the anticorruption field. Natalie is the editor-in-chief and host of the investigative program “Schemes” – a television project which she founded in 2014 with the support of the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, a media financed by the US Congress that operates in 22 countries where a free press is banned by the government or not fully established. Team of investigative journalists led by Natalie is exposing high-level political corruption and abuse of power by Ukrainian authorities as well as Russian war crimes.  

In 2013-2014, Sedletska was a Vaclav Havel Fellow – joint program of RFE/RL and the Czech Republic Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In 2015 Natalie went undercover as part of a British Channel 4 television documentary, “From Russia With Cash”. The film became an important element of the recent anti-money laundering campaign in the UK. In 2014 Natalie also participated as an investigator in the YanukovychLeaks project – when group of journalists and volunteers rescued from a lake, dried and analyzed 200 folders of documents, that shed light on the scale of corruption of Ukrainian ex-president Viktor Yanukovych, who fled to Russia in the result of Revolution of Dignity in Ukraine.  The project was awarded with the Global Shining Light Award in Norway in 2015 – an international award in the field of investigative journalism. In 2016 Natalie received “For progress in journalism” Award named after renowned Ukrainian journalist Oleksandr Kryvenko. In 2017 she was awarded with “Light of Justice” Award for “Moral and Spiritual Leadership in Ukraine”. In 2019 Natalie Sedletska was selected from Ukraine for the Draper Hills Summer Fellows Program at Stanford’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. 

Mstyslav Chernov

Mstyslav Chernov was selected for the 2023 Shortlist with ‘Why? Why? Why?’ Ukraine’s Mariupol descends into despair. 

AP video journalist Chernov is a Ukrainian-born photographer, photojournalist, and filmmaker. Chernov began working for the Associated Press in 2014, covering the Ukrainian war, then the European migration crisis. He has traveled to more than 50 countries in Europe, Asia and the Middle East. He has won number international awards for his work, including the George Polk Award for War Reporting, Bayeux Calvados-Normandy awards, the Deutsche Welle Freedom of Speech Award and the Royal Television Society Camera Operator of the Year award. He also directed the AP-Frontline documentary “20 Days in Mariupol,” which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and won the coveted World Cinema Documentary Competition Audience Award.  Chernov and his colleague Evegeniy Maloletka were the last international journalists in Mariupol when Russian troops attacked. Driving a van with windows blown out by explosions, snatching a bit of battery power where they can to file videos and photos, and checking in during rare moments when there was enough of a network signal, the two journalists were the world’s only eyes on a city that was my to the Russian attack on Ukraine.