By Ana Baric

It’s been three months since ex-president Viktor Yanukovych fled in the dead of night, after a last, desperate attempt to cover his tracks by destroying documents.

It’s not going to be that easy, Mr. President.

For the past three years, Ukraine’s “Journalists Day” has been commemorated with an anti-censorship rally in front of his former Mezhyhirya residence. This year, the sprawling compound itself has been hacked.

From June 6-8, the Mezhyhirya Festival on investigative journalism, digital activism, and leaks will celebrate a new era of freedom of expression with those who were on site to help usher it in.

The sold-out festival will feature presentations by journalists who were on site during the February document dig, such as Anna Babinets, Natalie Sedletska, Dmytro Gnap, and Vlad Lavrov—all partners of the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), which helped create the YanukovychLeaks website.

They will be joined by activists, hackers, journalists, and media theorists from around the world to explore how technology and journalism can intersect and empower.

Ukrainian journalists made history in late February by fishing out tens of thousands of documents dumped into the lake on his opulent Mezhygirya estate.

Since then they have produced dozens of stories, with more on the way, from the nearly 200 folders of sodden papers recovered by volunteer divers. A team of more than 50 collaborated to sort and separate the documents, making use of the residence’s sauna to dry the incriminating evidence.

The findings were scanned and uploaded within days onto YanukovychLeaks, which now hosts 23,400 documents that have been translated into English, Russian, and Ukrainian. Whistleblowers and citizens continue to come forward daily with more information about exactly what was going on during Yanukovych’s tenure.

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