YanukovychLeaks

» see yanukovychleaks.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Viktor Yanukovych left Mezhyhirya, his 140-hectare compound north of Kyiv, on 22 February 2014. People who walked onto the grounds that weekend found paper in the water. Somebody had decided the financial records should not be read and had put them in the Kyiv Reservoir, which turns out to be a poor shredder.

Divers went in. They recovered 174 folders that first day, and more paper turned up around the estate, some of it put through a shredder first. The reporters who got there first came from outlets that were in no sense a team, among them Dmytro Hnap of Slidstvo and Hromadske and Vlad Lavrov of the Kyiv Post. Maidan volunteers now controlled the compound and guarded them while they worked. They had a problem that journalism school does not cover. Wet paper rots.

So the first phase of it was eight days of laundry. Pages laid out to dry, then photographed or scanned, roughly 25,000 sheets in all. The website went up on 25 February, three days after the president left. The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project took the files into its data archive and put its name on the hosting.

The decision that made it matter was publishing the scans themselves rather than only the stories drawn from them. Anyone could read the folders. Prosecutors did, and so did people with no credentials at all who simply wanted to see what a presidency had cost.

~ the chronicle ~

~ eight days with a scanner ~

The operational detail is the part worth keeping. There was no plan for this. A government fell on a Saturday and by Tuesday a working document archive existed, assembled by competitors who had every professional reason to sit on what they had found and who agreed instead not to. Anna Babinets, who went through the material, put it at about 200 folders and more than 25,000 records.

It collected the awards that follow that kind of work. Reporters Without Borders and the public vote in Deutsche Welle's BOBs picked it up in May 2014, and the Global Shining Light Award followed in 2015.

~ what the paper proved ~

I was in Ankara in 2014, reading this the way most people outside Ukraine did, through other people's coverage of it. What travels across that distance is not the Ukrainian politics, which I am not qualified to narrate. It is the format. A searchable pile of a government's own receipts, published whole and left sitting there, is a different object from an article about those receipts. The scans are still readable on OCCRP servers today.

~ the day the crawler stopped ~

The Internet Archive had been crawling yanukovychleaks.org daily for years, pulling an 11.8-kilobyte front page every time, which makes the ending unusually legible. The last successful capture is 21 September 2021 at 23:59 UTC, 11,974 bytes. Then the daily rhythm simply stops. The next records, dated 27 September, are redirects.

Nobody wrote a farewell, and there was not much to announce. The OCCRP still held the documents. The reporters had moved on into the newsrooms and investigative outfits the project effectively incubated, and a seven-year-old site serving scans of 2014 paperwork had quietly turned into infrastructure rather than news. Today the domain 301s to an OCCRP project page that describes YanukovychLeaks in the past tense. The folders survived the reservoir and then outlived the website, which is a strange order for things to happen in.

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