Brian Bonner and Events in Ukraine

The Key and the Kite

Brian Bonner became chief editor of the Kyiv Post on June 9, 2008. He took on the additional responsibilities of executive director on March 21, 2018, following the purchase of the newspaper by businessman Adnan Kivan, owner of the KADORR Group in Odesa, Ukraine. Kivan fired him along with the entire staff on Nov. 8, 2021. Bonner announced his retirement on Nov. 30, 2021, after spending the last weeks winding down operations. Bonner also held the chief editor’s job in 1999, three years after first arriving in Ukraine on a journalism exchange program. He spent most of his career with the St. Paul Pioneer Press in Minnesota, where he covered international, national, and local news for more than 20 years as a staff writer, foreign correspondent, and assigning editor. Besides Ukraine, he has also reported from Russia, Belgium, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Laos, Norway, Poland, and the United Kingdom. In 2007-2008, he served as an associate director of international communications at the Campaign For Tobacco-Free Kids in Washington, D.C. He also worked as an election expert on six observation missions with the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s ODIHR in Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan between 1999 and 2013. From 2017-2020, he served on the boards of directors of the American Chamber of Commerce in Ukraine and European Business Association. He also won election to the EBA board in 2021 but resigned after leaving the Kyiv Post. He has a B.A. degree in history from the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, where he wrote and edited for the Minnesota Daily, the student newspaper. He worked from the Kyiv Post headquarters at 68 Zhylianska St. in the Holosiivsky district of the Ukrainian capital.