Sabra Ayres on Being Named the AP’s Chief Ukraine Correspondent—And Being Fired 22 Days Later

Welcome to the first post-Substack edition of Wiczipedia.

This is a special edition: a conversation with my friend Sabra Ayres. A few weeks ago Semafor broke the news that Sabra—a seasoned Ukraine hand who had been sent to Kyiv in fall 2022 to run the Associated Press bureau there—had been summarily sacked after only a few weeks on the job, and never given a reason why. The way the AP handled the situation has had enormous implications for Sabra’s personal life and career.

Sabra’s story marries two things I care very deeply about: Ukraine (and the Western world’s understanding of it) and the mistreatment of women across male-dominated professions. Like Sabra, I also know quite intimately what it is like to feel like your story is being buried, your career maligned, your life upended, all while you are forced to watch from the sidelines.

The AP has still never given Sabra a reason for her termination; they’ve only told Semafor that they dispute her account as “completely inaccurate.” She has filed a discrimination charge with the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission, a process that can drag on for months or years.

I’m presenting a conversation we had—lightly edited for length and clarity—because I think Sabra deserves to tell her story, and that it’s an interesting read. I hope you will, too.

Nina Jankowicz: So Sabra, you and I have known each other for a long time. I think your career is a fascinating one. I know we could spend literally all day talking about it, but can you tell the people who read my newsletter a summary of your career? How did you end up in Ukraine?

Sabra Ayres: My first experience with Ukraine started in 1995 when I was a young, idealistic 25-year-old woman who joined the Peace Corps, and I got sent to Ukraine. It was right after the Budapest Memorandum was signed, and there was a big diplomatic push to help strengthen Ukraine's democracy and independence, and upping the Peace Corps numbers was part of that.

I lived here for two years in Cherkassy Oblast and taught English at a secondary school. That was my introduction to this region, and I became sort of hooked on it. It also shaped how I approached [the region] as a journalist because my first experience in the former Soviet Union was in Ukraine, so I didn't come into it as many of my colleagues who cover this region did, where they were Russian scholars or they had studied Russian literature and they came at it from a more Russian-centric stance or background.

My parents were journalists. They met in the newsroom. I didn't think I wanted to be a journalist, but I did see it as a way to see the world. So I went into journalism, started out in local newspapers in New Hampshire, got my Master's from Northwestern—

NJ: Alaska too, right?

SA: Yep, spent some time in Alaska, [but] my first job out of graduate school was with the AP in Miami. And eventually I wanted to be a foreign correspondent. At some point I packed up my bags and went overseas to Moscow and tried to wing it as a freelancer and spent four years there. This was in 2003 until the end of 2006, where I was the correspondent for the Cox Newspapers. During that time the Orange Revolution was going on in Ukraine, so I spent a significant amount of time down here as well. It was part of my beat. A lot of people talk about [the 2013 Euromaidan Revolution] being the big turning point for Ukraine.

But for me, having first come here in '95, the Orange Revolution was huge. I mean, the changes I saw the country go through to the point where they took to the street in 2004 to protest the stealing of the election was, for me, monumental in Ukraine's modern history. I learned a lot as a journalist at that time.

Later my career took me to Afghanistan for a little bit, teaching journalism at the American University there and freelancing. Eventually I ended up back in Ukraine in 2013 as Maidan was starting. It turned into a much bigger news story, and I stayed until 2017. And then in 2017, The Los Angeles Times approached me and asked, “Would you go to Moscow for us?” And it was a dream for me. I loved working for them. I was there for three years until the pandemic happened.

NJ: Obviously you have deep, deep experience with Ukraine. There have been a lot of gripes among Ukrainians, especially since the Revolution of Dignity, that so many correspondents who have been dispatched to Ukraine are originally Moscow correspondents, and approach Ukraine through a Russian lens. But you are an exception to that rule. So when you saw the AP job being posted, what did you think? Were you like, this is the job for me?

SA: No, actually, they recruited me. I was living in the States at that time. After I left Moscow in 2020, I had some pretty interesting pandemic jobs, working as a reporter in Texas and writing for an international development magazine. But the war started in Ukraine, and I was champing at the bit to get back and was begging every editor I knew, “send me!”, but no one was biting because they had teams out there already. I didn't apply for the [AP] job initially, and I was approached by their Moscow bureau chief who I had known in Moscow. She said they were looking for someone with a bit more seniority and an understanding of Ukraine to lead the bureau.

I went through the interview process and it was what I was looking for. I knew I had a lot to offer. Professionally, the job offered something that I was looking for at that stage in my career: a level of management, overseeing the bureau. I was excited about the opportunity. It was sort of like two worlds coming together. It just seemed like a very, very perfect fit. I was really encouraged when a lot of my contemporaries, my colleagues who worked for other media, saw the announcement that I was chosen. I mean, everyone was like, “ah, yeah, that makes sense.”

NJ: You left in fall 2022, and I came over and brought you bagels right when you were finishing up packing your apartment. What's the process like for people who've never dropped everything and moved across the world? What did you have to go through to get out there?

SA: I have spent most of my career overseas, and so I've kind of gotten it down to a science or an art really, of storing stuff. This was different because when you move overseas and you never know how long it's going to be, but I knew this was a two-year assignment that they gave me, and my plan was to definitely see that out and then to stay with the AP either until the war ended or change it to another role within the AP.

I had to give up my lease, which cost me $4,000 or something ridiculous. I gave up my job. My boss at the time was very understanding. He was a former journalist himself. I put my stuff in storage. I sold my car. You sort of close up shop, really. It’s intense. And I think more importantly, it makes coming back not very—it’s not a simple thing.

NJ: I know you'd been here for the pandemic. You had been kind of setting up a stateside life. You had been in Texas and then in DC you got a dog.

SA: Yeah, I did. I got a foster, like many people during COVID.

When I left Moscow in 2020, because LA Times had decided that they wanted to refocus their foreign desk money and put it into the Asia Pacific and Latin America, if the full-scale invasion hadn't happened, I would've continued in settling roots into the US. I’ve got an aging dad; he’s 89 years old. I liked being closer to friends and family that I had been away from, having been overseas so much and really being able to spend time with them. But the the war did happen. And covering Ukraine, covering Russia is my expertise. It has been for the better part of the last 20 years. To not cover it wasn't an option. It seemed impossible. That's why I jumped at the chance at this job and was very excited about it.

NJ: And what were the first impressions of the work that was going on when you were there? What was the reality on the ground?

SA: The job was described to me from the beginning as the title was chief correspondent, but the role was more like being a bureau chief. And that meant kind of corralling what was a bit of—as it was described to me—a chaotic bureau, not just because of the war. There were some very strong personalities and talented journalists in that bureau that didn't always get along.

That bureau also had felt sidelined for years by the Moscow bureau. The AP hadn't had a foreign correspondent in Ukraine—they had an office, they had a photographer, but they did not have a correspondent, they rotated people in—since 2015, I believe. As a result, they reported to the Moscow bureau, and that was always a source of contention with the local reporters here that did work for them, the photographers and the local hires that rotated through. And particularly when the war started, it was a source of contention because while they're all professional journalists, it was very difficult to be getting instructions from Moscow on how to cover a war that was being conducted against them from Moscow.

I would be the person who would start reporting to London and not to Moscow, but of course that included cooperation with the Moscow bureau, which was fine with me. I knew most of them. What my role was was basically two fold: part of it was driving the story of coverage of the war, and also to play a role in leading the teams that would rotate into the country and be put out into the field.

Most people I talked to said it would be a difficult balance. But in the beginning when I was interviewing and when I talked to [AP management], when they brought me to New York as part of my onboarding, they showed a lot of support. When I was in New York, the President of the AP came into the office, and said, “Let me introduce myself. Thank you so much. We're so glad to have you. We're so glad to have someone who's going to go to Kyiv. Anything you need, let us know.”

So I set off to Kyiv with all five of my bags of belongings.

In the first days…look, I've worked for the AP before. I know news agencies, how chaotic and fast paced they can be, and it is not for the faint of heart. I knew that going in. I knew that I probably wouldn’t have much of a social life. I didn't care about that stuff. I was interested in the story. I was interested in embracing this job in a new leadership role for myself, for a news agency that I had a lot of respect for, and covering a story I could lend my experience to. I was excited about it, and I leaned into the job, if I can use that phrase. I mean, I asked all the questions.

If you've ever been in a new job, there's sometimes that awkward period where you're like, “should I ask these questions? Should I not? Should I just wait? I don't want to seem too aggressive.”

NJ: I would say these are questions that men are allowed to ask, but it's more difficult for women. You were asking those questions anyway.

SA: Yeah, I was asking every question I could. I wanted to know everything I could because I also knew that at some point where they promised that for the first six months or so that I would have someone who was rotating in with me to help train me, that I wouldn't be alone. I know how things work, and I wanted to make sure that I knew everything and that I was prepared. And I remember thinking to myself, I'm approaching this differently. I'm really leaning into it, not playing, “I'll figure it out as we go along.” I embraced it, and for the first two weeks of it, it was intense. The Russians started attacking Kyiv with missiles again, which it hadn't been since the early days of the full-scale invasion. And on top that I was learning the ropes of a new job, so it was intense. They were long days, but I was enjoying it even though it was tiring and exhausting and exhilarating.

NJ: Obviously we're having this conversation because things didn't work out the way that they were supposed to. And before we get to what happened, I want to ask, is there anything in those three weeks that you felt wasn't going right? Barring typical new job growing pains, is there anything that you think that you reflect on and you're like, huh, maybe it was this that led to things going wrong.

SA: I have spent countless hours in the middle of the night thinking about this. What went wrong? What did I do? Where were the mistakes? And I can tell you honestly that even an hour before I got the email demanding me to go to Krakow [NJ ed: where Sabra was ultimately fired], I said to myself, “I'm doing a good job. This is the right place for me and I can do this.” I never received any negative feedback. In the 17 days I was in the country, the only thing that I received negative feedback on was not going to a bar one night to meet up with a bunch of male staffers and three local female hires. That was the only time I was told that I was doing something wrong, that I didn't go to a bar.

I was in country about 12 days when the Asia bureau chief who was helping me get settled was leaving. At first they told me, “No one's going to come in. You're going to be on your own for a week.” I thought, “Well, you guys are supporting me. We'll get through this, we can do it.” And then they said, “Last minute change. There is a vice president who is going to come in and he's going to help train you for that week.”

When he arrived, I initially thought, “This is great. I got on with him in New York and it will be great to learn from him.” I quickly realized that initially he wasn't that interested in coaching me or training me. And when I would lean in and ask questions such as, “can I see the closet where the [protective] helmets and vests are held? Can I see the first aid kits that we have?”, his response was usually, “Don't take on so much, you're just moving too quickly. Just take it slowly, ease it up a little bit. It's too much.” That was frustrating to me.

The problem really arose when he told me that a local hire in the bureau—a talented young reporter who had been hired on just four months before—was the “new face of the AP” and that my job would be to get eyes on her from New York and London. I thought, “I'm happy to mentor her.” I got on with her well. I thought she was a very valuable person in the bureau, but I also had seen where she had room to grow, because she was fresh and green. There's nothing wrong with that. We've all been there, but I thought it was strange that he was really emphasizing that she was to be the new face of the AP.

It became more of a problem when he decided that he would put her on a team of a very experienced photojournalists and video journalists that were going to go down to the southern front, where at that time Ukraine was pushing a very successful counteroffensive to liberate Kherson and other cities. It was extremely volatile and kinetic down there. I thought sending her was a bad idea, and I told him.

My concern was twofold. I've been a young, less experienced reporter who has been in the company of very experienced reporters, and I know that I often didn't have the confidence to speak up. And I don't know if I, at the age of 26, would've had the confidence to speak up to a Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist and say, “I don't feel safe.” I'm scared at my age! At 53! I'm not afraid to say that because I've been in situations with other journalists where we need to make a call, and you're only as strong as your weakest link. If your weakest link is saying, “I'm hesitant, I'm scared,” then your group isn't as strong if something happens.

I also thought that it wasn't the right time to send her, because we needed her as the only native speaker in the bureau. We needed her to stay, and I felt that by making the decision [to send her] without consulting me, he was undermining my position absolutely. Now, he's a vice president, he gets to make decisions, sure. But I should have been consulted.

After that we had a pretty tense discussion about why I thought it was a bad idea to send her. I said, “If you need to send someone, you should send me. I have frontline experience. I'm the chief correspondent. I can be the text person on this trip.”

He said, “No, no, the decision's been made. I think you have a problem with this woman. I think you're jealous of her. I think that you don't like her. So why don't you just be frank with me about what's really going on here?”

I told him: “I'm not jealous of her. I don't have a problem with her. I actually have told you that you should hire her full time because she's on a six-month contract and she's going to get snatched up by another news organization here. She’s talented and we need her. She's a big, important part of the team.”

Again, he told me to be frank. I said, “Okay, if you want me to be frank with you, what I think is going on here is that you are bypassing a middle-aged woman with a lot of experience for a younger woman with not enough experience. And I think it's a bad idea.” He said, “You're wrong. That would never happen here at the AP. That doesn't happen.”

I told him, “Look, you and I have been in this business for a long time, and you know that it does happen all the time. Middle-aged women are pushed aside. There's been studies done about it. You told me to be frank, and I'm telling you that's what I think is going on here.” He maintained it wasn’t true, and said “look at me, I'm middle aged.” I said, “You're a man.”

NJ: [Laughs.]

SA: I realized that I wasn't going to get anywhere with this argument. He had the power and it was done. She was going. So I said, “Look, you've obviously made your decision, but let's move forward. How are we going to handle this as a bureau?” The other AP staffer in the room said, “Yeah, what are we going to do? She's our native speaker.”

Kyiv had been hit by missiles. We had a series of Monday morning attacks and we needed a native speaker in the bureau to help out. I speak Russian and a bit of Ukrainian, but it's not the same.

NJ: Especially when you're in a crisis situation. I mean, I still sweat bullets when I'm on the phone with somebody making a dinner reservation in Ukrainian. I can't imagine if I were in a more serious situation.

SA: Yeah, her role with the bureau was indispensable largely because of that and because she was interested in learning. She was an important member of the team, but I didn't think was ready to go with this particular group. So anyhow, the conversation ended and it was tense, but I just sort of backed down because what else could I do?

NJ: When you're new to a job, and I know this personally, you’ve got to pick your battles.

SA: Should I have not picked that battle? Maybe. But people have asked, “would you have done it differently?” I saw it as a duty of care. I also saw it as, “what am I going to do without her in the bureau? How am I going to plan forward?” I was doing my job, it was in my job description! I tried to end the conversation politely. We kind of shook hands on it.

But look, newsrooms can be tense, particularly when there's breaking news like this. This is not the first time that an editor and a reporter have had a heated discussion, and it certainly wasn't the last time. It's part of the job. So I moved on with my day and later I got a message from my senior supervisor based in London, who's the news director for Europe and Africa. He messaged me and asked for a check-in call. We got on the phone call that evening and he asked how everything was going? I said, “I’m getting the hang of things here. It's been an intense week, but we're getting a lot. We're moving forward. We've had some good stories.”

And he said, “Let me stop you right there, Sabra, I want to bring up something. I noticed that there were some photos that went around in our WhatsApp group about a meetup at a bar, and I noticed in that photo that your face wasn't in it. Why weren't you there?”

I said, “Yeah, yeah, those guys, I guess they met up at a bar, but I couldn't do it because I had a meeting with you at 6:30 that night. And then I had to make some phone calls back to DC to get a quote from someone for a story I was doing the next day, which I filed today. It's running. So I couldn't go.” He said, “Well, I was really disappointed to not to see your face in that photo. You really should have been there.”

I've never been in trouble for not going to a bar! I don't have a problem drinking with my colleagues, but I couldn't go that night. And we had a curfew here. Things shut down before the curfew. He goes, “This is serious. Not only should you have been there, Sabra, but you should have been buying people rounds of pints as the chief correspondent. Their lives are in your hands and you didn't show up. And what does that say?”

You know what it says to me? It says to me that I was held to a standard where I needed to go to a bar to prove myself likable with my male colleagues, that I was supposed to go to a bar and drink with them. But men aren't held to that standard. They don't have to be likable. No one would've blamed a man for not going to a bar one night. It wasn't the company Christmas party that had been planned for several months in advance. It was an ad hoc message that had gone into WhatsApp chat. I wasn't the only person who didn't go. There were two other male staffers who didn't go. But I was held to a different standard, and I think it's because this is how I was supposed to prove that I was likable, that I could go out.

NJ: Had you gone out with them at all before?

SA: As a matter of fact, the very first night the VP came into Kyiv, I coordinated and made a reservation at a local restaurant to meet up and have dinner. Everyone was in town was invited, and anyone could show up. So when you asked me before, was there anything that I could think of that I had done wrong? That's the one thing—out of the 22 days I worked for them—that was the one thing I was told that I did wrong.

NJ: What happened next?

SA: I got an e-mail at 3:45 the next afternoon, which was a Friday. It was from the news director in London who said that he needed to have a one-on-one meeting with me in Krakow, Poland which is about a 15 to 20 hour journey from Kyiv. The e-mail said I needed to get on a train that night and arrive in Lviv the next day, and then get a car to take me to Krakow and to meet at a hotel where they had reserved a room for me. You know, my first thought when I got this e-mail was “Oh my God, this guy’s-e-mail has been hacked,” because it was so weird.

I was freaked out of course and I didn't know what was going on, so I went back to the hotel where the AP was putting a bunch of us up and I saw the other AP staffer who had been in the room during the conversation with the vice president and he said he’d been given instructions to help me get to Krakow. I ask him if he knew what was going on, and he said, “I’m afraid they're going to use your frankness to fire you.”

I called the Moscow Bureau chief and asked her if she knew anything, and she said “I don’t know, something happened when [the vice president] was there.” I then picked up the phone and called the news director in London and said, “Can you please tell me what's going on with this e-mail?” He replied that his instructions were clear and that he would see me tomorrow in Krakow. Then he hung up. So, I bought a train ticket and within four hours I was on a train to Lviv.

I arrived in Krakow the next day at about 1:00 and as soon as I checked into the hotel I got a text message that said “go to conference room four.” When I walked into the room, the news director for Europe was sitting there with a computer next to him, and on the screen was the HR representative from Washington.

“Hello. Have a seat. You are here to make one of two choices,” he said. “Either you sign this prepared resignation letter—and if you do, you’ll get this envelope containing a settlement agreement.” And he held up in his hand this sealed envelope which clearly had some documents in it. “If you chose not to sign the letter, this will be considered a termination and you’ll get nothing. But either way, you no longer work for the Associated Press.”

At this point I just knew the whole thing was ridiculous. It was going down like some kind of bad spy film…the secretive mission crossing the border on an overnight train…the instructions to go find conference room four…and now this game of choices with the mysterious, sealed envelope of documents with the unknown settlement offer. I mean, it was just a bad made-for-TV movie! So, I felt a bit defiant and told him that I wasn’t going to sign anything until he told me what the eff was going on. Why was he firing me?

“We aren’t here to discuss that. You are here to make one of two choices…” and he repeated the line about the sealed settlement offer or the termination. We went back and forth like this with me pushing for a concrete reason for firing me, and he refusing to give one. Finally, the HR rep spoke up and said “You can tell her what’s on the envelope. It’s three months pay, but it needs to be notarized.” I think I looked at the settlement offer and realized it had an NDA in there. I said I’d think about it and left the room.

After I left the room I immediately started searching for a lawyer after I spoke to two of my mentors—people I had worked with at The Los Angeles Times who had a lot more experience than me. I got a lawyer and I traveled back to Ukraine.

NJ: You ended up being represented by Katz Banks Kumin, who represented Dr. Christine Blasey Ford when she made sexual assault allegations against Brett Kavanaugh, who was at the time being considered for a Supreme Court appointment.

Yes. I reached out to them and a lawyer there read my story. She said she would try to see if we could get a better settlement than three months pay. The lawyer thought that I had a pretty good case on a couple of points. The AP’s outside counsel came back with the same settlement offer, which I rejected.

I didn't have enough money. Even with three months of pay, that wouldn't have been enough money for me to resettle back in the United States, having already given up my apartment. If I were to return to Washington, I'd have to prove income to rent an apartment, and I no longer had a job. I was really financially screwed. Not to mention professionally.

So we filed what is called a charge with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which is a federal agency that looks at cases of discrimination in the workplace. Filing a charge with the EEOC is the first step before going to court.

NJ: Semafor covered your story very briefly a few weeks ago. Why did you decide to go public?

I felt silenced. I want to defend myself and be able to explain what happened. It was crushing to my professional reputation. When I came into the job, there was a sort of a PR campaign around that. The AP did a press release about it. It was on social media, it's still on their website that they hired me. My colleagues who cover this part of the world all saw it. Everyone knew in this sort of small realm of journalists who cover this part of the world knew that I had been hired.

And then all of a sudden I was gone and I couldn't talk about it and I couldn't defend myself. And that was really damaging. I did apply for other jobs in this area covering Ukraine or covering Russia. I had an interview when the editor flat out asked me, “What happened at the AP? You weren't there for very long.” How do you answer that? How can I say, “I was fired, and I don't know why?”

How can I say that in an interview, while also following my lawyer's advice? She had told me not to talk to anyone about it while we were trying to negotiate a settlement with them, because if they decide to settle, there probably will be an NDA. I agreed with that and abided by that. But it meant that I was holding all this in while I heard rumors in the fairly tight-knit press corps here in Kyiv. It was heartbreaking to me, humiliating to me, and professionally very damaging. So I have now decided to speak up.

And I felt bullied, and I felt that the way that they sent me to Krakow without telling me why was purely to intimidate me and to keep me quiet and to scare me. Why would you order someone to go across the border? But more than that, if during the 22 days I worked for them, if there was a problem, why didn't anyone ever bring it up to me? If it was so egregious, why didn't they bring it up? Because I hadn't been doing anything wrong. If I had been doing anything wrong, why were they using my stories?

What I did wrong was I didn't go to the bar that night. And I raised an issue, and I stood up, and I did my job, and it pissed them off, and I got fired for it. So I'm telling my story now because there is still an open door for me to take legal action, in which case it will be public. I want other women—particularly women in journalism in high-pressure environments—who feel like they've also been in a situation where they've just been flat out bullied and outnumbered by men, to feel like they can come forward. I think there's other stories like this out there, and I'm tired of bullies getting away with it, and I'm tired of it happening in my industry where women are silenced and pushed aside.

NJ: Thanks for sharing your story.

SA: Thank you.