LITHUANIAN FOREIGN MINISTER PRESENTS CERTIFICATE OF ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO UKRAINIAN JOURNALIST FOR COVERING POLITICS IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPE
On 12 October, Lithuanian Foreign Minister Audronius Ažubalis presented a certificate of acknowledgement to Ukrainian journalist and political analyst Vitaly Portnikov for many years of journalism and for covering politics in Lithuania, the Baltic States and entire Central and Eastern Europe in the last years of the Soviet regime in the 1980s and now.
In Vilnius, V.Portnikov who consistently criticizes the idealization of the Communist and authoritarian trends in Eastern Europe attended the round table discussion “Ukraine and Lithuania after twenty years: path towards partnership”, dedicated to the 20th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between Lithuania and Ukraine.During the visit in Vilnius, the journalist conducted an interview for the Radio Free Europe with President of Lithuania Dalia Grybauskaitė about relations between Lithuania and Ukraine.
In 1990, V.Portnikov graduated from the Journalism Faculty of the Lomonosov Moscow State University. Already as a student, he began to work with the Radio Free Europe and write articles for Russian, Ukrainian, Latvian, Estonian, Lithuanian, Belarusian and Israeli newspapers. Later, he moderated various journalistic and analytical TV shows in Ukraine and Russia, as well as covered news in the Middle East region.
In 2010, V.Portnikov was appointed chief editor of the Ukrainian TV channel TVi.
In 1989, he received the Golden Quill award of Ukraine’s National Union of Journalists for outstanding journalism, also the Hetman Orlik bounty and, later, he was given the title of the “Journalist of the Year” during the “Man of the Year” contest in Ukraine.
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