Illia Ponomarenko is a Ukrainian journalist known as a former defense and security reporter at the Kyiv Post and subsequently a co-founder of the Kyiv Independent. He has covered the war in eastern Ukraine since the conflict's earliest days, as well as Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine since 2022. He has also had deployments to Palestine and the Democratic Republic of the Congo as an embedded reporter with UN peacekeeping forces. Ponomarenko won the Alfred Friendly Press Partners fellowship and was selected to work as USA Today's guest reporter at the U. S. Department of Defense. He lives in Bucha outside Kyiv.
