In January 2017,
Strana.ua issued a statement in which it said that criminal cases were being prepared against the publication in order to arrest the editorial managers. The publication linked the possible prosecution to the publication of high-profile articles which displeased then President
Petro Poroshenko, in particular a report from the
Roshen factory in
Lipetsk owned by him, an investigation into paid bloggers working on social networks in favour of the authorities, a series of publications on the corruption revelations of MP
Oleksandr Onyshchenko, articles about systemic pressure of the authorities on Ukrainian media. On 22 June 2017, Igor Guzhva, together with a man named Anton Filipkovsky, was detained at the
Strana.ua editorial office by police and prosecutors under Part 3 Article 189 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine (extortion). Prosecutor-General
Yuriy Lutsenko said that Guzhva allegedly received 10,000 dollars for not posting on his website compromising information about
Radical Party MP Dmytro Lynko, who had reported the incident to the police on 31 March. Igor Guzhva himself and the
Strana editorial board called these accusations trumped up by the authorities. Guzhva claimed that he did not engage in extortion. Guzhva said that Filipkovsky offered him money for removing the materials about Lynko from the website, but he refused to take it. The materials of the criminal case contain correspondence between Guzhva and Filipkovsky, in which Guzhva writes that he refuses to remove the materials. There are also testimonies from political analyst Kost Bondarenko, who introduced Guzhva and Filipkovsky, in which Bondarenko states that Guzhva told him even before his arrest on June 22, 2017, that he had information that a provocation could be carried out through Filipkovsky's offer to remove materials from the site. Therefore, it is unlikely that Guzhva agreed to take money from him for removing the article, knowing that it was a provocation. The editorial team of
Strana is convinced that Filipkovsky is a provocateur sent to Guzhva. In 2019, former MP of the
Radical Party Ihor Mosiychuk claimed that the case against Igor Guzhva was fabricated by his fellow party members on the orders of Poroshenko and with the participation of the
Security Service of Ukraine. On June 24, the Shevchenko District Court of Kyiv chose a measure of restraint for Igor Guzhva in the form of a 2-month arrest with an alternative to post bail of 500,000 hryvnias. The bail was paid on June 26 by the deputy editor-in-chief of
Strana,
Svitlana Kryukova. After that, on June 27, Igor Guzhva was released. Later, searches were carried out in the editorial office and on the apartments of some of its employees regarding the alleged receipt by Igor Guzhva of a flash drive with classified information from the
Ministry of Defense of Ukraine. Guzhva and the editorial team of
Strana also called these accusations fabricated. This criminal case did not have any further developments. On February 1, 2018, the editorial board of
Strana.ua published an appeal to President
Petro Poroshenko stating that Igor Guzhva had left Ukraine and asked the Austrian authorities for political asylum. According to the journalist, the request was related to “unprecedented pressure from the authorities” and persecution from Poroshenko. On October 1, 2018, Guzhva announced that he had been granted
political refugee in
Austria. The
Strana.ua case has been repeatedly noted by international organizations as an example of a worrying situation with freedom of speech in Ukraine. The corresponding statements were made by the
Committee to Protect Journalists and the head of the
National Union of Journalists of Ukraine, Serhiy Tomilenko. The situation with
Strana.ua was included in the
OSCE report on freedom of speech and the human rights organization
Amnesty International. In October 2019, when asked about his possible return to Ukraine after a change of power, Igor Guzhva stated that he could not consider such a possibility until the fabricated criminal cases against him were closed. After President
Volodymyr Zelenskyy came to power, "Strana.ua" continued to criticize the authorities and publish articles about corruption in power (in particular, the publication was the first to write about the practice of paying illegal salaries to deputies of the ruling faction
Servant of the People). The publication by the newspaper of photos of Zelenskyy on vacation with his family in
Oman caused a wide public resonance. As a result of the publication and public discussion, the
National Agency for Prevention of Corruption (NAPC) began an investigation into the failure of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to declare expenses for his trip to Oman. == Discussions around Strana.ua ==