In the aftermath of the Cold War, we saw global experiments to liberate the world through capitalist markets and liberal democracy. How have they shaped understandings of freedom in the former Soviet “empire of justice”? *Taras Fedirko* addresses this question through the lens of Ukrainian journalists’ struggles against the power of oligarchs and other media patrons between 1998 and 2021. Fedirko traces how Russian interference, patronal domination, and organisational imperatives of grants promoting freedom of speech, have transformed what had begun as a solidarity movement against media censorship, into a divisive, moralised struggle over who counts as ‘real’ journalist in Ukraine. He argues that we can best understand this transformation if we pay attention to the centrality of the idea of freedom as non-domination to Ukrainian journalists’ struggles. In tension with liberal understandings of free speech, this idea of freedom and the emancipatory project it informed reveals journalistic labour as the key site where relations of political domination and exclusion were forged and challenged in pre-invasion Ukraine.