Jed Sunden

Sunden is from Brooklyn, New York, and attended Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in history. He recalled that he was in school from 1988 to 1992, as the walls were coming down in Eastern Europe, which got him interested in Soviet and Eastern European history.⁠[1][2]

After graduating, Sunden ended up working “sort of by chance” on a privately funded research project compiling a register of Jewish cemeteries in Ukraine for preservation purposes, and came to Kyiv in 1993. Visiting Ukraine in the early 1990s, he concluded that the country needed an English-language newspaper, as many other former Soviet republics already had, and decided to start one.⁠[2][2][1]

On October 18, 1995, the first issue of Sunden’s Kiev Post (later renamed Kyiv Post) came out, with him listed as managing editor; he soon took the title of publisher. He recalled that he knew little about publishing or journalism at the time, that the start-up money was six or seven thousand dollars of personal savings, and that he later fronted money on his credit card until the paper began making a profit from advertising.⁠[3][2][2]

About six months after the launch, he reworked the database used to contact advertisers into a business directory, the Kyiv Business Directory, and sold it. In August 1997, he expanded the paper to 32 pages and launched its website.⁠[2][3]

Sunden recalled that in 1999–2000 the Kuchma government cracked down on press freedom, with tax police carrying out harassing inspections of his company every week. On April 11, 2000, returning from abroad to Kyiv’s Boryspil airport, he was refused entry; authorities took his passport and told him he had been declared “persona non grata,” without giving a reason. After nearly 20 hours stranded at the airport he flew to Vienna, and U.S. Embassy officials then told him the ban had been lifted. He later said he had considered leaving Ukraine at the time.⁠[2][4][4][4][4][2]

Using profits from the Kyiv Post, Sunden moved heavily into the internet news business in the early 2000s: he launched the portal Bigmir.net in 2000 and the entertainment guide Afisha in 2001, and in 2002 started the Russian-language news weekly Korrespondent with key Kyiv Post journalists, also running korrespondent.net. His company was then called KP Publications, and he was its president.⁠[5][2][2][3][2]

In August 2003, a Kyiv court ordered KP Publications to pay a total of Hr 100,000 in a suit brought by the Interregional Academy for Personnel Management (MAUP) over a Korrespondent article. Sunden called the ruling “bad for freedom of speech and bad for Ukraine,” arguing that such heavy fines for small infractions showed a “clear and present danger to press freedom.”⁠[6][6][6]

In October 2005, on the Kyiv Post’s tenth anniversary, Sunden said the Orange Revolution had improved Ukraine’s business environment and that the company’s revenues had grown 40% the previous year; he said people regularly offered to use the Kyiv Post or Korrespondent as a political tool, and his constant reply was “We stay out of politics,” while he also liked being able to write articles in his publications from time to time to express his opinion.⁠[2][2][2][2]

In 2006, investment bank Dragon Capital helped Sunden’s KP Media sell 20% of its shares, raising $11 million.⁠[7]

After the 2008 financial crisis devastated the advertising market, Sunden put the Kyiv Post up for sale in January 2009, and on July 29 announced to staff that he had sold the paper to Mohammad ZahoorMohammad ZahoorMohammad Zahoor is a Karachi-born British businessman and founder of the ISTIL Group. He studied metallurgy in Donetsk in the Soviet Union in the 1970s, ran a steel business in Ukraine in the 1990s, and after selling his Donetsk steel mill in 2008 turned to real estate and media investments; from 2009 to 2018 he owned the Ukrainian English-language newspaper Kyiv Post.Open the full entry of the ISTIL Group. Neither side disclosed the price; Dragon Capital estimated it at about $1.1 million. He had been the newspaper’s only owner and publisher for its 14 years of existence.⁠[8][7][7][1]

Sunden said that from a business standpoint the sale came easy, but emotionally it “was very tough”; it was a matter of the company choosing priorities, as KP Media was heavily invested in the internet and needed enough money on that front. He said he had sized up Zahoor and believed he would honor his pledges to invest more and respect editorial independence, adding that defending editorial independence was not only the right thing to do but also good business, since owners who use their outlets to pursue a political agenda “tend to lose the trust of the readers.”⁠[1][1][1][1][1][1]

In early April 2011, reports said Sunden had reached a deal to sell his majority stake in KP Media. In an April 5 statement he did not directly confirm this, saying only that he did not rule out new partners, provided the basic editorial principles and his own top management role were preserved: “Even if a new partner arrives, I will personally remain the guarantor of free and independent journalism.” On April 13, Ukrainian Media Holding (UMH) and Petro Poroshenko confirmed that they had become strategic investors in KP Media, with Sunden remaining CEO; the deal’s value was not disclosed.⁠[9][5][10][10]

In 2012, at EastLabs, the Kyiv startup accelerator owned by Victor Pinchuk’s EastOne, Sunden was listed as a mentor, identified as the former owner of KP Media, alongside Horizon Capital investment director Vasile Tofan, Napster founding chairman and CEO John Fanning, TA VentureTA VenturesTA Ventures is an early-stage venture capital firm founded in 2010 by Ukrainian entrepreneur Viktoriya Tigipko, which in its early years operated in Kyiv under the name TA Venture. It invests mainly its own capital in pre-seed, seed, and occasionally Series A technology startups, chiefly in North America and Europe, and it established the angel investor community ICLUB; as of October 2026 it reported about 280 investments in total.Open the full entry director Viktoriya TigipkoViktoriya TigipkoViktoriya Tigipko is a Ukrainian entrepreneur and venture capitalist who founded the early-stage venture capital firm TA Ventures in 2010 and serves as its managing partner. She went on to found the angel investor community ICLUB, the startup conference IDCEE, and the children’s coding initiative Code Club Ukraine, co-founded the women-in-tech community WTECH, and is involved in Ukrainian film as president of the Odesa International Film Festival.Open the full entry and others guiding startup teams.⁠[11][11]

In March 2024, the American Ukraine PAC, a political action committee headed by Sunden, was launched to raise campaign money for members of Congress who support Ukraine, planning 20 fundraisers for lawmakers of both parties over the following months in partnership with local Ukrainian communities, with a focus on members of the bipartisan Congressional Ukrainian Caucus. The PAC launched with a fundraiser for Democratic Representative Brendan Boyle of Pennsylvania. At the time, the Senate had passed a national security supplemental including $60 billion in aid for Ukraine, but the House had not yet voted on it.⁠[12][12][12][12][12][12]

The PAC is a bipartisan political action committee registered with the Federal Election Commission and says about 80% of its donations are earmarked by donors for specific candidates. It has also published a congressional scorecard that rates members, based on their votes on key bills, as “Strong Supporter,” “Supporter” or “Negative.”⁠[13][13][14]

As of 2026, Sunden writes opinion pieces for the Kyiv Post as founder of the American Ukraine Committee, which works to strengthen the American-Ukrainian relationship in Congress. On July 16, 2026, he argued that Ukraine should not send another career politician as ambassador to the United States but a soldier who knows drone warfare and would have the Pentagon’s ear.⁠[15][16]

On September 30, 2026, in another piece, he argued that after the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act won overwhelming bipartisan support, some of Ukraine’s honorary consuls in the United States were lobbying for Ukrainian refugees to stay permanently, which he believed would undermine Republican support for Ukraine, and he called on Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry to rein in those consuls.⁠[17][17][17][17]

Sunden wrote many columns in the Kyiv Post expressing libertarian and anti-communist views, favoring low taxes, minimal regulation, free speech and free markets and taking a critical view of Kremlin leaders; for years he campaigned for the removal of all Lenin monuments in Ukraine. As a publisher, he was also criticized for allowing paid “massage” ads and for a high turnover of chief editors.⁠[18][1][1][18]

Sunden and his wife, Olga Sunden, fund journalism scholarships at Ukrainian Catholic University from the United States, supporting students in the university’s Master’s Program in Media Communications.⁠[19][19][19]

American Ukraine PAC: Official website: https://www.amukrpac.org/ (opens in a new window).⁠[14]

Kyiv Post: Official website: https://www.kyivpost.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[15]