After buying the Lafayette Nicollet Ledger four years ago for $35,000, owner Lee Zion is now giving up his beloved local newspaper for free to go and join the war effort in Ukraine. The veteran journalist, 54, said he didn’t feel strongly about Ukraine before the invasion in February—but he does care deeply about a traditional Ukrainian folk instrument called the bandura. “It's a gorgeous instrument. I thought, someday I'm going to buy one,” Zion told the Star Tribune. “And Russians murdered people just for the crime of playing it. Sounds silly, but at the same time, it's so silly that it's evil.” After contacting a Canadian chorus which plays the bandura, Zion was advised to contact the Ukrainian embassy in Chicago about signing up as a volunteer. He said he now plans to offload his profit-making weekly paper, which has around 500 subscribers, for free to someone who is willing to take care of it—and put the hours in required to keep the Ledger alive. “To put out a good newspaper, they have to do what I do,” Zion said of his successor. “And that is, do everything myself with only a handful of [freelancers], and work seven days a week and never take time off.”