Zelenskyy takes on Russia’s information warfare campaign against Ukraine

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But with the internet, 24-hour television and social media, Putin and other authoritarian leaders have turbo-charged their information warfare. The threat is evident in the new structures which have been created by the European Union, NATO, the United States and other democracies to counter it. As Russia’s “guinea pig” for information warfare, Ukrainian civil society has undertaken major steps to develop counter strategies and rebut (often Ukrainophobic) disinformation. Nevertheless, there continues to be heated debates about how a democracy counters disinformation and fake news and if, for example, it was right for a private company to ban a president from using its social media platform.

Using freedom to bring down democracy

The three banned pro-Russian television channels in Ukraine, 112, NewsOne and ZiK, accounted for half of the Kremlin’s disinformation and propaganda in the country, according to research by Detektor Media, an NGO media watchdog. The National Council on Television and Radio Broadcasting had warned and fined these three channels 40 times for infringing Ukrainian law and for spreading disinformation. The three channels replayed typical Kremlin themes that ridiculed the Ukrainian language and described Russians and Ukrainians as “one people”, played up life in occupied Donbas as better for Russian speakers than in Ukraine, blamed Ukraine for launching the Russian-Ukrainian war in the eastern Ukrainian region of Donbas, called the Euromaidan Revolution a putsch, justified the annexation of Crimea and portrayed Ukraine as a puppet of the United States.

The seven-year Russian-Ukrainian war and the intensity of Russia’s barrage of disinformation has led to Ukraine’s civil society and media organisations having no qualms about supporting the ban of pro-Russian TV channels. Six major media NGOs in Ukraine wrote: “In today’s world, the relationship between freedom of speech and propaganda has become much more complex. Propaganda, disinformation and malicious information operations often use freedom of speech against itself. They use democracy to bring down democracy.”

Ukrainian civil society and media do not view the ban as infringing media freedom in Ukraine because they never viewed Medvedchuk’s three TV channels as part of the independent media space, but rather as a national security threat due to their ties to the “aggressor state” and Putin. This media should not be permitted to operate “in a country that has been the victim of external aggression,” they stated. Oleksiy Danilov, secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defence Council (RNBO), described Russia’s hybrid war against Ukraine as consisting of military aggression, “information terror” and espionage elements conducted with the assistance of pro-Russian proxies in the country. Russian agents and Ukrainians recruited by Russia and terrorists trained by Russia are unveiled on a weekly basis. Pondering the fate of journalists at the three TV channels, Danilov advised them to find work in Russia.

The February 2nd decree signed by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy sanctioned Taras Kozak’s companies, which own the three television channels, for a period of five years. Unofficially these channels are controlled by Viktor Medvedchuk, Putin’s right-hand man in Ukraine. Kozak and Medvedchuk are leading members and financiers of the pro-Russian Opposition Platform-For Life party. 49 per cent of Ukrainians support (and 41 per cent oppose) sanctions leading to the closure of the three TV channels. This increases to 72 per cent support for sanctions if they are against individuals or entities which threaten Ukraine’s national security and 85 per cent for those who support terrorism and separatism. In the southern and eastern parts of Ukraine, 36 per cent and 30 per cent support the sanctions, respectively; with 51 per cent and 59 per cent opposed. Yet, respondents in southern and eastern parts say that if sanctions are introduced against those who supported terrorism or separatism, support increases to 79 and 80 per cent respectively, with only 16 per cent opposed. Similarly, if sanctions were introduced against those harming Ukraine’s national security, 66 per cent and 65 per cent in southern and eastern Ukraine would support them respectively, with 29 per cent and 31 per cent opposed.

Why now?

Danilov explained that an investigation into the three channels had been undertaken over the previous eight months by the SBU (Security Service of Ukraine) counterintelligence – headed by Major General Ruslan Baranetskyy, a man who has received accolades and medals for his service fighting Russian and proxy forces in Donbas. SBU counterintelligence had provided the information which made Danilov confident that any attempts to overturn the ban in the courts would fail. That the SBU counterintelligence played an important role is beyond a doubt, but one should ask why Ukraine’s vibrant independent media have undertaken far more investigations of Kozak and Medvedchuk than official security services. The sources of their corruption were long known; Ukrayinska Pravda (Ukrainian Truth) and Radio Svoboda (Liberty) published major investigations in 2016 and 2017 respectively. Why did Zelenskyy only find the political will to take this step now, after first suggesting he would take this step this past summer? There are three factors.

Domestically, Zelenskyy and his Servant of the People party are declining in popularity in eastern and southern Ukraine, where it faces competition from the Opposition Platform-For Life. There is a new US administration which, unlike its predecessor, is providing stronger support for Ukraine. After nearly two years of proposing compromises to achieve peace in Donbas and met by Putin’s inflexibility, Zelenskyy has reached the same conclusion as his predecessors (not counting Viktor Yanukovych) that Russia will constitute a major threat to Ukraine’s security for the foreseeable future. This conclusion is reflected in a 2020 presidential NISS (National Institute for Strategic Studies) think tank report and in this year’s Foreign Intelligence Service of Ukraine white book. A third factor is that Putin is weakened and distracted by mass protests in Russia, his imprisonment of opposition leader Alexei Navalny and western sanctions imposed as a consequence of this.

Why did President Petro Poroshenko not take this step during his 2014-2019 presidency? After all, he had banned social media, print and electronic media, films, books and flights from Russia. In October 2018, Ukraine’s parliament adopted a resolution sanctioning seven companies which owned the TV channels 112 and NewsOne TV (ZiK was purchased a year later). The new law on sanctions, adopted in 2018, permitted the RNBO to issue sanctions against foreign companies, individuals and states promoting “terrorism” and undermining Ukraine’s territorial integrity. Sanctions can also be issued against Ukrainian citizens if they act as foreign agents of a terrorist entity, government or state (i.e., Medvedchuk and Kozak). Poroshenko did not transform the parliamentary resolution into a presidential decree, claiming it was because he did not want to close down TV channels during the presidential election campaign. Many doubt this to be true. The interior minister, Arsen Avakov, who held the same post during Poroshenko’s presidency, believes he did not have the political will to do so. Two other reasons have been proposed. The first relates to the business dealings between Medvedchuk and Poroshenko. The second is that Poroshenko feared Putin’s wrath if he undermined his representative, Medvedchuk, in Ukraine, who participated in the Minsk Trilateral Contact Group’s peace negotiations and negotiated exchanges of prisoners of war.

The reason why Zelenskyy opted to act now, and not earlier, has a lot to do with who won the US elections. President Joe Biden has Putin in his sights for his operations against US national interests and for personal reasons. The US Democrats have never forgiven Putin for the 2016 intervention in the US presidential elections, which they believe was aimed at helping elect Donald Trump. The Democrats are also seeking to retaliate against Russia’s large-scale cyber-attacks against the US and, according to intelligence reports, of Russia paying Afghan Taliban bounties to kill US soldiers in Afghanistan.

Russia has also targeted Biden’s son, Hunter, in a major campaign through its Ukrainian agents, led by Andriy Derkach and Oleksandr Dubinsky, working with Trump’s legal team headed by Rudy Giuliani, Ukrainian-American Lev Parnas, and Belarusian-American Igor Fruman. This operation was in turn financed by Ukrainian oligarch Dmitri Firtash who is under house arrest in Vienna since 2014 fighting extradition to the US (it is no coincidence that Giuliani and his team always flew through Vienna to and from Kyiv). Firtash hoped to spread disinformation on the Bidens, thus preventing him from winning the election, and in return Trump would have cancelled his extradition request. The US sanctioned Derkach, labelling him a “Russian agent” last September. Dubinsky, Dmytro Kovalchuk, Konstantin Kulyk, Oleksandr Onyshchenko, Anton Symonenko, Andriy Telizhenko, and Petro Zhuravel were also sanctioned as Russian agents in January this year. Importantly, the US only sanctioned seven of the eight Ukrainian Russian agents, and that happened after the US elections, presumably because they had been undertaking a Russian-led disinformation operation against Trump’s opponent, Biden.

The US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, whose family has Ukrainian roots, demanded the expulsion of Dubinsky from the Servant of the People faction, which took place on February 1st, before he would agree to talk to Dmytro Kuleba, Ukraine’s foreign minister. The meeting took place the following day. In the same week, Zelenskyy’s decree sanctioned Kozak’s companies which owned the three TV channels. US support for Zelenskyy’s decree suggests that the US and Ukraine view the Kremlin’s disinformation campaigns as part of a larger Putin-orchestrated campaign conducted through pro-Russian television channels and pro-Russian oligarchs in Ukraine.

One of these oligarchs, Ihor Kolomoyskyy, is under FBI investigation for money laundering in the US, for what has been described as the biggest bank fraud in history. Dubinsky was a member of a sub-group of 40 or so deputies within the Servant of the People parliamentary faction which is allied to Kolomoyskyy. After the IMF and western governments successfully lobbied Zelenskyy not to allow the return of Privat Bank to Kolomoyskyy, which was nationalised in 2016, he became pro-Russian. On March 5th, the US turned the heat up on Kolomoyskyy as a “public designation of oligarch and former Ukrainian public official Ihor Kolomoyskyy due to his involvement in significant corruption”. Zelenskyy is under increasing pressure to act against Kolomoyskyy in return for US assistance and support.

Putin’s obsession with Ukraine

The Putin leadership developed a strategy during Poroshenko’s presidency in response to his widespread banning of print and electronic media, social media and cultural and educational contacts from Russia. A majority of Ukrainians have switched from Russian-language VKontakte to Facebook, from .ru mail to Gmail, Odnoklassniki to Instagram, and Russian to Ukrainian television. By 2018, only a small number of Ukrainians were consuming newspapers and magazines (one per cent), radio (three per cent), and TV (seven per cent) from Russia. In 2020, only six per cent of Ukrainians watched TV from Russia and less than one per cent received their information from print media and websites from Russia. These figures demonstrate why the Kremlin believed it could only deliver its disinformation to Ukrainians by using domestic TV. The Opposition Platform-For Life’s voters tend to be older, and most do not use social media.

With an eye to the 2019 and 2020 elections (after Zelenskyy’s victory, the parliamentary elections were brought forward to 2019), Putin’s strategy was two-fold. First, to take control of pro-Russian forces in Ukraine which had emerged from Yanukovych’s former Party of Regions. Oligarchs prevented Putin and Medvedchuk from taking control of the Opposition Bloc and therefore Medvedchuk engineered a split creating a new force, the Kremlin controlled Opposition Platform-For Life party, which has become the main pro-Russian political force in Ukraine. Second, no longer able to broadcast the Kremlin’s propaganda into Ukraine, Putin’s strategy was to take control of a growing number of Ukrainian TV channels to promote the Kremlin’s disinformation under the banner “freedom of speech”.

Medvedchuk was sanctioned by the US in March 2014 but has bypassed this by placing his business assets in his wife’s name (Oksana Marchenko) and TV channels in Kozak’s name and that of his partner, Natalya Lavrenyuk. That the real owner is beyond any doubt: Opposition Platform-For Life oligarch Vadym Rabinovych is on record calling them “Medvedchuk’s channels”.

There are three major sources of funding for the Opposition Platform-For Life and Medvedchuk’s TV channels. The first is connected to the oil industry in Russia, in which Marchenko and Lavrenyuk have interests. In 2017, Kozak’s partner, Lavrenyuk, received 75 per cent of the shares in the Rostov-based oil refining company Novoshakhtinsk, with Lavrenyuk owning 25 per cent of the shares which supplies oil to Crimea and the DNR and LNR. Since then, Lavrenyuk has become fabulously wealthy, owning ten companies in Ukraine and Crimea, as a front to conceal Medvedchuk and Kozak’s political operations in Ukraine. Recently Lavrenyuk, who illegally holds Russian and Ukrainian passports (Ukraine does not recognise dual citizenship), purchased a 13 million US dollar apartment in Moscow. The second source is the illegal coal trade between the DNR and LNR (the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic and the Luhansk People’s Republics – the Russian occupied Donbas) and Ukraine. Prior to 2014, Russian controlled Donbas included 88 coal mines while Ukrainian power stations lack coal. The illegal coal trade has been conducted since the beginning of the war, presumably with the knowledge of the Ukrainian authorities. Coal imported from the DNR and LNR was smuggled through a fake contract between the Hong Kong based company Arida Global and Tsentrenergo which pretended the coal was from South Africa. The third source is liquified gas, a sector Medvedchuk took control of in 2016, with the reported assistance of corrupt law enforcement which he used to squeeze out competition. With Russian-Ukrainian trade blocked by both sides, Putin transferred former Rosneft petrol stations to Medvedchuk.

On February 19th, two further decrees imposed sanctions on eight people and 19 companies. The eight included three Ukrainians: Medvedchuk, Marchenko and Lavrenyuk; and five Russians: Konstantin Vatskovsky, Vitaly Domchenko, Sergey Lisogor, Alexander Maslyuk and Mikhail Popov. The sanctions were imposed for “financing terrorism”; that is, using profits from coal imported from the DNR and LNR to finance three TV channels banned earlier that month. Two of the five Russians are owners of Donetsk Ugly (Donetsk Coal) in the DNR.

Of the 19 companies sanctioned, the most important is PrikarpatZakhidTrans, the operator of the Ukrainian section of the Russian-owned Samara-West oil pipeline. Sanctioned Russian diesel and oil was supplied to Ukraine and the European Union through this pipeline using Belarusian licenses. Other sanctioned companies included air transportation used for flights between Kyiv and Moscow and joint companies registered in Russia, occupied Crimea, Moldova and Portugal. The sanctions will cripple the economic and other activities of those they were imposed against. PrikarpatZakhidTrans, which Medvedchuk has controlled since 2017 through his wife Marchenko,is to be nationalised by the Ukrainian state. The assets of the five Ukrainians are frozen, meaning they cannot use and manage or trade these properties, flights are prohibited, capital cannot be taken out of Ukraine and permissions and licenses for the import and export of hard currency is not allowed.

The February 19th decrees were meant to undermine the financial base of pro-Russian forces operating in Ukraine. They will also no doubt have an impact on the ability of the Opposition Platform-For Life party to function as an effective political force.

Challenges ahead

Kozak grew up in Lviv and retains business interests there, including the Navariya hotel complex and the Galician Agricultural company. After a number of failures running for parliament, he was finally elected in 2014 by the Opposition Bloc, and in 2019 by the Opposition Platform-For Life. In 2017, a year before Kozak purchased the three television channels, his asset declaration reported 500,000 US dollars in cash, two houses and a land plot in Crimea. Not coincidentally, just ahead of Ukraine’s 2019 elections, Kozak, Marchenko and Lavrenyuk became very wealthy. A corrupt system was created whereby income earned by Marchenko and Lavrenyuk was used to purchase NewsOne (October 2018), 112 (December 2018) and ZiK (June 2019). The Opposition Platform-For Life party activities and election campaigns and Medvedchuk’s three television channels – which do not make a profit, costing about 1.5 million dollars each month running to nearly 60 million dollars per year – are corruptly financed by funding from Russian oil, diesel, illegal coal trade and the liquefied gas sector. The corrupt funding scheme used the Belarusian Absoliutbank, owned by pro-Alyaksandr Lukashenka oligarchs Mikalay Varabey and Alyaksei Aleksin, to bypass Russian sanctions by issuing Belarusian licenses for Russian oil and diesel.

Challenges in the months ahead will be made in the Supreme Court over the legality of the presidential decree and in the constitutional court over whether the decree constitutes an infringement of media freedom. The RNBO and Ukrainian authorities will presumably provide evidence to show that the owners of these three channels are agents of Russia and have been financing “terrorism” (i.e., pro-Russian proxies and separatism in the Donbas). If it is proven in court that Kozak and Medvedchuk are operating as agents of Russia, this will have a knock-on effect on whether the Opposition Platform-For Life is also acting as an agent of Russia in Ukraine.

The election victory of Joe Biden has stiffened western and Ukrainian resolve to take on Putin at a time when he is facing growing opposition at home. Putin has for many years conducted his personal war against the West without the US under President Trump pushing back in a tough manner. Ukraine’s civil society and media NGOs have called for the US to expand its sanctions from Medvedchuk to his wife, Marchenko, and Kozak and Lavrenyuk for their financing of Russian propaganda and disinformation using corrupt proceeds from illegal trade with the DNR, LNR and Crimea. The banning of three pro-Russian television channels in Ukraine is a signal that the Trump era of cosying up to Putin is over and Ukraine has Washington’s back in its fight against different forms of Russian aggression.

Taras Kuzio is a professor in the Department of Political Science at the National University of Kyiv Mohyla Academy and a Non-Resident Fellow of the Foreign Policy Institute, Johns Hopkins University. His most recent book is Crisis in Russian Studies? Nationalism (Imperialism), Racism and War.

Donbas, media, Russia, Ukraine, Viktor Medvedchuk, Volodymyr Zelenskyy