By Fred Weir, Facebook, 1/22/23

(See: https://myrotvorets.center/criminal/arestovich-aleksej-nikolaevich/)

Everything about the Myrotvorets “enemies list”, which is rumored to be curated by Ukraine’s SBU security service, is deeply disturbing. It now lists, and rather thoroughly doxes, almost 200,000 people “whose actions have signs of crimes against the national security of Ukraine, peace, human security, and the international law”. Plenty of Russians are on the list, of course, but so are many, many Ukrainians, as well as people from around the world, some of whom are generally considered to be friends of Ukraine. The bar for enemy status is astoundingly low. 

If nothing else, Myrotvorets is a dark catalogue of the vicious hatreds and internecine enmities that animate some in Kyiv’s security-connected upper circles. And the fact that it doesn’t get shut down, despite strenuous complaints from, among others, The Committee to Protect Journalists and the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, demonstrates high-level protection. After all, virtually every, even mildly oppositionist, media outlet in Ukraine has been banished by now via security decrees.

Some of the doxed subjects on Myrotvorets are easy to shrug at. Henry Kissinger. Gerhard Schröder. Roger Waters. Silvio Berlusconi. Viktor Orbán. They can take care of themselves. But many are Ukrainians, still living inside Ukraine, such as former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, many members of the now-banned Opposition Bloc as well as the astounding fresh entry that I’m going to describe below.

But what is Nobel Prize-winning Belarusian novelist Svetlana Alexievich doing here, ridiculously accused of “propagating interethnic discord and manipulating information important to society”?

And before you laugh, note that Russian publicist Daria Dugina had her entry stamped “Terminated!” after she was assassinated last year, as we now know, by Ukrainian security services.

Now welcome Alexei Arestovich, who has fallen from being an adviser to President Zelensky to a Myrotvorets entry in barely a week. Arestovich resigned after publicly suggesting that the Russian cruise missile that hit an apartment bloc in Dnipro last week, killing dozens, might have been blown off its intended trajectory by a Ukrainian air defense missile. He apologized, said he had been misinformed. But, no, not good enough. On to the Myrotvorets list he goes, described like this:

“Professional provocateur. Implementation of public information sabotage in favor of the Russian invaders. Participation in acts of humanitarian aggression against Ukraine. Conscious participation in activities that undermine the defense capability of Ukraine by demoralizing the armed forces of Ukraine. Discrediting State bodies of power and administration.”