A Ukrainian media group partnered with BBC, Der Spiegel and other Western outlets polled readers on which Russian intellectual should be assassinated following a car bomb attack on writer Zakhar Prilepin. The Biden administration has greenlit Kiev’s campaign of terror.
Hours after Russian writer and activist Zakhar Prilepin was nearly killed in a targeted car bomb, a popular Ukrainian news agency submitted a poll that asked its readers, “Who do you think should be next in the Russian pantheon of scum propagandists?”
It’s open season on Russian intellectuals supportive of the government’s war effort, according to Ukrainian news agency UNIAN. Following a car bomb intended to kill Russian novelist Zakhar Prilepin in the Nizhny Novgorod region of Russia, the outlet polled its audience on Telegram, providing a list of names of prominent Russians that could be assassinated.
Excluding the two reported assassination attempts on Russian President Vladimir Putin, Prilepin is the third high-profile Russian to be targeted for assassination by Ukrainian agents. His maiming follows the car bombing that killed Dariya Dugina, which was intended for her father, the Russian nationalist philosopher Alexander Dugin, and the bombing of a public event featuring Vladlen Tatarsky, who ran a popular Telegram channel. The Telegram post by UNIAN explicitly references Dugin, Tatarsky, and Prilepin.
Among the list of potential targets were the operators of other Telegram channels, RT editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan (crudely referred to in the post as “beaver eater”), Russian TV news hosts Dmitry Kiselyov and Sergey Mardan, and others. Some 50,000 Telegram users have voted in the poll at the time of this article’s publication.
According to UNIAN’s About page, the outlet “partners in information dissemination and exchange” with American outlets Reuters and Bloomberg while its clients include prominent foreign outlets like the BBC and Der Spiegel.
UNIAN is owned by the 1+1 Media Group belonging to Ukrainian oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky, a long time backer of Ukrainian President Vlodomyr Zelensky and the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion. The conglomerate is also the parent company of TSN, the TV News program that recently put out a bounty for drone terror attacks on Red Square during Moscow’s annual May 9 celebration of the defeat of Nazism.
The assassination attempt against Russian novelist Zakhar Prilepin coincided with raids inside Ukraine that swept up 11 war commentators including Gonzalo Lira, an American citizen. Ukraine’s SBU intelligence
agency announced on May 4 that they had arrested “another network of enemy internet agitators.”
American journalists with ties to US intelligence have sought to justify the targeting of online influencers. Christo Grozev, the lead Russia investigator at the US government-funded outlet Bellingcat, justified the bombing of a public event at a cafe in St. Petersburg on the grounds that the target was a “propagandist.”
Similarly, Sarah Ashton-Cirillo, an American journalist and former Democratic Party operative who enlisted in Ukraine’s armed forces, filmed a phantasmagorical defense of the arrest of American Gonzalo Lira by Ukrainian intelligence agents on the same grounds. While the SBU had only publicly released images of Lira with his face blurred, Ashton-Cirllo was somehow able to produce uncensored versions.
Meanwhile, the Biden administration has provided a green light for Ukraine’s campaign of terror inside Russia. Following the second assassination attempt on Russian President Vladimir Putin, Secretary of State Antony Blinken was asked about the US view on attacks inside Russian territory. “These are decisions for Ukraine to make about how it’s going to defend itself,” Blinken responded.
Among the trove of top secret documents leaked by National Guardsman Jack Teixeira and now likely slowly decomposing in file cabinets at top American newsrooms, is a document detailing the US’s dismal projections for a Ukrainian counteroffensive. As its hopes for recapturing the whole of its pre-2014 territory dim, Ukraine is resorting to a campaign of targeted assassinations against its most vocal critics in Russia, and disappearing those who remain within its realm.
A survey published by the Democratic Initiatives Foundation on May 8 shows that over 67% of Ukrainians say the war with Russia can end only after the Ukrainian victory.
They say that no compromises with Russia are acceptable, the poll shows. 22% of respondents say that some compromises are possible.
Over 5% of those asked say that any compromises are acceptable as long as they end the war.
According to the same poll, 82% of Ukrainians say that there’s no difference between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Adolf Hitler, leader of Nazi Germany. 11% of respondents say they “probably agree” with this statement.
Ukrainians also see Poland (68%), the U.S. (67%), and the U.K. (45%) as the most supportive, while Polish President Andrzej Duda, U.S. President Joe Biden, and former U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson as Ukraine’s most important backers.
The two most popular people in Ukraine are President Volodymyr Zelensky and Commander-in-Chief Valerii Zaluzhnyi.
Additionally, 40% of Ukrainians think the Moscow-controlled Ukrainian Orthodox Church helped Russia in its war against Ukraine. 26% say they “probably agree” with this statement.
Russia’s most successful military leader in the Ukraine war so far is not a soldier at all.
Yevgeny Prigozhin is a former convict and Kremlin-connected entrepreneur whose private army, the Wagner Group, has borne the brunt of the long, grinding, and incredibly costly battle that has raged since last summer amid the ruins of Bakhmut, once a quiet Donbas mining town.
And over the past 10 days, he has publicly threatened to pull his forces out of Bakhmut, appearing in a video with a field of dead Wagner troops he claimed were victims of Defense Ministry negligence. A week ago he accused Russian troops of “fleeing” the battlefield near Bakhmut, leaving his men exposed. “Soldiers should not die because of the absolute stupidity of their leadership,” he said.
This extraordinary spectacle has led to speculation about a rift in Moscow’s upper echelons of power, an imminent collapse of Russian lines around Bakhmut, or perhaps even a political challenge to the Kremlin by Mr. Prigozhin and the right-wing nationalist hawks who revere him.
Russian experts say there is indeed a struggle for influence and resources between Mr. Prigozhin and the Russian military bureaucracy, which clearly hates the private contractor. But they say he is not so much challenging the powers that be in Moscow, as he is jockeying for his own post-war position in what is anything but a monolithic Putin-era Russian establishment.
“Prigozhin is trying to act like a politician, and Putin may not be ready to tolerate too much independence,” says Andrei Kolesnikov, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center who continues living and working in Moscow. “But this is a strong authoritarian state which is ready to use all sorts of people to achieve goals that look very strange for the 21st century. For Putin, right now, it’s extremely important to fight and win this war. He needs men who can get things done, and that’s why he tolerates Prigozhin.”
A construct of Mr. Putin’s system?
Mr. Prigozhin, who served a decade in prison for robbery and fraud in the 1980s, began with small-scale businesses in post-Soviet St. Petersburg, mainly in the food catering field. After Russian President Vladimir Putin came to power, Russia’s wealthy elites had a choice between accepting political obedience or leaving the country, and Mr. Prigozhin, by then a successful grocer and restaurateur, chose the former.
Mr. Prigozhin became close enough to the Kremlin that he earned the sobriquet “Putin’s chef.” He grew wealthy on official catering contracts and began to branch out. Among other things, he started the Internet Research Agency, a cyber-trolling outfit that became notorious in the United States for allegedly interfering in the 2016 elections.
Although Mr. Prigozhin publicly denied it until last September, he’s best known for founding the Wagner Group, a private military contractor he says was modeled on U.S. examples like Blackwater, in 2014. The group was reportedly named for the call sign of its first commander, Dmitry Utkin, and its goal was to assist Ukrainian separatists in the Donbas without leaving official Russian fingerprints. The Wagners extended operations to Syria and several countries in Africa, where they were able to support Russian foreign policy goals in various ways, yet enable Moscow to maintain official deniability. Estimates of the size of the Wagner forces vary, but they generally seem to be somewhere in the tens of thousands of troops.
Andrei Soldatov, a specialist in Russian secret services who is now with the Center for European Policy Analysis, argues in a recent piece for Foreign Affairs that, far from being a wild card or a threat to Russia’s power structure, Mr. Prigozhin’s entry into private military operations was probably sponsored by Russian military intelligence, the GRU, and is very much in line with the traditional Kremlin style of creating different forces to pursue various goals and to play against each other.
“The GRU was instrumental in the emergence of the Wagner group, and the agency established a special department to supervise it,” says Mr. Soldatov. “Lately it looks as though Prigozhin is desperate to preserve the reputation of Wagner as the only force that’s capable of going on the offensive,” hence his strange public antics. “But this doesn’t necessarily mean that he’s a loose cannon” or a threat to the Kremlin, he adds.
Many argue that Mr. Prigozhin and his private army are ultimately a construct of the system created by Mr. Putin and that he serves at the pleasure of the Kremlin.
“The Wagners are an outsourcing model, who are able to do things that the state might not be able to openly carry out, such as recruiting prisoners straight out of jail and sending them into battle,” says Mr. Kolesnikov, the Carnegie expert. But “Yevgeny Prigozhin is simply a state hireling.”
“He wants to build his brand”
After Russia invaded Ukraine last year, the Wagner role grew immensely. Already involved in the Donbas conflict for several years, the group honed its skills at assaulting heavily defended Ukrainian positions, especially around Bakhmut. Mr. Prigozhin made the rounds of Russian prisons last September, offering freedom for any convict who would volunteer and serve six months on the Ukrainian front. It’s not known how many signed up, but Mr. Prigozhin recently noted that about 5,000 men have completed that service and returned to normal life.
Unlike the Defense Ministry, he has also been fairly honest about the casualties his men have suffered in the grueling attritional fighting around Bakhmut, putting losses at about 90 soldiers per day – which, he insisted, was far less than Ukrainian casualties. The ministry may also envy his relative success as the leader of the only Russian force that has consistently moved forward, however slowly and painfully, over the past several months.
In fact, Mr. Prigozhin has been in a constant squabble with the Russian military brass. He has cited them for allegedly failing to supply his Wagner stormtroopers with enough ammunition to blast through the rows of high-rise buildings in western Bakhmut, where Ukrainian troops still hold on. He has also accused the regular Russian troops who are meant to be securing the Wagners’ flanks of poor performance.
Not being a professional soldier – or even part of the chain of command – enables Mr. Prigozhin to take his complaints directly to the public via social media and sympathetic Russian journalists. Though he gets very little coverage in mainstream Russian media, everyone knows his name, and polls suggest that Wagner forces are more popular than the official Russian army. Hence, Mr. Prigozhin’s social media appeals get enormous traction.
Major public opinion agencies, like mainstream Russian media, have conspicuously avoided polling the public about Mr. Prigozhin and the Wagners. But one less formal survey carried out by the “Myusli Lavrov” Telegram channel found that 80% of its respondents would sooner sign a contract with Wagner than with the official Russian army. And at least one Russian military unit has posted a video appeal asking to be transferred to the Wagners.
“Prigozhin is something like a Russian version of Elon Musk, and his relationship with the Defense Ministry is like that of a huge, successful corporation struggling with government bureaucracy,” says Sergei Markov, a former Kremlin adviser. “Private corporations can be very effective, though perhaps it’s dangerous to give them too much power. But Prigozhin has been moving forward, street by street, in Bakhmut because he’s an effective leader, he has an excellent team whom he pays very well, he’s innovative. He rewards success and punishes failure. …
“The Russian army’s problems are mainly the burden of bureaucracy. Communications on the battlefield take hours for them, whereas the Wagners do it in minutes,” he says.
Mr. Markov argues that Western analysts are mistaken to view Mr. Prigozhin as a potential political challenger to the Kremlin.
“Prigozhin’s popularity may be a threat to the military bureaucracy, but not to Putin,” he says. “Prigozhin doesn’t want to be president. He wants to build his brand, to become the most powerful private army in the world. He wants to have projects in many countries and become very rich. Right now, he needs to win in Bakhmut.”
France-based press watchdog Reporters Without Borders (Reporters Sans Frontières, or RSF) recently released its scores and rankings for international press freedom. In 2022, RSF gave Ukraine a score of 55.76 out of 100, placing it 106th out of 180 countries surveyed. In the most recent report, issued after over a year of war, Ukraine shot to 79th out of 180, with a new score of 61.19. This despite wartime measures that banned opposition parties, consolidated media under state control, and saw journalists’ speech chilled by unprecedented intimidation.
Wartime measures in any country often result in a loss of press freedom. To say that such restrictions are typical, however, does not mean that they are therefore not really happening. For RSF to change the standards it applies to Ukraine, as it apparently has, because the country has been invaded is to endorse the idea that freedom of the press ought to be limited in times of danger—an odd position, to say the least, for a group dedicated to protecting the rights of journalists to take.
Deteriorating democracy
By ordinary standards, the position of the press in Ukraine has not improved in the past year, but dramatically worsened. In an exhaustive article, Branko Marcetic (Jacobin, 2/25/23) thoroughly outlined how democratic institutions have deteriorated in Ukraine as a result of the war. Ivan Katchanovski, a Ukrainian political scientist at the University of Ottawa, told Marcetic:
“[President Volodymyr] Zelenskyy used the Russian invasion and the war as a pretext to eliminate most of the political opposition and potential rivals for power, and to consolidate his largely undemocratic rule.”
This continues a trend since before the war. In 2021, Zelenskyy had banned the most popular news website in the country, then banned media outlets affiliated with one of the most popular parties in the country. In a case that elicited international condemnation, Vasyl Muravitsky was forced to flee to Finland after being accused of “treason” and allegedly disseminating “anti-Ukrainian” materials. His prosecution began before the war, but has continued in absentia during the invasion.
The trial is happening against a backdrop of wider political repression. Among other wartime measures, Zelenskyy suspended, then banned, 11 opposition parties due to their alleged links with Russia. One of these parties had even held 10% of the seats in the Ukrainian parliament before the move. Journalists and anyone else with a political opinion are well aware of the consequences of speaking out, and the pressures have only intensified.
One Ukrainian scholar told Marcetic:
“All Ukrainian journalists and bloggers who did not want to promote Zelenskyy’s version of “truth” had to either shut up (voluntarily or under duress) or, if possible, emigrate.”
Consolidated TV
International Federation of Journalists president Dominique Pradalié Media (1/17/23): “Freedom and pluralism are in danger in Ukraine under the new media law.”
In July, Zelenskyy consolidated television organizations into a single, government-controlled channel. In a widely criticized move, Zelenskyy signed a law that expanded the ability of the state regulator, controlled by Zelenskyy and his party, to issue fines, revoke licenses and prevent publication for media organizations.
The top Ukrainian journalists’ unions opposed the law. The head of one union warned that
“government officials will declare those who disagree with their vision to be enemies of the country or foreign agents. This perspective of state and political regulation of the media is in total contradiction with the desire of Ukrainian civil society for European integration.”
The International Federation of Journalists called on the European Commission and Council of Europe to review the measure. The Committee to Protect Journalists repeatedly called on the Ukrainian government to drop the bill, warning that it “imperils press freedom in the country by tightening government control over information.”
Unlike other international journalism-centered NGOs, Reporters Without Borders offered praise for the bill. In a blog post titled “RSF Hails Ukraine’s Adoption of New Media Law, Despite War with Russia” (1/11/23), it wrote that the law was “generally welcomed by Ukrainian journalists.” This praise was based on minor provisions that were required for Ukrainian admission to the European Union, as it “harmonize[d] Ukrainian legislation with European law.”
This was acknowledged as a positive move by the National Union of Journalists of Ukraine (NUJU), one of the unions opposed to the bill. But as NUJU made clear, journalists objected to the enormous control given to the state media regulators, not these less important provisions.
RSF acknowledged these measures, but euphemistically described them as “co-regulatory mechanisms that facilitate a dialogue between the media regulator and the media”; it wrote that the provisions “expand[ed] the media regulator’s powers,” but offered only muted criticism, suggesting that “to guarantee the regulator’s full independence…the process for its appointing members needs to be changed.” While it noted that this could be done by “amend[ing] the constitution,” it tellingly acknowledged that these changes were “impossible as long as martial law…is still in effect.”
Banning media—with improvement
RSF’s obfuscation and whitewashing of the law carried into its 2023 Press Freedom Index report for Ukraine, which merely says of the law, “A new media law that was adopted in late 2022 after years of preparation is designed to bring Ukraine in line with European media legislation.”
In the report, RSF acknowledged some repression:
“Media regarded as pro-Kremlin were banned by presidential decree, and access to Russian social media was restricted. This has intensified since the start of Russia’s invasion. Media carrying Russian propaganda have been blocked.”
RSF even acknowledged that “the application of martial law sometimes results in reporting restrictions for journalists.” To RSF, however, this increase in censorship does not overshadow the improvements in Ukraine’s media environment, as embodied by the EU-compliant regulations, so it gave the country a higher score than last year.
Looking at previous years of RSF index reports, the language hasn’t changed much since the 2021 index, which reads:
“Ukraine has a diversified media landscape…. Much more is needed to loosen the oligarchs’ tight grip on the media, encourage editorial independence and combat impunity for crimes of violence against journalists.”
In the 2022 report, this changed to “Ukraine’s media landscape is diverse, but remains largely in the grip of oligarchs who own all of the national TV channels.” The report criticized the Russian invasion for replacing the media in occupied areas with Kremlin propaganda. There was no criticism of the government’s consolidation of control, or the deteriorating political situation.
‘Front line of resistance’
The latest RSF report downgraded Russia’s already low standing, from 155th to 164th place (38.82 to 34.77). Its report on Russia began, appropriately, by noting what the Russian government had done to the press:
“Since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, almost all independent media have been banned, blocked and/or declared “foreign agents” or “undesirable organizations.”
The report on Ukraine, by contrast, began by talking about Russia:
The war launched by Russia on 24 February 2022 threatens the survival of the Ukrainian media. In this “information war,” Ukraine stands at the front line of resistance against the expansion of the Kremlin’s propaganda system.
This framing allows RSF to present the banning of “media regarded as pro-Kremlin” as an act of “resistance” rather than repression.
Rising score ‘a joke’
Political scientist Gerald Sussman called Ukraine’s rising score “a joke,” especially when the “US ranking dropped to No. 45 (from 42).” (RSF cited states’ efforts to restrict reporters’ access to public spaces, among other issues.) Sussman has extensively studied the role of seemingly independent international NGOs in pushing US-centric, market-oriented values around the world. He connected RSF’s Press Freedom score to other “Freedom” indexes, like Freedom House’s “democracy score,” which often judges “democracy” according to market standards. “Groups with the name ‘freedom’ in their title are almost always conservative,” Sussman stated in a statement to FAIR.
Freedom House has yet to release its 2023 democracy scores, though its 2022 report criticized Ukraine for pre-war repression, citing “imposition of sanctions on several domestic journalists and outlets on national security grounds, leading to three TV channels being taken off the air.” As we noted, RSF had no such critique.
Reporters Without Borders is a prestigious international institution, respected by many in the world of media and human rights. Unfortunately, like many in the media, it appears to have taken on the role of cheerleader for Ukraine in the proxy war, abandoning the pretense of being an objective monitor.
In Ukraine, the past year has been devastating for a country already struggling with media repression. RSF’s denial of reality does nothing to actually help Ukraine, but downplaying these problems will only further imperil press freedoms.
