Ukrainian officials and politicians have reacted angrily to the shutting down on May 14 of the Ukrainian website Myrotvorets (Peacemaker), which on May 9 published information on journalists it claimed were “cooperating with terrorists” in Russian-occupied eastern Ukraine.
The website, run by anonymous volunteers, put out a message saying that the shutdown had been demanded by journalists, Ukrainian Human Rights Ombudsman Valeria Lutkovskaya, and, in a jibe at the diplomatic language of EU officials on the Ukraine conflict, the “always concerned” European Union.
“Under pressure from all of them, and Ukrainian journalists with anti-Ukrainian feelings, we decided to close our website,” read the statement.
The website on May 9 published a list of nearly 4,500 foreign and Ukrainian journalists who have received press accreditation from Russian-backed armed groups that are in control of parts of Donetsk Oblast.
The leak of the list, allegedly obtained in a hacker attack on the separatists’ computers, outraged many in Ukraine’s media community. Foreign journalists and organizations such as the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe condemned the publication, saying that it endangered reporters working in the Donbas war zone.
The website now consists only of a link named “Purgatory” that leads to an archive of profiles of suspected members of illegal armed groups in the Donbas.
The website’s closure immediately caused a fierce reaction from some Ukrainian top officials and lawmakers.
Lawmaker and adviser to the interior minister Anton Gerashchenko, a prominent supporter and promoter of the website’s work, called the shutdown of Myrotvorets part of “a persistent campaign against a patriotic website.”
“This leak (the list of accredited journalists) is precious, because it helped to find out about the Russian, Ukrainian and international journalists who have become weapons in Russia’s information war against Ukraine instead of doing their job and being fair,” Gerashchenko said on Savik Shuster’s political talk show on May 13.
Half of the journalists on the list are Russian, while the rest come mostly from Western media outlets, including the BBC, the New York Times and others. A few are from Ukrainian publications, which have great difficulty gaining accreditation to operate in the Russian-occupied parts of Ukraine.
The Myrotvorets website published the list of the accredited journalists in a file called “scoundrels” and wrote that the people on the list had cooperated with the “terrorists,” and thus their data needs to be published.
A number of Ukrainian journalists, including some from the Kyiv Post, signed an open letter condemning both the leak and the description of the accredited journalists as traitors who “cooperated with the separatists.”
In response to the shutting down of the website, Gerashchenko has started a social media campaign, asking his followers to post an image reading “I support Myrotvorets” on their profiles.
Gerashchenko isn’t alone. Ukrainian Radical Party lawmakers Oleh Lyashko and Ilor Mosiychuk, the ex-leader of the Right Sector nationalist organization Dmytro Yarosh, Interior Minister Arsen Avakov, deputy economy minister Maxim Nefyodov and many others have lent their support to the campaign.
“Every Ukrainian today must realize that all those who attack the Myrotvorets website have an anti-Ukrainian position and support cooperation with Donetsk and Luhansk terrorists,” Mosiychuk wrote on his page on Facebook.
“I support Myrotvorets. The dogs bark but the caravan keeps going. We will win together,” wrote Yarosh.
Interior Minister Avakov had one of the angriest reactions, saying that he sees all who have contacts with the Russian-backed armed groups in the Donbas and who cooperate with them in any way as immoral people.
“It’s not about the journalists and their selective honesty. When we publish offshore leaks with personal data – that’s normal. But when their phone numbers and data were leaked – that’s so wrong,” Avakov wrote on Facebook.
The minister said that he is totally against media attacks on the volunteers behind Myrotvorets, whom he said helped the Ukrainian authorities get important information about the terrorists.
“Today, faith in my friends (at the Myrotvorets website), who really are fighting, is more important to me than all the statements of those egghead liberals and latent separatists,” Avakov wrote on Facebook on May 13 in a post backing Gerashchenko’s “I support Myrotvorets” campaign.
