On April 25, Ukrainian military blogger Dmitry Tymchuk announced to journalists at the Ukrainian Crisis Media Center that a helicopter had been shot down at the Kramatorsk airbase in northern Donetsk Oblast. No one was injured, reported Tymchuk, declining to identify his source.
Later it
emerged that the former lieutenant colonel’s mystery source got the details
wrong: hours after the helicopter was reportedly shot down, Vasil Krutov, the
head of the anti-terrorism unit of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU),
announced that a pro-Russian sniper shot the helicopter’s fuel tank causing it
to explode, seriously wounding the pilot. Still, Tymchuk reported the incident
before journalists were able to get to the scene.
That
Tymchuk was at the podium speaking to journalists is something of a wonder: a
career military officer, Tymchuk has emerged from the Ukrainian blogosphere as
one of the most important and popular sources of information about the ongoing, Russian-backed separatist
crisis in Ukraine.
Since former President Viktor Yanukovych’s
flight to Russia at the end of February, Tymchuk has been increasingly revered
as an authority on Ukrainian military intelligence. Followed by more than
100,000 users, his Facebook page is part-news, part-analysis, part-opinion, and
is increasingly being taken as gospel.
So who is Tymchuk?
Tymchuk
was born in 1972 in Russia’s Chita, a city east of Lake Baikal and deep in the
heart of Siberia. When he was seven, his family left the Soviet Union when his
father, a Soviet military officer, was assigned to East Germany. Tymchuk
returned to Ukraine for secondary school and in 1995, graduated from the Lviv
Higher Military School as a Lieutenant with a degree in war journalism. After
graduating, he served in an anti-aircraft unit of the Ukrainian army.
In 1998,
Tymchuk began serving in Kyiv as a commander in the National Guard, a position
he held until former President Leonid Kuchma controversially disbanded the unit
in 2000. Tymchuk then began working in Ukraine’s Defense Ministry but also had
“official assignments” in Iraq,
Kosovo and Lebanon. He has since retired and, having served for 20
years, Tymchuk now receives a military pension.
In
September 2008, in response to Russia’s invasion of Georgia, Tymchuk and a
group of other military analysts formed the Center for Military and Political
Research in Kyiv to study Ukraine’s defense and security. The center currently
consists of eight researchers, although they do not have a website, and do not
appear to have published anything.
Until
March of this year, Tymchuk and his group of analysts worked in obscurity.
Shortly after Yanukovych’s fall from power at the end of February, however,
Tymchuk’s Facebook posts started getting noticed.
In March, Tymchuk and other military
analysts formed the Information Resistance group to counter Russian propaganda.
The group gathers and distributes information about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which is then published on Tymchuk’s Facebook page and on the group’s
website, http://sprotyv.info. Contrary
to popular belief, Tymchuk’s Information Resistance is not related to the
website inforesist.org.
He writes about Ukraine’s and Russia’s
military capabilities, troop movements, Kremlin propaganda, and speculates
about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s ambitions in Ukraine.
Tymchuk
has become an important part of Ukraine’s information war with the Kremlin,
though he insists his group is only “trying to speak the truth…Russia is the
aggressor and therefore has to hide its actions…it is much easier for us.”
“We don’t
get paid for our patriotism,” Tymchuk told the Kyiv Post. “For us, our meager
pensions are enough to support our work…When we need money, we find it in our
own pockets.”
If the
group’s activities extend further, however, Tymchuk isn’t sure how the
organizers will finance them. He insists, however, that he is “opposed to
collecting money from [ordinary] people.”
He says
that Information Resistance composes a wide network of analysts and sources
inside and outside the Ukrainian government. When the Kyiv Post asked Tymchuk
to elaborate on his sources, Tymchuk declined, saying only “we verify our
sources with other, parallel sources.”
At the
April 25 press conference, when pressed by journalists, Tymchuk explained that
revealing his sources would undermine his information network: “Anonymity is
the elephant on which our system is based and it is working because there is
trust,” said Tymchuk.
This
anonymity has occasionally yielded prophecy. During the Russian invasion of
Georgia in 2008, Tymchuk anticipated that Ukraine might one day have to defend
itself against Russian aggression.
At times, Tymchuk’s sources seem to contradict more established ones. In the April 25 press conference, Tymchuk reported that there were 50,000 Russian troops stationed along the Russian border. At the same time, NATO reported that only 40,000 troops were positioned near the Ukrainian border.
At other
times, like when the helicopter exploded in Kramatorsk, Tymchuk’s sources have
fed him inaccurate information, leading many to believe he is little more than
a blogger who plays loose with the facts.
On March 18,
the same day that a Ukrainian soldier was killed while defending a military
base in Simferopol, Tymchuk wrote on his Facebook page that pro-Russian forces
were storming a dormitory where the wives and children of Ukrainian soldiers
lived. The Kyiv Post’s reporters arrived at the dormitory to find that no such attack
had occurred.
His
refusal to reveal sources leads some to believe that he knows little more than
journalists with strong ties to the government. Despite his inaccuracies and
inconsistencies, Tymchuk is clearly an important
and popular source of information about military and law enforcement matters. In
addition to six-digit followers on Facebook, he is increasingly consulted as an
expert on the Ukrainian military’s role in the ongoing crisis.
Kyiv Post
staff writer Isaac Webb can be reached at [email protected] and on
Twitter at @IsaacDWebb
