Korniyets seems to feel at ease despite several corruption investigations against him and massive evidence of an extremely wealthy lifestyle contrasting with an extremely modest salary. The cases against him are collapsing due to the protection of corrupt officials and persecution of corruption fighters in the Prosecutor General’s Office.
Gnap, on the other hand, is a target of an unprecedented witch hunt launched by President Petro Poroshenko’s supporters, along with his fellow Hromadske television journalist Anna Babinets. Accusations of violating journalistic ethics against the Hromadske journalists have been blown out of proportion and are absurd.
For Korniyets, it is now a very convenient and opportune time to attack Gnap.
This contrast is a mockery of justice that could never have happened in any country with the rule of law and properly functioning institutions.
Borrowing Putin’s propaganda tools
Gnap and Babinets broadcast a show on April 3 about Poroshenko’s registration of an offshore firm in the British Virgin Islands. The report is part of the Panama Papers, a massive leak of documents from Panama’s Mossack Fonseca consulting firm.
So far, the president’s representatives have refused to provide a coherent explanation for the numerous discrepancies in their claims on the offshore firm and the creation of a blind trust by Poroshenko.
They have been trapped in a web of conflicting reports and contradictions in their confusing statements.
Instead of providing moral and legal justifications for Poroshenko’s offshore company, his proponents have focused their energy into attacking the investigative journalists.
Gnap and Babinets have been criticized for making the story too emotional by saying that Poroshenko created the company when hundreds of Ukrainian troops were massacred by the Russian army in the city of Ilovaisk in Donetsk Oblast in August 2014.
Nobody has been able to claim, however, that they got any of the facts wrong.
Poroshenko’s supporters argue that drawing the Ilovaisk parallel was manipulative.
Yet diverting attention from Poroshenko’s arguably unethical and likely illegal behavior to the quality and ethics of journalism is a much bigger manipulation.
Poroshenko failed to declare the offshore firm, which is a violation of the law, and stands accused of using it for future tax optimization or evasion. He denies the claims.
This trick is taken directly from the playbook of Russian dictator Vladimir Putin’s propagandists.
To counter massive evidence of Putin’s corruption, human rights violations and usurpation of power, they have channeled the discussion into an entirely different realm. Instead of discussing Putin’s crimes, they have accused Russia’s opposition of immorality and being funded by the West. A classic example is the Pussy Riot punk band, whose two members were jailed by the Kremlin for dancing in a church in 2012.
Bohdan Miroshnikov, a pro-Poroshenko blogger, wrote on Facebook on April 6 that a Dutch referendum on an association deal between Ukraine and the European Union had been lost by Ukraine due to the efforts of “anti-corruption scum who sell their homeland” in a reference to the Hromadske journalists and anti-corruption activists.
He completed his post by urging the nation to unite behind the president.
Miroshnikov’s overtones are almost identical to those of both paid and sincere Putinist trolls who demonize Russia’s opposition and extol their beloved Fuehrer.
The behavior of Poroshenko and his supporters increasingly resembles the Kremlin’s paranoid and absurd mindset.
Earlier this month Poroshenko accused the New York Times of waging a “hybrid war” against Ukraine after the newspaper published an editorial about the country’s pervasive corruption.
Criminal investigations against reformers and critical activists launched by Poroshenko’s loyal prosecutors also resemble the Kremlin’s policy of all-out repression.
Troll army
The most striking thing is the effectiveness of Poroshenko’s propaganda. All of a sudden, thousands of people who had never given a damn about journalistic standards in their lives simultaneously started caring about them so much that some of them called for lynching and ostracizing the Hromadske journalists on very flimsy grounds.
Though many of them were surely sincere in their emotions, it is highly likely that the attack on Hromadske was orchestrated by an army of Internet bots and trolls, colloquially known in Ukrainian as “porokhoboty” (from “Porokh”, Poroshenko’s nickname, and “bots”).
This technique was also directly borrowed from the Kremlin’s arsenal. Putin’s propagandists are routinely using bots and trolls to attack his enemies and spread the most virulent lies and distortions.
In January 2015 Yury Stets, the head of Ukraine’s notorious Ministry of Information Policy (nicknamed the Ministry of Propaganda or Ministry of Truth – a reference to George Orwell’s novel 1984), said that he would create an “Internet army” to protect Ukraine’s information space.
Earlier this month
Stets justified his criticism of Hromadske by citing “media experts” who
accused it of manipulation – an apparent reference to Ukraine’s International
Renaissance Foundation. He said the Panama Papers leak was a “special operation”
against Ukraine.
Instead of attacking Hromadske, the public should discuss whether Stets violated Ukrainian law by creating his Internet army and whether financing and organizing Internet bots to defend one politician’s private interests is acceptable.
Though Poroshenko’s fans have dominated the agenda online, the offline situation seems to be different, with the president’s approval ratings plummeting to all-time lows.
A divided nation
The fact that so many Ukrainians actually took the bait of Poroshenko’s propagandists is alarming.
The offshore scandal has exposed a split in the Ukrainian nation that goes far beyond and much deeper than the divide between Russian and Ukrainian speakers or even pro-Ukrainian and pro-Russian people.
On one side of the divide are those who crave stability and want to keep their good old ways – business as usual. They are afraid of the uncertainty that any revolutionary changes or radical reforms entail. That is why some of them cling to the illusion that an authoritarian government with a strong leader would give them stability. In that paradigm, whoever “rocks the boat” is a traitor to the nation.
Despite parading with Ukrainian or EU flags and sporting traditional Ukrainian clothing, adherents of this ideology have much more in common with Russia than with Europe.
On the other side are reformers and revolutionaries who were behind the 2013-2014 EuroMaidan Revolution and are trying to bring its ideals to life. They have a highly critical and cautious attitude towards any government and seek to control its every step. These people seek a true, fundamental revolution that will transform Ukraine from a third-world flawed democracy into a genuinely European nation with the rule of law and free markets.
Both the offshore scandal and the crackdown on reformers like ex-deputy prosecutor generals Vitaly Kasko and Davit Sakvaridze are part of this struggle between the old and new Ukraine.
Hopefully, more and more Ukrainians will realize that radical change is not only necessary but also inevitable.
Kyiv Post staff writer Oleg Sukhov can be reached at [email protected]
