I have been following relations between ex-President Petro Poroshenko and pro-Kremlin politician Viktor Medvedchuk for years. But even I was struck by the details I was able to obtain from high-ranking sources about how in the last year of Poroshenko’s five-year rule, which ended in 2019, Medvedchuk’s TV channels were saved from closure.
Today, Poroshenko is trying to look like the greatest advocate of purity of the information space from Russian propaganda.
After President Volodymyr Zelensky on Feb. 2 shut down three Ukrainian Russian-propaganda TV channels associated with Medvedchuk, Poroshenko had to explain why he didn’t do it when he was president.
Poroshenko said that, since the opportunity to shut the channels presented itself less than a year before the 2019 presidential election that he lost by a landslide, he couldn’t proceed with it because it would have looked like censorship against political opponents.
As if they really were opponents.
In recent days, to restore his fading veneer of being a fighter against Russian propaganda, he proposed a draft law on criminal liability for collaborationism, including the spread of propaganda. The right-wing radical National Corps, with which Poroshenko now works in the same niche, came up with a similar idea.
What Poroshenko doesn’t want us to remember is that he hasn’t always been so ardently opposed to Russian propaganda.
If it wasn’t for Poroshenko, Medvedchuk’s propaganda-filled TV channels could have been silenced almost three years ago.
Instead, Poroshenko’s direct intervention saved Medvedchuk’s channels from sanctions that were to be imposed on them in 2018. This story is shrouded in political fog, as it exposes all its participants in a bad light.
And they would rather forget about it.
Poroshenko loves TV
We must start with the fact that Poroshenko has a soft spot for TV channels. Owning media reassured him, giving him a guaranteed platform for his PR and the ability to deter attacks against him. Initially, Poroshenko owned only Channel 5. It was launched before the Orange Revolution, which brought Viktor Yushchenko to power in 2004, by merging two regional broadcasters under the Channel 5 logo.
Poroshenko’s understanding of the role of his private media is well illustrated by a recording of an intercepted telephone conversation that took place in 2003 after then-opposition candidate Yushchenko traveled to the lair of his opponent, Viktor Yanukovych in Donetsk, and Poroshenko, a part of Yushchenko’s campaign, traveled with him. Poroshenko cursed his subordinate TV manager, hysterically screaming because he was not shown enough on Channel 5 while he was “crawling on the barricades.”
Poroshenko relied exclusively on TV news channels. He understood that any television in Ukraine was unprofitable. But news TV channels with a financial deficit could at least create some political profit. Therefore, running for president, Poroshenko announced his refusal to sell his TV channel. And when he became president, he planned to expand his television pool. His first possession was the Tonis TV channel, which previously belonged to Yanukovych’s elder son Oleksandr, known by the nickname “Sasha the Dentist.”
Instead of being confiscated by the state as an asset of the fugitive president’s family, the TV channel changed hands imperceptibly. Formally, the new owner was a former head of the Kyiv administration, Volodymyr Makeyenko, who ran the city in the last weeks of Yanukovych’s rule. He and Poroshenko had known each other for more than 20 years.
The Tonis channel was renamed the Pryamy (Direct) channel and turned into a mouthpiece in support of then-President Poroshenko. Millions of dollars of unknown origin were poured into it, an office was set up in one of the most expensive business centers in Ukraine, Parus, and Russian national Alexei Semenov became its general producer.
Another news channel that Poroshenko wanted to acquire was Channel 112, a news channel that was also spearheaded by Semenov. This media belonged to ex-Interior Minister Vitaliy Zakharchenko from Yanukovych’s entourage, who fled Ukraine with him and tried to sell the TV channel to various businessmen from Poroshenko’s circle.
Several people negotiated to buy Channel 112 on behalf of Poroshenko. Among them were the exiled lawmaker Oleksandr Onyshchenko, who is wanted as a suspect in an embezzlement case in Ukraine; Viktor Polishchuk, the owner of the bankrupt Mykhailivsky Bank; and investment banker Makar Pasenyuk, founding partner of Investment Capital Ukraine (ICU), the company that could have acted as a mediator on behalf of Poroshenko in Rotterdam+ gas corruption scheme that cost Ukrainian taxpayers at least $1.4 billion.
But only Medvedchuk managed to buy the channel in 2018. He had equally good relations with both Poroshenko and Russian President Vladimir Putin, under whose protection Zakharchenko is hiding in Russia, managed to buy the channel. The fugitive minister was employed by the Russian authorities in the state corporation Rostech.
Medvedchuk didn’t buy Channel 112 himself — his ally Taras Kozak is the official owner. Soon after Channel 112, Kozak bought NewsOne. In 2019, he added ZIK. There are signs that Medvedchuk controlled the channels 112 and NewsOne even before Kozak purchased them.
The acquisition of channels had an immediate impact on their program policies. They introduced blacklists of guests, taboo topics and started spreading fake narratives in line with Russian propaganda.
Perverse chronology
Oct. 4, 2018, was to become a black day for Channel 112 and NewsOne. The Ukrainian parliament voted to impose sanctions on them. But Poroshenko didn’t enforce the decision.
Further developments, that have been unknown until now, show that Poroshenko didn’t simply ignore this vote but used it to obtain personal benefits from Medvedchuk’s TV channels during the election.
Parliament’s resolution had to be considered by the National Security and Defense Council, the body that imposes sanctions, which then have to be enforced by the president.
Although it takes 20 minutes by car to get from parliament to the council’s headquarters, parliament’s resolution on the two TV channels wasn’t delivered to the council for three weeks. It reached the Security Council only on Oct. 26, 2018. The text was sent without a cover letter from the speaker, which was unusual.
Then, the council forgot about the document for two months. Finally, during the Dec. 26, 2018 meeting, when various sanctions were considered, the members of the Security Council remembered about the document.
But then another miracle happened: The council’s draft decision on sanctions mentioned other people and companies, but the two TV channels associated with Medvedchuk were missing.
The situation turned out to be even more interesting when I obtained and read the transcript of the Security Council meeting from that day. Although the draft decision did not mention sanctions against Medvedchuk’s channels, this topic was indeed discussed. After all, 2.5 months have passed since the parliamentary vote, and there has been no reaction.
But when the issue was raised at the meeting, then-President Poroshenko, who chaired the council, simply moved on to another topic.
To do so, Poroshenko said that he instructed the Security Service of Ukraine to “finalize” the sanctions “from the legal point of view.”
No one was in a hurry. Poroshenko said that SBU had one week to finalize the sanctions. Instead, more than a month after the meeting, on Jan. 31, 2019, a draft decision of the council, amended with SBU’s proposals, landed on Poroshenko’s desk. But he never enforced it.
In mid-March, Deputy Secretary of the Security Council Oleksandr Lytvynenko notified his boss, Secretary of the Council Oleksandr Turchynov that the decision remains unenforced.
Then, the council held another vote — a written one — that sanctioned a number of entities. This decision was enforced by Poroshenko immediately.
Why was he ignoring one decision on sanctions for 1.5 months, but signed its twin immediately?
The answer is easy: The second decision was missing the TV channels associated with Medvedchuk — the channels that parliament wanted to be sanctioned for airing Russian propaganda.
After dragging their feet for nearly five months, the council and Poroshenko finally ignored the October resolution of parliament altogether. That’s how much Poroshenko “wanted” to fight Russian propaganda.
If Poroshenko wanted to stop Russian propaganda, he had even easier ways to do it. He didn’t even need a parliament vote.
A decree by the Security Service of Ukraine, the law enforcement agency best known as the SBU, would have been enough to ban the pro-Russian channels. The SBU seemed ready to issue it. During my time as a lawmaker, I obtained a document, dated September 2018, in which the SBU accuses the Channel 112 “of applying Russia’s hybrid war technology against Ukraine.”
But parliament’s vote on Medvedchuk’s channels wasn’t useless. Poroshenko used it as leverage to get the channels to cooperate with him.
During the 2019 presidential election campaign, the pro-Kremlin channels that Poroshenko saved from shutting down, essentially worked for him, covering his campaign events and promoting his candidacy along with his own Channel 5 and Pryamy, which he controls indirectly.
Fake warrior
According to opinion polls, the idea of shutting down Medvdechuk’s channels is supported by the majority of those Ukrainians who know about this development. Now Poroshenko, who has come under fire from critics for his own history with the tainted channels, is trying to fend off accusations of playing along with Medvedchuk by saying he didn’t want to ban the media before the presidential election so as not to be accused of being undemocratic.
This argument is untrue, because even before the official start of the election campaign, in December 2018, Poroshenko, presiding over the Security Council, had an opportunity to vote on sanctioning these TV channels. Instead, he postponed the decision “for a week” and then buried it.
Oleksandr Turchynov, who was secretary of the Security Council during Poroshenko’s rule, is also trying to justify himself. He accuses Zelensky of procrastinating on the issue since he only banned the channels 1.5 years into his presidency.
But even before Zelensky, Poroshenko and Turchynov themselves could impose sanctions against these channels but didn’t do it. They could have done it in April or May 2019, after Poroshenko’s defeat in the presidential election, when the election was over, but before Zelensky’s inauguration. During this time, Poroshenko signed dozens of decrees, handing out awards and positions, but didn’t find time to finalize the issue of Medvedchuk’s channels.
In other words, Poroshenko personally prevented imposing sanctions on Medvedchuk’s channels.
And in April 2019, following Poroshenko’s defeat in the presidential election, he gave Oleksiy Semenov, the TV manager who ran both Medvedchuk’s channels and Pryamy, Ukrainian citizenship. A few weeks later, Semenov headed the entire Medvedchuk media holding.
Soon, the holding grew and was uniting three channels — 112, NewsOne, and ZIK. All three have been deploying the most disgusting propaganda technologies, airing lies and instilling hatred to-wards the Ukrainian state.
And part of the responsibility for this is with Poroshenko, the fifth president of Ukraine. While imitating a fight against mouthpieces of Russian propaganda, he protected and enabled them in reality.
Sergii Leshchenko is a Kyiv Post columnist, investigative journalist, and former member of Ukraine’s parliament.
