If the oligarch with the most TV stations wins, billionaire Victor Pinchuk is Ukraine’s champion. He has three channels – ICTV, STB and Novy Kanal – as part of his StarLightMedia holding.
“Owning television gives you access to the highest ranks of oligarchic influence in Ukraine,” said Balazh Jarabik, a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
StarLightMedia is owned by Pinchuk and his wife, Elena Pinchuk, the daughter of former President Leonid Kuchma.
The media holding is among the assets that Pinchuk acquired while his father-in-law served as Ukraine’s second president from 1994 through 2005.
Besides ICTV, STB and Novy Kanal, the holding includes music stations M1, M2, and QTV.
All in all, 22 percent of Ukraine’s television audience tunes into one of Pinchuk’s stations, according to recent research by the Institute of Mass Information and Reporters Without Borders.
This gives him more viewers than fellow billionaire oligarchs Dmytro Firtash with his Inter Media group, Ihor Kolomoisky with 1+1 media and Rinat Akhmetov, who controls the Media Group Ukraine.
Pinchuk bought ICTV, one of the first private Ukrainian TV stations, in 2000 from then gas magnate and pro-government lawmaker Igor Bakai.
In the early 2000s, he purchased STB from Russia’s Lukoil oil group, and Novy Kanal from Moscow-based Alfa Group.
Observers say he first exploited the power of nationwide television in the 2002 parliamentary campaign, promoting Winter Crop Generation, an unsuccessful new political formation that was seen as a spoiler party.
“The representatives of Winter Crop Generation were seated along with political heavyweights on TV talk shows, which portrayed them as those that had some significance,” recalled political analyst Kostiantyn Bondarenko.
Bondarenko said that ownership of a TV channel became a typical attribute of any Ukrainian oligarch, but Pinchuk never lost interest in television. He invested millions of dollars in the development of his then-small TV channels to bring them to competitive positions.
To launch entertainment and cartoon channel QTV in 2008 alone, he spent some $5 million, said Olga Vaganova, a StarLightMedia spokeswoman.
The rewards are not financial. Vaganova said Pinchuk’s channels, just like all Ukrainian TV channels, are unprofitable.
Instead, the benefits include political leverage and power, political analysts and insiders claim.
When Viktor Yushchenko replaced Kuchma after the 2004 Orange Revolution, Pinchuk lost his powerful patron.
But the influence on public opinion through television helped to keep him afloat and thwart attacks by rivals that rose above him in the ranks of political power.
Pinchuk, analysts say, used all the might of the ICTV, STB and Novy Kanal channels to criticize and – ultimately torpedo – plans by then-Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko to cancel questionable privatization tenders. This helped Pinchuk keep control of the prized and profitable Nikopol Ferroalloy Plant.
ICTV, for example, showed a TV documentary questioning the economic benefit of the re-privatization of the plant. All three channels heavily covered protest rallies against re-nationalization of the factory.
Eventually, Yushchenko fired Tymoshenko, defusing the imminent threat to Pinchuk’s business interests.
When prosecutors under President Viktor Yanukovych allowed a criminal investigation into the alleged involvement of Kuchma in the Sept. 16, 2000, kidnapping and murder of journalist Georgiy Gongadze, news coverage blasted to viewers on Pinchuk’s channels countered by discrediting the investigation, challenging the evidence and polishing Kuchma’s image.
“He didn’t just use them. It was one of the keynotes,” said Otar Dovzhenko, a lecturer at the School of Journalism at Ukrainian Catholic University and a former editor of the Telekritika media watchdog.
Dovzhenko said that, when Kuchma turned 70 in 2008, ICTV had a special edition on its main Sunday news show, which consisted of an interview with Kuchma. Publicity stunts such as events when Kuchma made a public appearance giving lectures or presenting grants for students always received coverage on Pinchuk’s channels.
In January 2013, Pinchuk’s channels stood out by not showing the final courtroom speech of former police Gen. Oleksiy Pukach, who was sentenced to life in prison for Gongadze’s murder.
In the dramatic scene, Pukach claimed that he would agree with the verdict only when Kuchma and his former chief of staff Volodymyr Lytvyn joined him in the dock.
Although it was assumed by many for years that Pinchuk himself held a controlling stake in the channels, legislation adopted in 2015 aimed at bringing transparency to media ownership forced him to reveal that his wife Elena owned a 50 percent interest in all of his media assets.
Despite extensively promoting Kuchma and Pinchuk’s charity events, his channels were trying not to take any political side. Instead, they covered any political party or politician who was ready to pay, Dovzhenko said. He said: “ICTV has always been a supermarket of ‘jeansa,’” – the slang term for paid-for PR or advertorials disguised as news.
During the parliament campaign in 2014, ICTV became No. 3 in terms of the number of its news items that appeared to be “jinsa,” after the Inter and Ukraina TV channels, a media monitoring by Telekritika conducted in September-October 2014 showed.
ICTV spokeswoman Tetiana Veremchuk didn’t immediately comment on the issue.
Pinchuk’s channels also took a neutral side during the EuroMaidan Revolution that ousted President Viktor Yanukovych on Feb. 22, 2014. Activists criticized the stations for their neutrality.
“Pinchuk’s channels show comedies, and Inter (shows) movies. No need for nicely written statements, guys. Dead bodies and seas of blood are on your conscience,” wrote now-lawmaker Viktoria Syumar, the former executive director at Institute of Mass Information, on her Facebook page on Feb. 19, 2014. The comment came the day after the first mass shootings of demonstrators.
At the last parliament elections of 2014, Pinchuk’s channels promoted independent lawmakers close to the oligarch. Thanks to extensive TV coverage on ICTV, Pinchuk’s former manager, Yakiv Bezbakh, once again secured a parliament seat, Dovzhenko said.
Pinchuk’s channels don’t seem to challenge or strongly praise any of Ukraine’s post-Kuchma presidents, including current leader Petro Poroshenko.
TV monitoring by Vox Ukraine, published on Sept. 7, revealed that the prime time Sunday TV shows of Pinchuk’s ICTV had no more than 2 percent negative mentions of Poroshenko. This same pattern is also seen on the channels controlled by Firtash, Kolomoisky and Akhmetov.
