Lawmaker and ex-President Petro Poroshenko said that he bought Pryamy, a news TV channel, on Feb. 18.
However, the change is likely to be artificial.
Although the channel, launched in 2017, was officially owned by ex-lawmaker Volodymyr Makeyenko, it was alleged from the start that its real owner was Poroshenko.
The channel’s coverage has been heavily tipped towards Poroshenko and his party, European Solidarity, which has 27 seats in parliament. It promoted Poroshenko and the party during the 2019 presidential and parliamentary election campaigns. Poroshenko denied that he owned Pryamy.
Adding to the allegations was the fact that Makeyenko, the official owner, didn’t have the money to set up and sponsor the channel.
Poroshenko didn’t reveal how much he paid for Pryamy. He already officially owns one news TV channel, Channel 5.
“I paid big money… millions and millions,” he said, talking live on Pryamy.
Poroshenko said that he bought the channel to “protect” it because, he claimed, it was under threat of being sanctioned and banned by the National Security and Defense Council on the following day. A meeting of the council is indeed scheduled on Feb. 19, but its agenda is kept in secret.
Two weeks earlier, the council took an unprecedented decision to ban three TV channels that aired Kremlin’s propaganda in Ukraine.
The banned channels belonged to Taras Kozak, a pro-Russian lawmaker with the Opposition Platform party. Like in the case of Pryamy, it is widely believed that Kozak is only the nominal owner of the channels. The real owner is believed to be Viktor Medvedchuk, another pro-Russian lawmaker and a close friend of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Both Kozak and Medvedchuk deny it.
It isn’t clear how Poroshenko becoming the official owner of Pryamy can save the channel from sanctions. The three pro-Kremlin channels belonged to a lawmaker, too, which didn’t stop the council from banning them and putting personal sanctions on the owner.
The official reason for shutting down the pro-Kremlin channels was that they were, according to the council, funded by the money Kozak made by trading with the Russia-occupied territories of eastern Ukraine — which is qualified as financing terrorism.
