Savik Shuster, who revolutionized TV political talk shows in Ukraine in the last decade, is facing economic, political and even legal troubles that may force him off the air at the end of the year. Such a fate, he thinks, would fulfill one of President Petro Poroshenko’s aims.
Economically, Shuster said that he’s got less than $1 million in the bank, a payroll of 170 people and expenses of $250,000 monthly for his internet 3S.tv station. He’s sold 20,000 memberships, starting at Hr 100 (less than $4). But the club dues cover only 7 percent of the budget for Savik Shuster Studios.
“Finances are the greatest concern,” Shuster told the Kyiv Post in an interview on Oct. 21. “In the last years we have saved some money because we were working on commercial channels. We have no inflow. The advertising market is non-existent. Now we have enough money to go until the end of the year.”
He believes his economic troubles are linked to his political and legal ones.
Two other striking numbers emerged from the interview — 46 and 0; 46 is the number of times that Poroshenko appeared on his shows before taking office on June 7, 2014, while 0 is the number since becoming president.
“The president, it’s a long story, because he is a person who attended our show most of all,” Shuster said. “When we were working on Inter TV, I would get a lot of pressure not to take him” from ex-President Viktor Yanukovych’s administration.
Poroshenko’s enemy?
Shuster said Poroshenko no longer treats him as a journalist but as an enemy trying to block his re-election in 2019 in a bid to get ex-Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko elected.
Even more troubling, Shuster said, is his suspicion that Poroshenko and fellow billionaire oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky are using their loyalist in charge of the State Fiscal Service, Roman Nasirov, to harass him, potential investors, advertisers and guests with the prospect of tax inspections for associating with Shuster.
Poroshenko: ‘not true’
Poroshenko’s press service said that “these accusations are not true. President Poroshenko emphasized repeatedly that freedom of speech is one of the founding pillars of Ukrainian democracy, which was protected during the Revolution of Dignity. The president has defended and will defend freedom of speech as one of the core norms of the Constitution of Ukraine.”
Shuster’s fans see him as a brave voice of journalistic independence. The fact that he’s been kicked off almost every oligarch’s TV channel is proof to his supporters that the powerful elite are trying to censor journalists like him who give platforms to dissenting voices.
What critics say
The view of his critics can be summarized this way: Shuster’s big ego is the reason he can’t find a TV station to host him for long. He is suspected not only of tax evasion, but selling air time on his show, denting his reputation and leading to loss of viewers. He has only himself to blame. Moreover, his four-hour Friday night shows have become political mud wrestling events — with more shouting than enlightenment.
Shuster was also among a group of journalists who harmed their credibility by accepting a controlled tour of Yanukovych’s Mezhyhyria estate and appearing to play along with the official story line that the disgraced fugitive ex-president lived in a modest residence. The public now knows Mezhyhyria as an extravagantly luxurious compound.
Otar Dovzhenko, a lecturer at the School of Journalism at Ukrainian Catholic University and a former editor at Telekritika media watchdog, is also not sympathetic.
“In times of Yanukovych he was always easily making agreements with those in power. He initially worked at (billionaire Rinat) Akhmetov’s Ukraina TV channel, then he was moved to the 1st National TV channel, which was at that time controlled by (ex-Yanukovych chief of staff Serhiy) Lyovochkin. Later he was moved to Inter, owned by (billionaire Dmytro) Firtash-Lyvochkin and then again to the 1st National.”
Dovzhenko noted that Shuster “never had problems with the authorities even though it was a non-democratic and violent time (during Yanukovych’s rule from 2010-2014.). And now he says he’s being pressured. It’s just ridiculous. Of course, the authorities don’t like that Shuster gives – most likely by contract agreement — a platform for Tymoshenko and other people, whom those in power wouldn’t like to see on TV. But this is not in the style of Poroshenko and his team to shut up someone.”
Another person who is not a fan of Shuster is Eugen Fedchenko, director of the Kyiv Mohyla Academy’s School of Journalism.
“I find his show to be problematic from a journalistic point of view — quite manipulating the political agenda in Ukraine, making serious issues just a matter of infotainment, also being self-centered and very selective in the choice of those who are invited to participate,” Fedchenko said.
Shuster’s view
One by one, Shuster rebutted allegations against him as bogus.
The tax evasion charges are false, he said, but so humiliating that he thought of leaving Ukraine last summer after authorities called him in for questioning.
“I spent not a very good summer and I really wanted to abandon Ukraine, especially after the killing of Pavel Sheremet,” Shuster said, referring to the car bombing on July 20 that killed the Belarusian-born journalist for Ukrainska Pravda.
He said he never pays guests — and defies anyone to go public with such an accusation.
As far as his viewership goes, he said that he is still more popular than political talk shows on the main commercial channels.
The greatest strength of his format, Shuster said, is the real-time polling of a representative sample of 100 Ukrainians in the studio audience.
What really bothers Poroshenko and other politicians, Shuster believes, is their risng unpopularity. He thinks that’s the real reason they avoid his show.
“I just feel it with our audience,” Shuster said of Poroshenko. “They have stopped believing in him.” Consequently, Shuster said that the Poroshenko administration is “blocking people from coming to the show.”
Ilovaisk turning point
Shuster attributes the unpopularity of Poroshenko to many factors.
Only two months after taking office, Poroshenko came under criticism in August 2014, when Russian soldiers massacred hundreds of retreating Ukrainian soldiers in a devastating loss in the Donetsk Oblast city of Ilovaisk. This setback led to the first Minsk peace agreement, replaced by a second one on February 2015 after more battlefield defeats. Russia has not lived up to either peace deal in a war that has killed 10,000 people.
Shuster also said that Tymoshenko’s frequent appearances, including two shows in which she sharply criticized the government’s increase in utility costs to households, deepened the Poroshenko administration’s hostility.
“She was very critical to say the least,” he said. “They don’t have a person who is capable to oppose her — at least to formulate some credible arguments. They decided to ignore.”
Slim re-election chances
Shuster thinks Poroshenko, with approval ratings in the single digits, stands little chance of re-election in 2019 “in an honest scenario.” But he is worried about a repeat of the Russian 1996 presidential campaign, when the oligarchs and the media united behind a faltering Boris Yeltsin to defeat Communist Party candidate Gennady Zyuganov.
“That was the beginning of the end of Russian democracy. The media were all told what to do,” Shuster said. “We can have a situation like that” when Poroshenko and the rest of he oligarchs unite “to keep their property and their power.
“People have realized that basically he came to power and he is actually defending his own interests,” he said. “He’s not leading the people. They wanted a leader who would stop the war as he promised and the person who would start correcting the economy.
“There was a hope we are electing a statesman who is going to put behind his own personal interests and lead the country and that didn’t happen,” Shuster said. “All the property he hasn’t sold…a factory in Russia in conditions of war. Nobody understands it really. He’s paying taxes in the budget of the aggressor…His enterprises are winning tenders in the defense sector or somewhere else. He doesn’t have any trust among society, among the masses.”
Poroshenko is so weak that Shuster thinks that Tymoshenko would “certainly” defeat him — and even former Defense Minister Anatoliy Hrystenko, who got 5 percent of the vote in the 2014 election, could do so.
The president’s undoing is similar to that of ex-President Viktor Yushchenko, who went downhill after the public saw him as defending his private energy interests with billionaire oligarch Dmytro Firtash.
Not modern leader
Like Yushchenko, Poroshenko “is trying to project himself as a modern, European kind of a leader. He is not.”
Instead, Poroshenko has “learned from Yanukovych’s mistakes. You cannot be the only oligarch in the county, you have to share. That’s what he’s doing. He’s redividing the country. They are splitting things and he’s becoming the big player.”
Shuster said he does not have high hopes in the “Euro-optimists” in parliament such as Sergii Leshchenko, Mustafa Nayyem and Svitlana Zalishchuk.
“They’re not ready,” Shuster said. “They cannot get together on one issue. They don’t give a vision of what this country should be.”
He’s watching with interest “the volunteer battalions who fought the war and basically saved Ukraine,” Shuster said. “These guys are not going to play around…These people now are providing hope. They have 90 percent support. Even people from the older generation support them. I don’t know if they have a political future now, but they’re the people who I’m watching.”
But for now, finding money to keep his program going is his top concern. He hopes to find someone like American billionaire Michael Bloomberg to back him. If he fails, Ukraine could be seeing and hearing a lot less from Shuster soon.
