The paradox of censorship and pressure on journalists in the Ukrainian media is probably hard to understand for colleagues, politicians and ordinary citizens of democratic countries – from the US, Europe to New Zealand. How, despite two revolutions and a bloody war that has been going on for 9 years, taxpayers pay for the work of local government officials (for which they also pay their salaries) to be shown exclusively in a positive light by TV channels and other media.
What’s even worse is that thanks to the censorship that accompanies such coverage, taxpayers pay to ensure that they never learn the truth about the content and results of the activities of officials and deputies. The city of Dnipro is a prime example.
Dnipro’s state-funded media diligently avoid the topic of corruption and criminal proceedings against officials and do not pay attention to any events or facts that are important to the citizens but that may negatively affect the image of the mayor and his entourage as “successful and honest businessmen, patriots of Ukraine.”
As a result, instead of being the “watchdogs of democracy,” contributing to the purification of society and the effectiveness of the government, such media do the opposite.
The city, country, and society lose time for development, money (including financial assistance from partner countries), and the lives of the military at the front, and ultimately degrade, becoming victims of aggressive neighbors.
As we wrote earlier, on July 27 this year, the municipal enterprise “Organizational and Analytical Service” of the Dnipro City Council (hereinafter – the ME) lost another trial in the Third Administrative Court of Appeal.
According to the court’s ruling, individual entrepreneur Oleksiy Oleynikov must return UAH 640,034.82 to the ME, and the ME must return UAH 640,034.82 to the Dnipro budget, which at the beginning of the full-scale invasion he spent (according to documents) on advertising the Dnipro City Council, its departments and officials – according to the contract with the “Organizational and Analytical Service”, Oleynikov was to place “advertising and information stories within the framework of regional news” and “commercials” on the 11th, 34th TV channels and the “Open” TV channel.
According to Article 9 of the Law of Ukraine “On Advertising”, “information, author’s or editorial material that draws attention to a particular person or product and that forms or maintains the awareness and interest of viewers (listeners, readers) in relation to these persons or products is advertising and should be placed under the heading “Advertising” or “On the rights of advertising”.
We reviewed all the stories from March to April 2022 that aired on TV Channels 34, 11, and “Open” that mentioned the mayor of Dnipro, officials, deputies of the Dnipro City Council, utilities, the chairman of the Public Council at the City Council, Hennadii Korban, etc. No stories were found under the heading “Advertising” or “On the rights of advertising”.
However, both a year and a half ago and now, Dnipro’s TV channels, which are constantly receiving funding from the city budget, cover the activities of the city authorities exclusively from a positive perspective, devoting a significant part of their airtime to the “good deeds” of the mayor and his entourage, which are carried out in the performance of their official duties at the expense of taxpayers’ money.
Criminal silence
One of the most recent egregious cases that shows the level of demoralization and censorship in the media, which is funded by the Dnipro budget, is the concealment of the tragedy at the Rudnev Center for Mother and Child, a city multidisciplinary hospital (subordinated to the Department of Public Health of the Dnipro City Council).
An 11-year-old child and a soldier from the 25th Air Assault Brigade died after the surgeries, while five children and five adults sustained severe injuries and were urgently transferred to the regional children’s hospital and Mechnikov regional hospital.
On August 12, when this case became known from social media, the media of the family of deputies from Dnipro Mayor Borys Filatov’s party “Propozytsiya” Oleksiy Bezuhlyi and Ihor Lytvynov (“Nashe Misto”, “Dnipro Operatyvnyi”, “Dniprovska Panorama”, “Dnipro Chas”, “Gorsovet”, etc.), the “Tsentr” newspaper of Mykola Feldman, a member of the “Propozytsiya” party and business partner of the chairman of the public council at the city council of Hennadiy Korban, did not report this tragedy at all.
The online media outlets Vgorode and Dnipro Vechernyi did not report that the child had died and did not specify the name of the hospital (although the official statement of the Ministry of Health had already been published at the time, which named the hospital).
Others, such as “Obozrevatel”, RBC, “Open” Channel 11, etc., reported the incident but did not mention the name of the hospital.
Local media, which receive funding from the Dnipro budget, also ignored the information of the prosecutor’s office about the delivery of the third notice of suspicion of committing a crime to the deputy mayor of Dnipro, director of the Department of Humanitarian Policy Ksenia Sushko.
The department, headed by Ms. Sushko, is responsible for all secondary schools in the city. When in early September, parents of schoolchildren began to complain on social media about the quality of the meals provided by Olympius Consult LLC, the municipal TV channel DniproTV (Dnipro City Television Studio of the Dnipro City Council) found nothing better than to invite the company’s director Mykhailo Toroshchyn to the morning show every day and praise the quality of the meals.
In the morning, the hosts, along with Toroshchyn, tried the dishes and called them very healthy and tasty, and in the evening, parents posted on social media their children’s complaints and photos of lunch boxes with dishes thrown away.
In early October, the complaints allegedly stopped (although Olena Zeeva, a member of the Dnipro Regional Council, continues to draw attention to the quality of the meals on social media), but Mr. Toroshchyn did not stop appearing on DniproTV. Dnipro TV has never invited parents whose children complained about the quality of the food, MPs, or civic activists who have a different position on the quality of the food than the hosts and the supplier company to appear on the air with Mr. Toroshchyn.
However, even this almost sycophantic stance of Dnipro TV employees towards officials and companies with which they cooperate ceased to satisfy the mayor of Dnipro and his entourage in early October. Sources at the TV channel reported that Svitlana Kryukova, the head of the banned online publication Strana.ua, visited the channel’s office to conduct a training session for employees and “introduce new standards of work at the TV channel.”
Ms. Kriukova is a person close to the head of the public council at the Dnipro City Council, Hennadii Korban, who was called the “de facto head of the city” before he lost his Ukrainian citizenship. Kryukova actively defended Korban after the President issued a decree terminating his citizenship, and their good relationship is evidenced by Ms. Kryukova’s posts and comments on social media.
Sources said that after Svitlana Kryukova’s visit, some of the staff was dissatisfied, and three people started looking for new jobs. Two of them negotiated for employment at another TV channel, and one of them was even hired there immediately. However, according to sources, they were promised to be left without bonuses for this “demarche”.
We were unable to reach the head of DniproTV, Oleksandr Linkevych, as he did not pick up the phone for several days in a row. Later, in response to an information request, he assured us that the editorial policy on the TV channel is implemented in accordance with the Editorial Charter, no one tells journalists how to cover certain events, and the mayor, deputies or officials of the Dnipro City Council do not coordinate or approve their stories.
We also talked to Natalia Vlasova, whom sources call the de facto head of the TV channel (however, after Ms. Kryukova’s visit, according to sources, her influence began to decrease significantly) – Oleksandr Linkevych was her subordinate when she worked at Channel 34 in Dnipro.
“I don’t know. I definitely don’t have any such information. Journalists leave all TV channels from time to time. We are constantly looking for new journalists, and this is a normal process. And we have a lot of work to do. We work at a very intense pace, so yes, not everyone can withstand such a load. Sometimes we invite people, and they don’t want to work because they know that we have a very tight schedule. It differs from the schedules of other TV channels. Well, it’s a normal process. Some people leave us because they want to work in Kyiv on some other projects, and that’s normal,” – Vlasova said.
According to her and her subordinates who joined the conversation, “we don’t have time for Zoom meetings, let alone for any instructions. In order to receive instructions, we have the editor-in-chief of our TV channel and other editors who are responsible for all this.”
As we have learned, shortly before Ms. Kryukova’s visit, Yevhenia Gamza was appointed editor-in-chief of DniproTV.
Ms. Gamza, along with Mykola Feldman, co-founded the Kremenchuk Public Television NGO. At the end of last year, Hromadske’s editorial board reported that Central Public Television (legal name – Kremenchuk Public Television NGO) illegally used trademarks registered and owned by Hromadske on its YouTube channel and Facebook page. Yevheniia Hamza was also the editor-in-chief of the Kremenchuk City Council’s municipal newspaper, Visnyk Kremenchuk (before her, the newspaper was headed by Mykola Feldman). After denationalization in 2019, the printed version of the newspaper stopped being published, and now its website has been removed from the network. News signed by Yevheniya Gamza can still be seen on the website of Mykola Feldman’s Center TV and Radio Company.
Despite the fact that the Center received a broadcasting license from the National Council of Television and Radio Broadcasting, we did not find its channel on the cable networks of Dnipro, while the Center constantly receives budgetary funds for placing PR materials about the mayor of Dnipro, deputies and officials of the Dnipro City Council.
According to media reports, Feldman, together with Hennadiy Korban, co-founded the National Brokerage House LLC in Kremenchuk and is the head of the Poltava regional organization of the Propozytsiya party (registered in an apartment he owns), as well as a number of companies in Kremenchuk and Kyiv, including those related to land registration.
According to our sources, both at Dnipro TV and in the Dnipro City Council, Yevheniya Gamza and Svitlana Kryukova “will work in sync,” and more experts and analysts who were regulars on Viktor Medvedchuk’s TV channels “may appear on Dnipro TV.”
We contacted Svitlana Kryukova for a comment on the above information – she answered the phone call saying that she could not talk and asked us to send the question to the messenger. As of the date of publication of this material, she had not sent a response to the editorial office.
Is it possible to stop censorship and pressure on journalists in regional media?
As a result of our previous materials about “jeansing” the media in Dnipro for budget money and censorship, almost all of the individual entrepreneurs we wrote about have disappeared from bidding for PR services for the city government; the courts have made a number of decisions to return the funds spent on the “jeans” to the Dnipro budget, and the mother of Ihor Litvinov, a member of the Dnipro District Council from the “Propozytsiya” party, who, together with his matchmaker Oleksii Bezuhlyi, controls a number of websites that constantly receive funding from the Dnipro budget, sold a three-room apartment. When the NACP opens access to the declarations, it will be interesting to see how much the above-mentioned individuals became richer or poorer in 2021-2023.
Also, based on the information provided by journalists about the fraudulent use of budget funds by the Organizational and Analytical Service of the City Council, Dnipro investigators launched a pre-trial investigation:
Meanwhile, it should be noted that journalists, especially television journalists, who want to work in accordance with journalistic standards, have virtually no place to work in Dnipro. The 11th TV channel of Dnipro, owned by the family of billionaire Victor Pinchuk, although considered “less toxic” than Dnipro TV, also has problems with adherence to journalistic standards due to the constant receipt of funds from the Dnipro budget.
The situation is further complicated by the fact that Pinchuk’s daughter Maria is a member of the public council at the Dnipro City Council, which, despite the loss of citizenship and more than a year’s absence from Ukraine, is headed by… Hennadiy Korban.
Victor Pinchuk’s family has businesses and real estate in Dnipro, so it seems that he will make deals with anyone who is in charge of the city.
Mykhailo Koshlyak, a deputy of the Dnipro Regional Council from the OPFL, who is a co-owner of the Open TV channel, also has no reason to refuse budget funding to ensure that journalistic standards are maintained on the channel.
Natalia Babachenko, the director of the Open TV channel and a member of the Dnipro Regional Council from the Propozytsiya party, whom we called, asked us to “call back later” and then turned off the phone.
Media expert Otar Dovzhenko suggests not calling what is happening in the Dnipro media, in particular on the municipal TV channel, censorship, but rather “loyalty.” According to him, this situation cannot be influenced by legal means, because “the media’s dependence on the government is due to the lack of an advertising market in the regions and political competition.”
“We can only prohibit by law the spending of local budget funds on PR. In times of war, this issue is relevant, especially if the repair of a road or stadium directly benefits residents, while spending on media that does not adhere to journalistic standards does not,” – Mr. Dovzhenko emphasized.
Ivan Krasikov,
Petro Hrytsayuk
This investigation was carried out by the NGO Lustration Anti-Corruption Council of Prydniprovia as part of the Protecting the Frontline 3 investigative journalism project funded by UNESCO and implemented by the Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR).
The contents of the investigation are the sole responsibility of the NGO Lustration Anti-Corruption Council of Prydniprovia and do not reflect the views of UNESCO or the Institute for War and Peace Reporting.
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