Pro-Russian TV channel becomes flashpoint in Ukraine

Pro-Russian TV channel becomes flashpoint in Ukraine
Channel NASH has become the target of Ukrainian ire amid the increasing Russian preparations for war. / bne IntelliNews
By Neil Hauer in Kyiv February 10, 2022

“Muraev to prison! Muraev isn’t ours!”

Those were some of the more polite chants from the crowd last week in Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, when some 300 people gathered outside Channel NASH (‘Ours’) to denounce what they see as the TV mogul’s Russian propaganda outlet.

Channel NASH has become the target of Ukrainian ire amid the increasing Russian preparations for war. Under an enormous advertisement on the station’s outer wall of its smartly dressed news anchors and reporters, few of the demonstrators minced words about what they saw as NASH’s purpose:

“This channel has no right [to exist],” said Svanislava Shchebet, a 20-year old management student. “It’s just a Russian channel – pure bullshit. It’s all about ‘Russky mir’,” Shchebet said. ‘Russian world’ is a concept promoted by Moscow implying that all Russian-speaking countries belong to Russia’s sphere of influence.

NASH has been on Ukrainian airwaves for a little over two years, having received its broadcasting license in October 2020. Detractors say that it publishes a steady stream of aggressive Russian official viewpoints and little else.

“I want this channel closed. It’s Putin’s propaganda,” said Lyubov Vasilyeva, 60, speaking in surzhyk (a mixed dialect of Russian and Ukrainian using words and grammar from each).  “[NASH] says it’s about freedom of speech, that they should be able to stay on the air, but look how many channels we have here – this isn’t the issue,” Vasilyeva said.

“Muraev wants Russia to capture Ukraine,” Vasilyeva said. “His channel supports these things every day. How can it still be on the air?” she added.

Yevhen Muraev, the focus of the protesters’ anger, has become a much talked about figure in recent weeks. Muraev, 45, comes from Ukraine’s northeast region of Kharkiv, a Russian-speaking area that saw pro-Moscow agitation in 2014 and has been pegged as a likely target in the event of a new Russian incursion. He was appointed by former president Viktor Yanukovych to a minor position in 2012, serving there as a member of Yanukovych’s Party of Regions until the latter was ousted in 2014’s Maidan revolution. He made an abortive run for Ukrainian president as the head of his own pro-Russian party in 2019 and ranks low among potential future candidates.

Muraev’s most notable characteristics are related: his longtime control over some of Ukraine’s most significant media assets, and his staunchly pro-Russian views. From 2014 to 2018, he owned the channel NewsOne, which was shuttered last year on the Ukrainian government’s orders, with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky stating it posed a ‘national security risk’ by spreading “Kremlin disinformation”.

Muraev himself has made repeated provocative statements echoing the official Russian line on Ukraine’s recent history, including that the Maidan revolution was a “coup” and that Ukrainian film director (and onetime Russian political prisoner) Oleh Sentsov was a “terrorist”.

The media executive became a global figure in late January, when UK Foreign Secretary Liz Truss made a startling claim: Moscow was “looking to install a pro-Russian leader in Kyiv” as part of an upcoming invasion, and Muraev was the Kremlin’s “top candidate” for the job. Truss named four other pro-Russian figures, including former Prime Minister Mykola Azarov (a frequent guest on NASH’s programming) as accomplices to the plan and “in touch with Russian intelligence”.

Muraev called the allegations “nonsense”, pointing out that he has been under Russian sanctions for four years, and threatened legal action against London. The UK government’s claims have not been corroborated by other governments or open sources.

Nevertheless, the report reverberated with the protesters outside NASH, who numbered several times more than at a previous rally there two weeks earlier.

“Britain even reported that [Muraev] is a Kremlin agent,” said Shchebet, the student protester. “But for some reason, he’s able to just live here and run his channel like a normal guy.”

Whatever his true personal ties and affiliations, Muraev and Channel NASH have become symbols of what many Ukrainians feel like they are now fighting against: the pernicious, overarching influence of a resurgent Russia that desires to subjugate their country again.

For Vasil Lyuborets, 61, and his colleague Andriy, 58, NASH embodies Moscow’s narrative and pretensions.

“They say on this channel that we have a civil war, it’s only Ukrainians against each other,” Lyuborets says. “They say that only union with Russia can save us. It’s not news, it’s propaganda, something like Russia Today [RT] or [Russian state TV presenter Dmitry] Kiselyov,” Lyuborets says.

Andriy agrees. “We have fought against corruption for the past eight years,” he says. “Before that, authorities would only rob people – it’s gotten better, but we still have far to go,” he says.

The expression of Ukrainian identity as something unique, and different from Russian, is another impetus.

“It used to be that I could hardly talk in this country [in Ukrainian] and be understood,” says Lyuborets. “I am glad to see that this is changing, that we now have more appreciation for who we are,” he says.

“The most important thing for me is the way that [Russia] thinks it should decide our lives,” says Andriy. “We are very grateful for countries like Canada, who help us with their own taxpayers’ dollars, in our own fights against corruption and imperialism here,” he says.

Meanwhile, for Lyuborets, the current situation reminds him of another pivotal moment in his life, as well as in world history.

“You know, I am a former soldier, in the Soviet army. I was there on Red Square in 1991, during the putsch,” he says, referring to the failed August 1991 coup attempt by hardliners in the dying days of the Soviet Union. “They wanted us to shoot people, but we refused. I learned then that it is better to be a victim, than a tool of tyrants,” Lyuborets says.

There were a few darker elements at the protest as well. The dark black and red-and-black flags of several far rightwing groups dominated the scene, including one group called ‘Invisible Patriot’ (Невідомий Патріот). That group’s Facebook page features a banner extolling the Ukrainian Insurgent Army – a World War Two-era organization that fought Soviet forces for Ukrainian independence, but in the process collaborated with Nazi occupation forces and committed massacres against Poles.

One of the chants periodically brought forth was “Ukraine for Ukrainians” – possibly only referencing expelling Russian interests, but with other, unmistakable overtones as well. Andriy’s jacket, meanwhile, featured an unmistakable Nazi eagle-and-swastika crest - something he declined to discuss.

For most of the demonstrators, however, such themes seem to have little to do with their reason for attendance. The crowd, evenly split along gender lines, leans towards the younger generation in particular.

“I think this protest is very necessary,” says Olya, 22, a designer. “This Muraev is poisoning the minds of the people. His goal is to destabilise the situation in Ukraine and work towards driving us away from Europe, which is our future,” she says.

The obvious contradictions in some of the Kremlin’s messaging are not lost on people in Kyiv.

“[Russia] says that Ukraine should not be with Nato, that it will make everything horrible for Russian speakers, and that Russia and Ukraine are ‘brotherly nations,’” Olya says. “But they also say that we are all Nazis and evil. So which one is it?” she asks.

Whatever the fate of Muraev and NASH in the weeks to come, there is a sense that this struggle is far from over.

“Russia will never accept Ukraine as a sovereign state. We want to end this struggle so our children won’t have to face it. That’s why the battle continues,” says Andriy.

 

 

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