Ukrainian media targeted by pro-Zelenskyy ‘info army’

A series of attacks and smear campaigns targeting prominent Ukrainian journalists has cast a shadow over Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s record on safeguarding media freedom.

In a rare statement since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Mediarukh, an association of media outlets and watchdogs, on Wednesday directly called on the country’s president to “resolutely condemn” the attacks and “take over control of the investigation” in order to find out who the culprits were.  

“Unknown aggressors are trying to smear Ukrainian journalists as ‘enemies of the people’, Russian agents, drug addicts, and to discredit their professional work,” the statement said. “There is surveillance, wiretapping and a violation of journalists’ right to privacy — all with the aim of putting pressure on independent media.”

Zelenskyy on Wednesday said the domestic security service (SBU) had launched an investigation into the monitoring of journalists, adding: “Any pressure on journalists is unacceptable.”

Ukraine’s media freedom has been partly curtailed over what the government has said were national security concerns since the Russian invasion, with Reporters Without Borders warning that the war “threatens the survival of the Ukrainian media”.

While journalists have been subject to online intimidation and smear campaigns before, in the past few days this has escalated into harassment in real life. Investigative journalist Yuriy Nikolov, who exposed corruption in the defence ministry, was targeted by several men on Sunday, who banged on his door, yelling that he would be sent to the front line, and plastered signs that called him a “traitor” and “provocateur”. 

Nikolov’s articles led to the resignation of defence minister Oleskiy Reznikov, who was not directly accused of graft, and Zelenskyy saying he would demand greater transparency and reforms.

Pictures of the men engaged in the attack were soon published on pro-government Telegram channels, stoking accusations that the incident was carried out with the blessing of one of the law enforcement agencies.

Natalia Lyhachova, editor-in-chief of Detector Media, said the case showed how online attacks allegedly waged at the behest of the government against journalists working to hold power to account have moved into the physical world.

Pro-government online voices dubbing themselves the “information army” operate “in the most vile way”, she said, by “turning all critics of the government into Russian agents, evaders, enemies of the president and Ukraine”.

The incident targeting Nikolov was followed by what appeared to be a co-ordinated campaign to discredit Bihus.info, an investigative news outfit in Kyiv that has spent years exposing government corruption. 

Denys Bihus, the group’s founder, said that several of his employees appeared to have been under surveillance, after a video appeared online allegedly showing some of them using illegal drugs during a private New Year’s Eve party. They had rented a cottage outside Kyiv where a camera had been installed without their knowledge, Bihus said.

The reporters’ phones were also likely to have been tapped for more than a year, he added, because the conversations included in the video date back as far as 2022.

The video was posted a day after Bihus.info published an investigation looking into reports prepared by a state-funded company, which analysed media articles “critical” of the Ukrainian president and his cabinet. The company is controlled by an MP in Zelenskyy’s party.

“I’m embarrassed by what I saw on the video,” Bihus said, but he added that it also showed “the special services have the time, inspiration and budgets to conduct systematic surveillance of the private lives of members of the investigation team”.

The SBU said on Wednesday that a criminal investigation had been opened into the illegal wiretapping and video recording of Bihus.info employees. “The SBU believes that the transparent and unimpeded work of independent and professional mass media is an important condition for the development of Ukraine as a democratic state,” it said in a statement.

The video was uploaded to a YouTube channel called “People’s Truth”, which according to Ukrainian fact checkers is led by a woman whose image was generated by artificial intelligence.

People’s Truth is similar in appearance and tactics to a 2013 project called “Ukrainian Lies”, which targeted prominent journalists and civil rights activists critical of the pro-Russia president at the time, Viktor Yanukovych.

Among the journalists targeted a decade ago was Oksana Romaniuk, director of the Institute of Mass Information watchdog, whose email account was hacked and the contents published online.

“I am very sorry to see examples that remind me of the times of Yanukovych,” Romaniuk said earlier this week. “They definitely have no place in 2024.”

Politicians critical of Zelenskyy have seized on the opportunity to raise concerns.

Vitali Klitschko, mayor of Kyiv and Zelenskyy’s longtime political rival, has described the incidents as “oppression of independent journalists who do not like the government”.

“What is happening today destroys unity in the state, destroys democratic principles and damages the image of Ukraine,” Klitschko wrote on Telegram.

The head of the Ukrainian parliament’s committee on freedom of speech, Yaroslav Yurchyshyn, said the surveillance of Bihus.info’s journalists was “definitely pressure [and] illegal”.

Failure to investigate and find the culprits would confirm suspicions that law enforcement agencies were acting on behalf of some government figures, he added.