Two major media watchdogs have published studies of a campaign under way in Ukraine to discredit the Revolution of Dignity (the Euro-Maidan protests) and to push a narrative on Russia’s invasion of Crimea and military aggression in the Donbas which closely follows the Kremlin’s. The publications coincide with a Hromadske journalist’s probe of three Maidan cases that clearly disproves one of the underlying refrains, namely, the claim that there is no evidence against suspected Berkut killers.
Anastasia Stanko from Hromadske.ua was merely citing the kind of evidence that prosecutors from the former Special Investigations Departments have amassed over the last six years since the bloodiest days of Maidan. The automatic rifles almost certainly used to gun down protesters disappeared from the base after February 20, 2014, and were later found in a lake, with the numbers on them rubbed off. There are, however, enough bullets, including those that inflicted fatal injuries, which can be linked to specific rifles formally issued to specific Berkut officers, including two of the five men released in an exchange of prisoners on December 29, 2019 (Pavlo Abroskin, Serhiy Zinchenko).
Oleksiy Donsky, one of the prosecutors working on Maidan cases from the end of 2014, reports that the Internal Affairs Ministry management also issued 156 Kalashnikovs and 40,000 bullets to “titushky,” or government-paid thugs, on February 20, 2014. Although the initial attempt to issue them during the night appears to have failed, with the man organizing the thugs having said that they never signed up to killing people, they are known to have been given out to the thugs later. Those weapons have never been recovered, making it impossible to identify whether titushky were involved in the deaths either of activists or of enforcement officers.
Mr. Donsky pointed out that the case over this criminal issue of lethal weapons to thugs was handed to the court back in January 2016, but has never gotten beyond the preparatory stage. He blames the defense lawyers in this case, but in many others there has been obstruction from the Internal Affairs Ministry, the Prosecutor General’s Office, the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) or individual judges. Events of the last six months, including some very suspect appointments and the release on December 29, 2019, of five former Berkut officers as part of the prisoner exchange, have seriously eroded confidence that there will ever be justice for the victims.
One of the people widely believed to have influence on highly contentious appointments and investigations in the State Bureau of Investigations (which has taken over many Maidan cases) is Andriy Portnov. He was deputy head of President Viktor Yanukovych’s administration during the Maidan protests and only returned to Ukraine on the eve of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s inauguration. He is one of the most active figures in the current campaign to discredit the Revolution of Dignity and to at least suggest that its victims should be treated as perpetrators.
Although there is fairly widespread recognition that a campaign is under way to try to discredit the Maidan, there is not necessarily full agreement as to who is behind it. In an article asserting that the drawn-out investigation and impunity have enabled Maidan opponents to raise their head, Krystyna Berdynskykh spoke with several analysts.
Iryna Bekeshkina from the Democratic Initiatives Foundation believes that Mr. Yanukovych’s old Party of the Regions is attempting to avenge itself and make a comeback after the battle for Ukraine that they lost in 2013-2014. Among the Ukrainians who gave their votes to Mr. Zelenskyy and his Servant of the People party in 2019 were many who would earlier have voted for the Party of the Regions. The latter is now trying to reclaim its “electorate,” she believes, with manipulation and distortion of the Maidan as one of its methods.
Oleksiy Antypovych, head of the Rating public pollster points to the lack of a well-defined position on the Revolution of Dignity on the Zelenskyy team. “Everybody feels a weakening of control. You can speak out in defense of ‘Anti-Maidan’ and you won’t suffer any consequences,” he says.
Ms. Bekeshkina believes that the same can be said of other events and processes, with Mr. Zelenskyy’s team trying to please everybody. With respect to the Maidan, there are a number of national deputies inside the Servant of the People party who were themselves against it.
Although Mr. Portnov ostentatiously chose the eve of Mr. Zelenskyy’s inauguration to reappear in Ukraine, the key point is that the previous five years had probably convinced him and others closely linked to the Yanukovych regime that impunity could be expected. This, many analysts believe, is the reason that he, Olena Lukash and many other people from Mr. Yanukovych’s team now feel that they can publicly “raise their head” again. There are plenty of media willing to provide them with a platform for serious distortions of the facts regarding the events from November 2013 to February 2014, including those believed to have links with Viktor Medvedchuk, the contentious and rich Ukrainian national deputy with close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The surge in disinformation and fakes about the Maidan since November 2019 has prompted both the Institute for Mass Information (IMI) and Halyna Poptsova from Detector Media to carry out assessments of what both agreed are efforts to discredit the Revolution of Dignity. While such attempts are not new, the scale of this campaign is unprecedented.
IMI names Mr. Portnov, Ms. Lukash and Mr. Medvedchuk as having been most active in a campaign to discredit both the Maidan and the slain activists – the Nebesna Sotnia, or Heavenly Hundred. They were provided a platform by the website Strana.ua and media associated with Mr. Medvedchuk (ZIK, 112.ua and NewsOne).
There was serious manipulation, for example, over claims that the list of slain Maidan activists was half “falsified.” Ms. Lukash and Mr. Portnov pretended to have uncovered new information showing that many of the names of victims should not be there. IMI points out that there was no sensation and that Yuri Butusov, chief editor of Censor.net, had reported back in March 2018 that the correct number of heroes of the Nebesna Sotnia was likely 86, and not 107.
If Mr. Butusov’s aim had clearly been to uphold justice and truth, and honor only those who genuinely perished on the Maidan, the Portnov/Lukash alleged “revelations” were aimed solely at trying to discredit Maidan.
The same material also tries to claim lack of any proof that Berkut officers were involved in the gunning down of activists, although there is considerable proof. Their text, as well as others on Strana.ua, have pushed the claims that there was a group around Maidan defender Volodymyr Parasiuk that shot at protesters or that it was Maidan activists who first began shooting. The texts tend to be extremely manipulative and claim that they are revealing information that has been concealed because it doesn’t fit the preferred version.
IMI also describes a campaign to get all enforcement officers amnestied, with the same campaign also pushing the idea that the killing of 13 enforcement officers during those final days is not being investigated. Maidan investigators have long stated that there are criminal investigations under way over these deaths.
It is, however, true that a law was passed immediately after Mr. Yanukovych’s flight guaranteeing immunity to Maidan activists. Many activists had been imprisoned, or otherwise prosecuted on fabricated charges, so the move had seemed justified; however, this question is undoubtedly contentious and the acting director of the state bureau of investigations has suggested that she thinks the amnesty law should be revoked.
It is when it comes to the supposed “consequences of the Maidan” that all the above-mentioned media closely echo the line taken by Russian state-funded propaganda. The message they all push is that the Maidan was a “state coup” and that this “bloody path” was then thoughtlessly transferred to the Donbas, with the conflict there labelled “a civil war.”
Some of the other manipulative ploys cited in the IMI study – the use of an extremely selective choice of supposedly “disillusioned experts” or activists, and the claims about “Georgian snipers” on the Maidan – have also been seen on Russian propaganda sites.
At the very beginning of her study, Ms. Poptsova notes that “the objective of Kremlin propaganda is to distort the memory of the events and participants in the Maidan. That will allow it to place liability for the crimes committed by Russia and the Kremlin-loyal Yanukovych team on “insurgents.”
Hearkening to the idea of the Overton window, or window of dialogue, being the range of policies and ideas that will be viewed as acceptable to the mainstream population at any given time, Ms. Poptsova suggests that Mr. Portnov and the people he calls his team have set about changing that range inside Ukraine. Such a change would lead to “executioners becoming victims, heroes – killers and victory – betrayal.”
The pro-Russian segment of Ukrainian media have, she says, been actively circulating disinformation about the Maidan aimed at supporting the Kremlin’s narrative. The aim is to free the Yanukovych regime from liability for the violence against protesters, and Russia from liability for the war and occupation of Crimea by discrediting the protests and calling for repressive measures against them.
Ms. Poptsova dates this new campaign from November 21, 2019, with the article in question citing Mr. Portnov and published on Ukraina.ru, a website that, like Strana.ua, can be expected to always echo the Kremlin line on any events related to Ukraine. In a thoroughly toxic piece on Strana.ua, for example, the authors claim that a “civil war” was launched by the Maidan, and that it was anti-Maidan protests after Mr. Yanukovych’s flight that “ended with Crimea joining Russia and the war in the Donbas – between supporters and opponents of the new Kyiv regime Moscow supported the latter [i.e. the opponents], providing them with weapons and military experts.”
There is no mention of armed Russian soldiers without insignia, armed Russian paramilitaries, major military offensives at Debaltseve and Ilovaisk, etc. Russia just “helped” opponents of the Maidan. Ms. Poptsova provides many examples of such narratives, as well as of the manipulation of sociological data, etc., used to distort the real level of support for the Maidan in Ukraine, not to mention the facts about Russia’s aggression.
While Strana.ua has long been recognized as a publication that promotes a pro-Russian and/or anti-Ukrainian slant on just about everything, ZIK was, until June 2019, a publication that was not viewed as having a particular political agenda. Now it has become the third media (after NewsOne and 112.ua at the end of 2018) to be taken over by Taras Kozak, a person closely linked to Mr. Medvedchuk. The fact that 112.ua has a strong English-language page has probably meant that a lot of people read its website without due caution.
How quickly any society’s “window of dialogue” changes is not clear, but it is probably dangerous to assume that a long period is needed in the case of unrelenting disinformation.