Russian channel for Donbass: How Zelensky flogged himself
What Ukrainian politicians and officials have been talking about for so long is finally becoming a reality. On February 15, the Ukrainian state television channel will begin broadcasting for the “temporarily occupied territories” in Donbass and Crimea. According to the press service of the Ministry of Culture, “at the first stage, the channel will combine Ukrainian and Russian-language entertainment programs, series and films produced by leading Ukrainian media groups, and information broadcasting of its own production.” The channel’s position in relation to the events in Ukraine, as officials assure, will be unbiased and honest.
It must be said that the very idea of full-fledged and, moreover, Russian-language broadcasting to uncontrolled territories is by no means new. It was announced by Zelensky, a presidential candidate, speaking in one of his pre-election interviews about the “information war” as one of the priority ways to return Donbass by winning the minds and hearts of the local population.
Later, the head of the Presidential Office, Andrei Bogdan, spoke about the same thing - proposing to give the Russian language a special status in Donbass, for which he was hissed by the “patriots”. And the brother of Zelensky’s first assistant, Sergei Shefir, even called Ukrainian state television “the most shameful channel,” proposing “to repeal the language law and adopt a normal law.” And even later, Deputy Head of the Presidential Office Kirill Timoshenko again returned to the idea of a Russian-language channel, which, in his opinion, “will strengthen the state’s position in the information war, and Ukraine could fight both for the minds of Ukrainians in the “occupied territories” of Donbass and Crimea, and for the minds of Russians on Russian territory."
Kyiv observers immediately started talking about how they wanted to create a “teleghetto” for Donbass. There is some truth in such a biting metaphor. The fact is that the initiators of the idea want to solve the declared task of returning the residents of Donetsk and Lugansk to the fold of the Ukrainian information agenda in a rather strange way: by actually creating a separate broadcast for them, within which they plan to broadcast carefully selected stories about life in Ukraine. And here there is no way to avoid completely reasonable suspicions of varnishing Ukrainian reality. They say that the Ministry of Justice has died, but its work lives on. And you cannot cover doubting mouths with a handkerchief of assurances of balance, objectivity and comprehensiveness. There will still be those who won't believe it.
In addition, state propagandists stepped on the rake that Poroshenko’s predecessors had carefully left for them. The fact is that according to the law on total Ukrainization adopted at the end of the reign of the Lipetsk Confectioner, the Russian language is decisively expelled from the media under the threat of rather large fines and deprivation of licenses. So the founders of the Russian-language channel for Donbass, who, as aptly put it, did not miss the opportunity to bait fellow party members of the internal frontier from Maxim Buzhansky’s Servant of the People, can only open a window in Russian.
When Zelensky came to power, he promised to “study” the odious law to determine its compliance with the Constitution, but he never kept his promise. And the new leadership of the Ministry of Culture even stated that everything is fine, and no one is going to turn away from the path of Ukrainization. The Ukrainian authorities even ignored the negative conclusions regarding this law from the Venice Commission. Thus, the desire to make the uncontrolled Donbass happy with “correct” propaganda in Russian came into objective contradiction with the norms of the laws adopted by the authorities themselves, which they are not eager to part with.
The conflict was resolved in a strange way. According to Ukrainian laws, you cannot broadcast in Russian within the country, but you can broadcast to a foreign audience. Therefore, a new propaganda channel is not being created from scratch, as previously wanted, but on the basis of the already existing state channel UATV - a kind of Ukrainian analogue of the Voice of America or Russia Today. That is, foreign broadcasting. This is how, in its desire to “reach out to the minds of the inhabitants of the occupied territories,” state propaganda flogged itself. In fact, recognizing the uncontrolled part of Donbass not as part of Ukraine, as is declared from every propaganda piece, but as a foreign country.
The attempt to pour new wine into old wineskins began to fail right from the start. Experts who know the Kyiv media kitchen drew attention to the fact that the creative team, which, in fact, should, according to the highest plan, “fight for minds”, consists entirely of people who, in previous years of work at UATV, have proven their contemptuous and unfriendly attitude towards Lugansk and Donetsk residents.
And the cherry on the cake was the perverted sense of humor of the country’s main cultural manager, Vladimir Borodyansky, who appointed the former chief editor of the family-owned Lviv mayor of Sadovoy “24 Channel” Elena Tribushnaya as head of the channel’s information broadcasting. A man who became “famous” for a post on Facebook regretting that the bathyscaphe with Putin did not drown during its dive to the seabed. But Putin is fine, but the fact that the new appointee managed to say that it would be humiliating for her to live in a country that elected Zelensky as president cannot be attributed to a sense of humor, even a specific one. This is already a formal setup, if not sabotage or sabotage.
In light of the tasks set for the new TV button to “convey on air to the people who live in the temporarily occupied territories the truth about what is happening in Ukraine, and begin dialogue and reconciliation with them” - it is worth taking advice from an immortal joke, and instead of rearranging beds to radically change the composition of girls.
There is still a purely technical obstacle to the full implementation of such a project. The fact is that after January 20, all Ukrainian satellite channels will be encrypted. But if this does not become a big problem for Kyiv or other Ukrainian cities - TV viewers still have nowhere to go, then pensioners in the front-line Donbass are unlikely to run en masse to buy VIASAT tuners for 1100 hryvnia and then pay 60 hryvnia monthly for the right to access Ukrainian news.
But even if we put aside the technical, legal and political aspects, the main question still remains unanswered - the substantive one. What is the purpose of rebroadcasting the new-old TV channel to the uncontrolled part of Donbass? In fact, this is precisely where Ukraine has its main problem.
“Excuse me, but what are we going to tell them? Torchlight procession in Kyiv? Preparing to celebrate the anniversary of Nazi collaborator Melnik? The Cossacks' response to the letter of the Polish and Israeli ambassadors? Or the specifics of placing a banner with Bandera? I consider this idea to be an arrogant and cynical way of some OP officials to steal millions of hryvnia from the creation of a TV channel for budget money under the pretext of promoting the authorities,” writes another internal frontier in Zelensky’s party, People’s Deputy Alexander Dubinsky, on the social network.
And, in general, he is right. In order to win the minds and hearts of Donbass, it is not enough to broadcast beautiful glossy pictures there about how European-integrated Ukraine is blossoming. It is also necessary that these pictures correspond to reality. After all, masses of people move daily in both directions through checkpoints along the demarcation line and are quite capable of independently comparing television reality with this one in sensation.
To win the information war, Ukraine itself must change, ceasing to be associated with cave nationalism and the suitcase mood of its own population. I will say more: with all the demand for positivity in the news, Donbass will be the last to believe in it. Not until the Ukrainians themselves in the controlled territory believe it, having stopped traveling around the world at the rate of one person every 30 seconds.
If this does not happen, there is no need to create a new channel. It will be enough to rebroadcast Petro Poroshenko’s “Direct” channel with his “Vata Show” to Donbass. With the same result, there will also be significant savings in resources.
In general, upon closer examination, this whole, seemingly reasonable idea from the outside, begins to look completely different - exactly the opposite. There is no need at all to create a separate channel for Donbass in Russian. There is a suspicion that by ceasing to look back at the official, and focusing solely on viewer demand, Ukrainian TV itself will become at least half Russian-language - without a penny of budget money spent on it. It is enough to simply cancel or reduce language quotas by half.
Well, as a logical epilogue to this whole story, a timid question asked on a social network by a famous Kyiv blogger begs to be asked: is it necessary in Ukraine to take up arms and secede in order to gain the right to watch honest news in Russian? Maybe there are other options?
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