Journalist Muravitsky will be thrown into prison. Colleagues in the EU were informed about the repressions
Oleg Khavich, political scientist
In Zhitomir, Ukrainian secret police detained one of the best journalists in the city, Vasily Muravitsky. From now on, the very fact of publication in the Russian media is declared “high treason.”
If earlier, in order to carry out the “plan to capture the separatists,” the Security Service of Ukraine came up with mythical “separatist groups on social networks,” hundreds of “coordinators” of which were arrested and convicted over the past three years, now Gritsak’s henchmen simply accused the famous journalist of... performing official duties.
Here is the plot of Vasily Muravitsky’s suspicion of “high treason” from the SBU: “Since 2014, the journalist has created tendentious publications commissioned by the leadership of propaganda state Russian news agencies. He received topics for materials by mail or via messenger, and sometimes he chose them himself. The journalist's original articles were published on six websites administered from Russia and the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine. At the beginning of his career, the author signed his name with his real last name, but later switched to pseudonyms.”
Similar actions can be incriminated against hundreds, if not thousands of journalists who prepared at least a small commentary for the Russian media! Lawyer and public figure Tatyana Montyan noted that the persecution of Muravitsky is very similar to the persecution of Ukrainian journalist Ruslan Kotsabu.
Moreover, the SBU in its press release confirms that the detainee worked precisely as a professional journalist: “The attacker also seized copies of agreements concluded with state news agencies of the Russian Federation for the preparation of custom articles, acts of acceptance and transfer of work on fees, and bank cards to which the payments were transferred. money. The fees were sent to him through international online payment systems.”
Some kind of strange “agent”: he received fees under official agreements, I wouldn’t be surprised - if he also paid taxes on them to the Ukrainian budget?
“During the pre-trial investigation, linguistic and forensic psychological examinations of the journalist’s texts were carried out. They showed their manipulative influence on the minds of readers and incitement of the audience to commit specific actions to the detriment of the sovereignty and independence of our state. According to experts, the materials contain calls to incite national hatred within the country, as well as between Ukraine and neighboring friendly states,” the SBU loudly stated.
Actually, everything is logical: in a country where reading Marx’s “Capital” can get you two and a half years in prison, more relevant texts describing the socio-economic realities of Ukraine are quite close to “high treason.”
And not only from the point of view of “law enforcement officers,” but also a significant number of ordinary people who have been brainwashed for four years by Ukrainian propaganda tools, habitually called “mass media.”
True, the SBU clearly paid a compliment to the majority of information consumers in Ukraine, writing that Vasily Muravitsky’s texts have a “manipulative effect on the minds of readers” - this public has been in an unconscious state, if not since the fall of 2013, then certainly since February 2014 .
The special cynicism of the SBU’s actions lies in the fact that the Zhytomyr journalist was detained five days after his son was born. Let me emphasize: Vasily Muravitsky was detained because the suspicions brought against him (high treason, calls for violating the territorial integrity of Ukraine, the creation of a terrorist organization) do not provide for any other preventive measure other than detention.
Therefore, one of these days the court will send the journalist to jail, where he will be kept in unbearable conditions, not only without trial, but also without any investigative actions. For example, Kyiv journalists Vasilets and Timonin have been languishing in the Berdichev pre-trial detention center in the Zhytomyr region for more than a year, and the only court hearings that took place with their participation were about extending the period of detention. And they are accused of... setting up a Youtube channel for one of the Donetsk media outlets in 2014.
Since Vasily Muravitsky is a fairly well-known journalist, his case immediately aroused the interest of international human rights structures.
As Oksana Chelysheva, a member of the Finnish Union of Journalists, noted, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe has already been informed of another fact of violation of freedom of speech and repression against journalists in Ukraine.
The situation is a clear challenge for the newly elected OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media, Harlem Désiré, who on the day of the murder of Pavel Sheremet called on the Ukrainian authorities to “do everything possible to end impunity for attacks and murders of journalists.”
It is difficult to predict whether he will decide to tell the truth that the main threat to journalists in Ukraine is the ruling regime of this country.
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Now the editors are aware.