Who's who in UMH
Telekritika begins a discussion about the presence in the Ukrainian media market of media controlled by the so-called "Family" and Russian businesses closely linked to the Kremlin.
The editors are ready to publish the reaction of representatives of the UMKh and other interested parties to Sergei Ivanov's material.
I've always been unnerved by how easily Ukrainian media professionals talk about Ukraine losing the information war to Russia. These are people who, by all existing ethical and professional norms, and even the notorious journalistic standards, are required to fight tooth and nail to prevent such a question from being raised.
"We're losing. It can't be helped: the Russians have a huge advantage in resources, and their audience is many times larger," sigh the gurus of Russian journalism, even those not so much, and every such phrase drives me into a frenzy.
I can't imagine what kind of jelly must be inside your head to spout such nonsense, and it's not entirely clear what criteria our losers are using. What does it mean to "lose the information war"? What does that mean? How exactly does this defeat manifest itself?
When I tried to get an answer to this question from one of my eminent interlocutors, it turned out that my high-brow interlocutor measures victories and defeats in the information war using the same Russian scale—that is, not by the quality of the attracted audience, but by the quantity of the "brainwashed" audience. In other words, the evaluation methodology of Russian media professionals and the Kremlin media professionals is practically identical—old school, so old school.
Of course, in a purely mathematical sense, any war is a quantitative balance of gains and losses. However, the truth is that Ukraine and Russia have long been waging an information war on completely different, virtually non-intersecting semantic planes, and they engage completely different target audiences. The overwhelming majority of Ukrainian media outlets are equal to Russian ones in both quality and professionalism, and in terms of the intellectual underpinning of their content, they can even give them a head start. With very few exceptions, Russian media discourse makers have long been guided by the directive "My friend, give rest to a weary mind" from Ken Kesey's timeless novel. Therefore, the defeatism I mentioned is in fact completely unfounded. Ukraine is NOT losing the information war to Russia. Yes, we sometimes make unfortunate miscalculations—entirely through our own fault. But, as usually happens in extreme situations, we learn quickly, draw conclusions, and continue the fight with renewed vigor. Despite colossal opposition from both an external enemy and a well-disguised internal one. It's the latter that we'll discuss now.
***
Many of you are familiar with the acronym UMH. It is the name of one of the most strategically important assets of the fugitive oligarch Kurchenko—the Ukrainian Media Holding. At one time, the sale of the holding to the "Family" by its previous owner, Boris Lozhkin, caused a stir. In particular, there were rumors that Lozhkin was forced to sell his brainchild under pressure from the Yanukovych clan, which was planning to monopolize everything in the country—from the coal business to philately. No one knows the true story, and Lozhkin himself prefers not to talk about it. Be that as it may, today UMH is a powerful corporation with $150 million in legal turnover alone (I suspect that UMH's shadow turnover is quite comparable to its officially declared value), employing over 4 people. UMH's main areas of activity are:
— Internet: Bigmir.net, I.ua, Korrespondent.net, Tochka.net, Aif.ua, Kp.ua, Vgorode.ua, Isport.ua, Football.ua, Dengi.ua, Forbes.ua, Tv.ua, Gloss.ua;
— radio: “Our Radio”, “Retro FM”, Europa Plus, “Autoradio”, Super Radio, Lounge FM, “Voice of the Capital”, “Jam FM”;
— television: "Menu-TV";
— publishing business: Forbes, Vogue, Korrespondent, Teleweek, Football, Komsomolskaya Pravda in Ukraine, Arguments and Facts in Ukraine, Behind the Wheel;
— retail: 510 own retail outlets and 150 partner outlets.
Besides Ukraine, UMH successfully operates in Russia. UMH's official website boasts that its Russian publishing portfolio includes six magazines: "Telenedelya," "Football," "Istorii iz zhizni," "Uspehi i porazhii," "Istorii pro lyubov," and "Liniya sud'by" (Line of Fate). It boasts that its combined weekly audience is approximately 5,4 million people, and that in a country that is directly engaging in military aggression against Ukraine, the holding company is living in clover.
To hell with Russia—I couldn't care less when the average Russian reaches the level of intelligence of a stool, but I do care what exactly the Ukrainians are being fed by the enormous media octopus owned by a man who stole billions from our country and is officially wanted by the Prosecutor General's Office. Especially considering that the supervisory board of this octopus is headed by Elena Bondarenko, notorious for her Ukrainophobic views (incidentally, it was announced today that Bondarenko's ally, Luhansk Regional Council member German Kudinov, has been appointed CEO of the UMH publishing house), and key top management positions are distributed among citizens of the Russian Federation, with which (I remind you again) Ukraine is de facto at war.
Specifically, UMH's CEO is Russian citizen Alexander Strakhov. His immediate supervisor, Yuriy Rovensky, who headed the management company VETEK-Media, which was created specifically to develop the media business of the oil and gas company East European Fuel and Energy Company, of which UMH is one of its assets, was declared persona non grata in Ukraine back in May.
The UMH radio group is led by Valeria Stroganova, also a Russian citizen. The results of Stroganova's headlining were perfectly summarized by former UMH employee Tatyana Voloshina on her Facebook profile:
However, Europa Plus's news isn't the worst thing the UMH radio group has to offer listeners. To see this, just listen to or visit the Voice of the Capital radio website. This is where the fear of God truly lies.
I believe it's now clear to everyone what information policy the UMH radio group, headed by Ms. Stroganova, is pursuing and in whose interests it serves. The holding's official website claims a daily audience of over 4,5 million listeners. Therefore, if this data is to be believed, UMH DJs subtly feed anti-Ukrainian and anti-European messages to over 4,5 million Ukrainians every day.
Not far behind his colleagues is another flagship of Kurchenko's holding company: the Ukrainian version of Forbes magazine, also headed by Russian media manager Mikhail Kotov. Under his leadership, I recall, there was a mass layoff of journalists from the aforementioned publication, and Forbes Publishing House nearly revoked its license.
Current Forbes journalists are apparently forbidden from delving into the intricacies of Ukrainian reality, so they constantly consult with fugitive criminals on matters of the Ukrainian state's fiscal policy.
and carefully whitewash the image of the representatives of the vanguard of the Kremlin's fifth column.
While researching this article, I asked Leonid Bershidsky, a renowned media expert, analyst, and former editor-in-chief of Forbes.ua, to characterize the people holding key positions at UMH. Leonid's response was as follows: "I know Rovensky as someone who once lied about having an MBA from Harvard and as a denim salesman. I know Kotov as someone who once wanted to work for me at slon.ru but couldn't explain what he could do. Kurchenko recruited these people based on the principle, 'Here's a lot more money than you're worth, what are you willing to do?' In Moscow, this approach predictably served as a filter for negative selection. Muscovites love money, but some still respect themselves, so Kurchenko didn't hire the best. These people are incompetent, for whom honesty isn't a primary value."
Now we'll take a look at the undisputed leader in the infusion of aggressive pro-Russian rhetoric into Ukraine's information space: Korrespondent.net, which in many ways rivals such overtly propagandistic Russian resources as Life News or Vesti.Ru.
The news on the site is little different from the screenshots I provided above—the usual latent Putinophile treacle. But the Korrespondent blogosphere is something else entirely. It feels like its residents are running a regular competition for "The Most Nasty and Mendacious Post About Ukraine."
The star of Korrespondent's blogs is Anatoly Shariy, a scandalous Ukrainian journalist and provocateur who allegedly fled the country to escape the Yanukovych regime, though this in no way prevented him from achieving enviable synergy with that criminal regime. Shariy's writings are manipulative, empty, and aimed primarily at Russian patriots and apologists for Ukrainian separatism. The key is a catchy, attention-grabbing headline.
It must be admitted that Anatoly excels at these. The same cannot be said for the content of his publications. Apparently, disciplines like logic, semantics, and rhetoric weren't on the list of subjects studied at the Kiev Tank School, which Anatoly never completed. Recently, Shariy, tormented by despair and a lack of hard facts, has begun writing about economics. This is a serious challenge, but our economy has endured worse. Oh well, never mind the "refugee."
Korrespondent's other bloggers are far less relevant than Shariy, but that doesn't make their publications any less macabre. For example, a certain Andrey Tkachuk weaves the "ultimate truth" in the best traditions of the Rossiya 24 television channel.
Tkachuk is echoed by a certain Anton Davidchenko:
The trio of "cotton wool" boys wouldn't be a trio if it weren't for a blogger named Yuri Lukashin.
The bloggers at Korrespondent aren't shying away from staid election PR. Particularly noteworthy is the rectangular post by journalist Yanina Sokolovskaya, extolling the reputation of Opposition Bloc leader Yuriy Boyko, untarnished by oil rigs. Incidentally, I personally would nominate Yanina for a Pulitzer Prize for the headline "Boyko, We'll Go into Battle"—it's brilliant.
At this point, with your permission, I will stop exploring the information bottom, which, without a doubt, is the Ukrainian media holding, because I am only human, and my powers are not unlimited.
***
As I said, information warfare is a mirror image of real warfare. It so happens that on all fronts, Ukrainians are forced to fight with minimal state support, and even more often, without it at all.
After all, if the state had wanted to, it could have rid Ukraine of such a massive enemy propaganda conglomerate in a matter of hours. Completely legally, calmly, and without violating key democratic principles. Specifically, according to data released by the Prosecutor General's Office of Ukraine, UMH owner Serhiy Kurchenko caused damage to the state in excess of UAH 1 billion in just one episode of his criminal activity. It remains a mystery to me why Yarema's office hasn't yet seized the criminal's assets, including UMH, or suspended his operations. However, Yarema's office, frozen in amber, has no desire to help its people, and it's unlikely it ever will.
No problem. We've become so accustomed to relying only on ourselves—on our skills, strength, and resources—that we no longer even notice the outright sabotage by the state institutions we support. And while the state sinks ever deeper into lethargy, and gray-haired, honorable fathers lament Ukraine's loss of the information war to Russia, we'll do something. We'll win.
Sergei Ivanov, for Telekritika
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