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 associated with the Kremlin.
The editors are ready to publish the reaction of representatives of the UMH and other persons interested in the topic to Sergei Ivanov’s material.
I have always been bothered by how easily Ukrainian media people talk about how Ukraine is losing the information war to Russia (*country sponsor of terrorism). People who are ordered by all existing ethical, professional norms and even the notorious journalistic standards to gnaw at the ground in order to prevent such a question from being raised.
“We are losing. There’s nothing you can do: the Russians have a huge advantage in resources, and the audience is many times larger,” sigh the gurus of not-so-domestic journalism, and every such phrase drives me into a frenzy.
I can’t imagine what kind of jelly you need to have in your skull to talk such nonsense, and in general it’s not entirely clear what criteria our defeatists base themselves on. What does it mean to “lose in the information war”? How is that? What exactly is this loss?
When I tried to get an answer to this question from one of the eminent interlocutors, it turned out that my high-brow counterpart keeps track of victories and defeats in the information war according to the Russian scale – that is, not by the quality of the attracted audience, but by the quantity of the “washed” one. In other words, the assessment methodology of domestic media workers and Kremlin media workers is practically no different – old school, so old school.
Of course, in a purely mathematical sense, any war is a quantitative ratio of gains and losses. At the same time, the truth is that Ukraine and Russia (*country sponsor of terrorism) have long been waging an information war in completely different, practically non-overlapping semantic planes, and completely different target audiences are involved in it. The vast majority of Ukrainian media are not inferior to Russian ones either in quality or in professionalism, and in terms of the intellectual background of the content they can even give a head start, because with very rare exceptions, Russian media discourse setters in their work have long been guided by the directive “my friend, give your tired mind a rest.” from the imperishable novel by Ken Kesey. Therefore, the defeatism I mentioned is in fact unfounded. Ukraine is NOT losing the information war to Russia (*country sponsor of terrorism). Yes, sometimes we make unfortunate mistakes – entirely through our own fault. But, as usually happens in extreme situations, we quickly learn, draw conclusions and continue the fight with renewed vigor. Despite the colossal opposition of both the external enemy and the well-disguised internal one. That’s what we’ll talk about now.
***
Many of you are familiar with the abbreviation UMH. This is the name of one of the most strategically important assets of the fugitive oligarch Kurchenko – the Ukrainian media holding. At one time, the story of 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 going to monopolize everything in this country – from the coal business to philately. No one knows how everything really happened, and Lozhkin himself prefers not to dwell on this topic. Be that as it may, today UMH is a powerful corporation with $150 million in legal turnover alone (I suspect that the shadow turnover of UMH is quite comparable to the officially declared one), which employs more than 4 thousand people. The main activities of UMH 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, “Avtoradio”, Super Radio, Lounge FM, “Voice of the Capital”, “Jam FM”;
– television: “Menu-TV”;
– publishing business: Forbes, Vogue, “Correspondent”, “Telenedelya”, “Football”, “Komsomolskaya Pravda in Ukraine”, “Arguments and Facts in Ukraine”, “Behind the Wheel”;
– retail: 510 own retail outlets and 150 partner outlets.
In addition to Ukraine, UMH successfully conducts business in Russia (*country sponsor of terrorism). The official website of UMH boasts that the Russian publishing portfolio of UMH includes 6 magazines: “Telenedelya”, “Football”, “Life Stories”, “Successes and Defeats”, “Stories about Love” and “Line of Fate”, that the total audience in week is about 5.4 million people and that in a country that is carrying out direct military aggression against Ukraine, the holding is rolling like cheese in butter.
To hell with Russia (*country sponsor of terrorism) – I am completely indifferent to exactly when the average Russian will catch up with a stool in terms of intelligence, but I am far from indifferent to what exactly the huge media octopus, owned by the man who stole billions from our country and was officially declared by the Prosecutor General’s Office, is feeding Ukrainians with. wanted Especially considering that the supervisory board of this octopus is headed by Elena Bondarenko, notorious for her Ukrainophobic views (by the way, today it became known that Bondarenko’s comrade-in-arms, regional deputy of the Lugansk regional council German Kudinov, has been appointed general director of the UMH publishing house), and key top management positions are distributed between citizens of the Russian Federation (*country sponsor of terrorism), with which (I remind you once again) Ukraine is de facto at war.
In particular, the general director of UMH is Russian citizen Alexander Strakhov. His direct supervisor, Yuriy Rovensky, who headed the management company VETEK-Media, which was created specifically for the development of the media business of the oil and gas East European Fuel and Energy Company, one of whose assets is UMH, received persona non grata status in Ukraine back in May .
The UMH radio group is led by Valeria Stroganova, also a citizen of the Russian Federation (*country sponsor of terrorism). The results of Stroganova’s headlining were perfectly summarized in her FB profile by ex-UMH employee Tatyana Voloshina:
However, the Europa Plus news is not the saddest thing that the UMH radio group can offer the listener. To be convinced of this, just listen or go to the website of the Voice of the Capital radio. This is where the fear of God truly lies.
I believe that now everyone understands what kind of information policy and in whose interests the UMH radio group, headed by Mrs. Stroganova, is pursuing. The official website of the holding says that the audience of radio listeners is more than 4.5 million people a day. That is, if you believe these data, UMH DJs unobtrusively record anti-Ukrainian and anti-European messages into the subcortex of more than 4.5 million Ukrainians every day.
Another flagship of the Kurchenko holding does not lag behind its colleagues – the Ukrainian version of Forbes magazine, also headed by Russian media manager Mikhail Kotov, under whom, let me remind you, there was a mass dismissal of journalists of the mentioned publication, and the Forbes publishing house almost took away its license.
Today’s Forbes journalists are apparently forbidden to delve into the intricacies of Ukrainian reality, so they constantly consult on issues of fiscal policy of the Ukrainian state with fugitive criminals,
and are carefully whitening the image of representatives of the avant-garde of the fifth Kremlin column.
While working on the material, I turned to Leonid Bershidsky, a well-known media expert, analyst, former editor-in-chief of the Forbes.ua website, with a request to characterize the people holding key positions in the UMH. Leonid answered me verbatim as follows: “I know Rovensky as a man who once lied that he received an MBA from Harvard, and as a jeans dealer.” I know Kotov as a person who once wanted to hire me to work at slon.ru, but could not explain what, in fact, he could do. Kurchenko recruited these people according to the principle “here’s a lot more money than you’re worth, what are you ready to do?” In Moscow, this formulation of the question predictably served as a filter for negative selection. Muscovites love money, but some still respect themselves, so Kurchenko did not recruit the best. These people are incompetent people for whom honesty is not a core value.”
Now we have to get acquainted with the undisputed leader in the field of introducing aggressive pro-Russian rhetoric into the information space of Ukraine. This is the site Korrespondent.net, which in a number of positions can give odds to such openly propaganda Russian resources as Life News or Vesti.Ru.
The news on the site is not much different from those whose screenshots I gave above – the usual latent Putinophile molasses. But the blogosphere of “Correspondent” is something. It seems that a competition “The most disgusting and deceitful post about Ukraine” is being held among its residents on an ongoing basis.
The star of the Korrespondent blogs is Anatoly Shariy, a scandalous Ukrainian journalist-provocateur who fled abroad allegedly from the Yanukovych regime, which, however, in no way prevented him from achieving enviable synergy with this criminal regime. Shariy’s creations are manipulative, meaningless and designed mainly for Russian jingoists and apologists of Ukrainian separatism. The main thing in them is a catchy, attention-grabbing headline.
It must be admitted that Anatoly succeeds in them. The same cannot be said about the content of publications. Apparently, disciplines such as logic, semantics and rhetoric were not included in the list of subjects studied at the Kiev Tank School, which Anatoly was never able to complete. Recently, Shariy, tormented by despair and a shortage of fried facts, began to write about economics. This is a serious challenge, but our economy has experienced much worse. Well, God bless him, the “refugee”.
Other Korrespondent bloggers are much less relevant than Shariy, but this does not make their publications any less macabre. For example, a certain Andrei Tkachuk seems to be welding to cut the “truth” in the best traditions of the Rossiya 24 TV channel.
Tkachuk is echoed by a certain Anton Davidchenko:
The trio of “cotton” boys would not be a trio if not for a blogger named Yuri Lukashin.
The Korrespondent bloggers do not shy away from bad election PR. The post of journalist Yanina Sokolovskaya, rectangular as a chest of drawers, praising the reputation of the leader of the “Opposition Bloc” Yuri Boyko, never tarnished by oil rigs, deserves special attention. By the way, for the title “We will go into battle smartly,” I personally would nominate Yanina for a Pulitzer – 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 just a person, and my powers are not limitless.
***
As I said, information war is a mirror reflection of real war. It just so happens that Ukrainians have to fight on all fronts with minimal state support, and even more often without it at all.
After all, by and large, if there was a desire, the state could have rid Ukraine of such a massive enemy propaganda conglomerate in a couple of hours. Completely legal, calm and without violating key democratic principles. In particular, according to data announced by the Prosecutor General’s Office of Ukraine, in just one episode of his criminal activity, the owner of UMH Sergei Kurchenko caused damage to the state in the amount of more than UAH 1 billion, and it remains a secret to me why Yarema’s department has not yet seized the assets of the criminal, including at UMH, and did not suspend its activities. However, Yarema’s department, frozen in amber, has no desire to help its people and is unlikely to arise.
No problem. We are so accustomed to the fact that we can only rely on ourselves – on our skills, strengths and resources, that we no longer even pay attention to outright sabotage on the part of the state institutions that we support. And while the state sinks deeper and deeper into lethargic sleep, and the gray-haired, all-honest fathers complain that Ukraine is losing the information war to Russia (*country sponsor of terrorism), we will do something. We will win it.
Sergei Ivanov, for Telecritika
