Ukraine blacklisted Western journalists and Israeli political scientists

Petro Poroshenko promised the new British Ambassador to exclude BBC journalists from the “black list”. Photo: The official website of the President of Ukraine

The first large-scale list of sanctions by the Ukrainian authorities raised many questions from the world community. AT "black list" along with leaders of the self-proclaimed republics of the DPR and LPR, as well as a large number of Russian officials, including Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov and State Duma Speaker Sergei Naryshkin, several journalists from the European media and a number of Israeli citizens.

Three employees of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), as well as two journalists from the Spanish newspaper El Pais and a correspondent from Germany, as the office of Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko later announced, will be removed from the list. This decision was made after the actions of the Ukrainian authorities were criticized by the representative on freedom of the media in the OSCE (Organization for Security and Cooperation) Dunja Mijatovic.

“Freedom of the press is an absolute value for me,” Poroshenko told the British ambassador on Thursday during the presentation of his credentials, instructing the National Security and Defense Council (NSDC) to exclude journalists from Europe from the sanctions list.

The Minister of Information Policy of Ukraine, Yurii Stets, also acknowledged that the sanctions list requires changes.

“Sanctions against so-called journalists like propagandist Kiselev (the leading TV channel Rossiya and the general director of the Rossiya Segodnya news agency) must and will be applied. Regarding journalists who profess the standards of the profession, they will not be on this list,” Stets wrote on his page in Facebook.

Among those who, according to the compilers of the sanctions list, also threaten the national security and territorial integrity of Ukraine, were six Russian-speaking Israelis: editor-in-chief of the Kursor news agency Max Lurie, owner of Eton-TV and editor-in-chief of the Echo newspaper Alexander Ronkin, employee of the Israeli First Radio Nata Potemkina, publicist Vladimir Bukarsky, as well as political scientists Avigdor Eskin and David Eidelman.

Since September 16, they are all banned from entering the territory of Ukraine.

To Donetsk and Lugansk - to elections

Max Lurie said that in the fall of 2014 he visited the so-called DPR, where he collected materials for his book “Donetsk without war.”

“Due to the fact that there was no other legal opportunity to get into the DPR, I found a workaround by becoming accredited as an election observer. Since I was traveling on my own initiative, I took a leave of absence from the publication where I work,” reported lurie.

According to the journalist, despite the “incident,” he respects the current Ukrainian authorities.

“If officials believe that such decrees strengthen the viability and territorial integrity of Ukraine, so be it. But, if it were up to me, I would not immediately include journalists in the sanctions lists, but would invite them to the ATO (anti-terrorist operation) zone to show what the situation looks like through the eyes of the Ukrainian authorities. But those who didn’t come, I would put on the “black list” - as non-professionals who are actually fulfilling the order of one side and don’t want to see anything other than this,” suggests Lurie.

After Poroshenko ordered the lifting of sanctions against BBC journalists, the editor-in-chief of Kursor expressed hope that “the filter has already been turned on” and the restrictions can be revised.

The co-owner of several media outlets, Alexander Ronkin, explained that he was invited to the elections in Lugansk by the city election commission as an independent journalist. Following the trip, a documentary essay-report “Lugansk. Through the eyes of an outside witness."

“We spent one day in Lugansk and left in the evening before the end of the elections, so I was physically unable to control the election commission or observe the counting of votes. I couldn’t control the work of the polling stations either, since I spent the whole day filming everything I saw around me - says ronkin. – I deliberately refrained from voice-over commentary, giving the audience the opportunity to evaluate for themselves the events taking place in Lugansk. “I believe that I did my journalistic job honestly and did not violate the duties of an independent journalist in any way.”

According to Ronkin, officials of today's Ukraine, including independent journalists in the sanctions lists, “are becoming similar to the regimes that they themselves criticize, and are moving further and further away from the norms of Western democracy that they so strive to conform to.”

A political decision and an iron curtain?

Political analyst David Aidelman, commenting on Poroshenko’s decree, said that he had never been in Donetsk or Lugansk, and therefore could not be an observer at the elections in the DPR and the LPR.

“The last time I visited Ukraine was in May of this year. The last city I visited was Kyiv. The last people I communicated with on Ukrainian soil were employees of the Prime Minister’s Office. Apparently, I carried out subversive work among them,” wrote adelman В Facebook.

Eidelman’s colleague, publicist Avigdor Eskin called personal sanctions against journalists an attempt to “shut their mouths” and build an information “iron curtain” on the part of the Ukrainian authorities.

“I have been declared an enemy of this regime, and I am very glad that they perceive me this way. This is recognition of the effectiveness of my activities.

They once again showed that they are afraid of the word. They included in the list people who never violated any laws and always behaved quite loyally, even within the framework of a dialogue with their representatives.

However, any exposure of the true nature of the current authorities of Ukraine leads to the fact that you end up on the “black list,” Eskin said on Sputnik radio.

Unlike the previous decisions of the leadership of Ukraine, which restricted the entry of individual citizens, mainly from Russia, in the new list of sanctions almost 400 individuals and more 100 legal entities.

The list, among others, included large Russian airlines Aeroflot and Transaero, as well as Donavia and Severstal. Experts note that the wording of the sanctions regulation is not yet clear: what exactly is prohibited for airlines - only transit through Ukrainian airspace or flights that end directly in Ukraine.

The sanctions, along with visa restrictions, provide for the freezing of assets, temporary restrictions on the use of the property in Ukraine and the prevention of the export of capital outside Ukraine.

“If the latter, that is, if Aeroflot, Transaero and other airlines are prohibited from flying to Ukraine, then, of course, this will have a very serious impact on passenger traffic between Russia and Ukraine, because in fact only Ukraine International Airlines will remain,” which will fly in the Moscow-Kiev direction,” said Sergei Sumlenny, head of the Kiev bureau of the Heinrich Böll Foundation Russian service BBC.

At the same time, large Russian banks (Sberbank, VTB, Vnesheconombank), unlike similar Western sanctions lists, are not on the Ukrainian one. The largest of the sanctioned banks are Rossiya, Bank of Moscow, Ak Bars and SMP-Bank. Analysts explain this decision by the presence of a number of leading Russian banks in Ukraine, whose inclusion in the “black list” could cause panic among depositors and problems in the interbank Ukrainian market.

Experts in general do not see in the new Ukrainian list of particular economic motives, calling the decision of the authorities purely political.