The Long War #14
KYIV—Back in 2019, I worked on a piece about the brutal murder of a Ukrainian journalist in Cherkasy, a city in central Ukraine. While I was doing some preliminary research about the regional media scene—almost entirely controlled by local oligarchs and power brokers, it turned out— I stumbled upon this very strange headline: in 2017, 530 journalists in the Cherkasy region had declared ownership of so-called “traumatic weapons”, weapons that look exactly like normal pistols but fire rubber bullets. Cherkasy was a dangerous place for journalists, with several of them beaten or killed over the past few years. Was this an indication of just how afraid they were?
Well, no. Journalists weren’t buying weapons—people were becoming journalists in order to own weapons legally. See, there is this weird thing in Ukraine where having a press card gives you a number of rights, including the right to legally own a traumatic weapon (why anyone thought journalists should be able to own weapons in a country with very strict gun control laws, I have no clue). Combine this with the fact that it is ridiculously easy to get a press card, with Ukrainian investigative outlet Bihus reporting back in 2021 anyone could buy one for about 80 dollars, and you get a lot of people pretending to be journalists just so they can carry a Makarov that fires rubber bullets.
This wasn’t the only way to exploit this press card loophole, however. Another thing the press card gives you is easier access to official institutions and harsher sentences against those who might try to block you—obstructing a journalist’s work is, in Ukraine, a criminal offense. This was put to good use by Kyrylo Stremousov, a bizarre activist in the Kherson region previously known for his embrace of a post-Soviet, neo-Pagan and neo-Stalinist cult. All the way back in 2008, Stremousov had created an organization he described as a press agency. Ten years later, he shot a local journalist using a traumatic weapon (I haven’t seen a confirmation that was carrying legally thanks to his press card, but it seems likely). And, during the 2020 Covic pandemic, he encouraged his followers to use their press cards in order to barge into local hospitals without masks and denounce the disease as either fake or created in US biolabs.
A well-known (and largely despised) presence in Kherson, Stremousov then went on to lead the local Russian occupation administration after the capture of the city by the Russian military, and even paraded in the Kremlin when Vladimir Putin declared the annexation of the Kherson region. Stremousov died just a month later in a car crash (reportedly), days before the Ukrainian military liberated Kherson.
Something to read
Novinarnya (in Ukrainian) / 2,700 kilometers with the volunteers transporting fallen soldiers across Ukraine [Google Translate version] (a grim but incredible example of cooperation between state and civil society in wartime Ukraine: volunteers transporting the bodies of dead soldiers from frontline areas to their native towns)
Zaxid (in Ukrainian) / Hrytsak, Bandera and the "cult of personality" [Google Translate version] (in this op-ed, historian Roman Lehniuk reacts to a controversy surrounding—again—the cult of Stepan Bandera, following the publication of an article on the topic by French daily Le Monde (an English-language version of which you can read here, if you can get past the paywall). There are a lot of interesting things in this op-ed, but it’s essentially an attempt at cooling heads after some Ukrainian public figures described Le Monde’s piece as Russian disinformation, something Roman Lehniuk calls “classic examples of a tribal type of thinking, when the world is clearly divided into "us" and "them", white and black”. And while the dead horse that is Bandera has been thoroughly flogged at this point, how Ukrainian society can handle the inevitable radicalization of minds that comes with the shock of invasion, the fear of death and the anger that followed Russian war crimes is an extremely relevant topic.)
The Wall Street Journal / Russian Spy or Ukrainian Hero? The Strange Death of Denys Kiryeyev
In Moscow’s Shadows / FY23 SCSS#4, 17 January 2023: “Ukrainian Victory!” (“For Ukraine, a minimally acceptable starting point for negotiation would be for Russia a return to the status quo ante 24 February 2022, with the territories seized in 2014 (DNR, LNR and Crimea) all on the table. Such an outcome is dependent on western military assistance. [...] There are minimum preconditions that any Russian negotiated victory must meet if Putin is to justify the costs of the war. We can speculate that this includes not just consolidating existing territorial occupation but also seizing the rest of Donetsk region, including Kramatorsk and Slovyansk. The occupation of Donbas and a land corridor to Crimea represent Russian victory.”)