Before the war began, the Kremlin paid significant attention to disinformation about the reasons for the attack on Ukraine. According to the rules of Russian propaganda, there must be a lot of lies. This is necessary to confuse the target audience. People should choose not between lies and truth, but between different versions of lies. This makes it harder for them to get to the real reasons or events.
Trying to explain the upcoming aggression against its neighbor, Putin offered his compatriots to believe in the scary American biolabs on Ukrainian territory, the rise of neo-Nazism, the need to protect the population of Donbas, NATO expansion, and even Ukraine’s attempts to create a nuclear bomb. A few days before the invasion, Russian special services staged several shellings of their territory supposedly by Ukraine. But this Gleiwitz incident was done so clumsily and shoddily that not even Russian Z-patriots believed it.
In fact, Putin’s decision to start a full-scale war was influenced by entirely different factors. The first (but not the main) of these was Zelensky’s victory in the presidential elections in April 2019.
The Kremlin really wanted Zelensky to win. President Poroshenko, despite all his flaws, consistently pursued a policy that Putin did not like. He strengthened the Ukrainian army, under him the economy grew for 30 consecutive months, he achieved autocephaly for the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, and visa-free travel for citizens to the European Union. If the situation continued at this pace, Ukraine could well receive a roadmap for joining the EU by the end of the second presidential term.
In anticipation of the presidential elections, in March 2019, the chief editor of the Russian radio station “Echo of Moscow,” Alexey Venediktov, stated that Putin is satisfied with any president of Ukraine who would make the country weaker.
“I understand that anyone but Poroshenko. In my opinion, speaking of our, pro-Russian candidate for president of Ukraine, we have Mr. Chaos. The more chaos, the weaker the candidate, the more Putin thinks it is beneficial for Russia. We do not have our own candidate: Tymoshenko, Zelensky, Boyko, some other people − it does not matter. Mr. Chaos satisfies us,” said Venediktov.
Of course, Zelensky’s victory itself was not one of the reasons for the war. But it created the necessary conditions. An incompetent president of Ukraine was Putin’s hope that Poroshenko’s policy towards Europe would, at the very least, slow down. It would also be desirable for the new president to improve relations with Russia. To begin with, it would be good for Ukraine to forget about Crimea and come to terms with the separatist authorities in Donbas.
The maximum program for Putin envisaged appointing Viktor Medvedchuk as the head of the government or the return to power of former President Viktor Yanukovych. Either way, but Venediktov was right: to begin with, the Russian leadership very much wanted the situation in Ukraine to worsen.
For some time, Putin waited. He hoped that he would somehow be able to expand the political influence of Ukrainian parties loyal to the Kremlin. For this, at the next parliamentary elections in Ukraine, pro-Russian parties had to get the percentage of votes that would allow them to claim participation in the parliamentary coalition. If this succeeded, then Medvedchuk could hope to become the speaker of the parliament or vice-premier. Putin really hoped to return representatives of pro-Russian forces to the executive power of Ukraine.
To strengthen Medvedchuk’s influence, Putin gifted his wife − former TV presenter Oksana Marchenko − the right to develop one of the three largest oil fields in Russia, the Gavrikovskoye field in the Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug. According to Putin’s plan, Marchenko’s Cypriot company would extract oil in Russia, sell it, and use the proceeds to buy and finance TV channels in Ukraine.
For some time, this scheme worked successfully. Even under Poroshenko, Medvedchuk began to buy up information TV channels. In a relatively short time through front men, he became the owner of the television channels NewsOne, ZIK, and “112 Ukraine”. In November 2019, already under Zelensky, Medvedchuk opened two more TV channels: “First Independent” and UkrLive.
Notably, all pro-Russian media resources, including Medvedchuk’s channels, ruthlessly criticized Poroshenko before the presidential election and assessed Zelensky’s prospects quite neutrally. This continued after the new president was elected. The criticism of Poroshenko was meant to maximally reduce the percentage of his party in the upcoming parliamentary elections. Zelensky was still being observed, obviously, in the calculation of possible participation in a future coalition and government formation.
Everything changed on July 22, 2019, after the vote count in the snap elections to the Verkhovna Rada. The pro-Russian bloc of parties “Opposition Platform − For Life” got not so little: 13.05% of the votes. This allowed them to bring 43 deputies into parliament. However, Shariy’s party, another pro-Kremlin force, did not overcome the 5-percent barrier in the 2019 parliamentary elections, receiving only 2.23% of the votes.
The real triumphator of the snap parliamentary elections was the pro-presidential party “Servant of the People,” which for the first time in the history of Ukraine managed to form a mono-majority. Zelensky’s party received 43.16% of the votes. Together with deputies elected in single-mandate constituencies, this was enough to form a majority without the participation of other parties. This meant that Putin’s desire to influence the decisions of the Ukrainian government would not be realized, at least for the next 4 years.
Since Medvedchuk and Boyko no longer hoped to get positions in the government or even in the leadership of the parliament, pro-Russian TV channels began to gradually criticize the president. It is worth mentioning again that Zelensky is very sensitive to criticism. He simply hated any critical statements about himself, broadcasted from the TV channels of Poroshenko and Medvedchuk. But since Poroshenko belongs to the pro-Western opposition and has quite a high authority, including in Washington and European capitals, his media resources cannot be simply shut down, as somewhere in Venezuela or Azerbaijan. This would immediately cause a scandal and accusations of oppressing freedom of speech. The President of Ukraine, as we know, positions himself as a democratic leader.
But if the TV channels of the hated Poroshenko cannot be shut down, then this prohibition does not apply to Medvedchuk’s channels. Viktor Medvedchuk made a big mistake. He somehow began to think that his status as “Putin’s godfather” and the unofficial representative of the Kremlin in Ukraine gave him certain privileges that Zelensky would not dare to violate. But it turned out that the Ukrainian president is absolutely indifferent to this status.
Zelensky did not want to tolerate and watch how Medvedchuk’s propagandists systematically destroy his rating from their TV screens. The first year of his presidency, on the wave of fantastically high popularity among the people, he could still ignore this. However, criticism on TV screens was increasing, including news stories about corruption in power. The last straw was information that Zelensky’s father was very upset by journalists’ attacks on his son. Moreover, it was about Medvedchuk’s TV channels, which Olexandr Zelensky liked to watch until a certain time. There were even rumors that the president’s father had a heart attack because of this.
On February 2, 2021, the president initiated a decision by the National Security and Defense Council to impose sanctions against people’s deputy Taras Kozak, TV channels “112 Ukraine”, NewsOne, and ZIK. Kozak fell under sanctions because he was formally the owner of these TV channels, not Medvedchuk or his wife Oksana Marchenko. A similar ownership scheme existed for Poroshenko’s channel. Until 2021, “Pryamiy” was registered to the former head of the Kyiv City Administration, Volodymyr Makeenko, although Poroshenko actually managed everything.
It is interesting how the father of the Ukrainian president reacted to the sanctions and the shutdown of Medvedchuk’s TV channels. The next day, Olexandr Zelensky told journalists that he supports the ban on TV channels “112 Ukraine”, NewsOne, and ZIK, because their rhetoric does not correspond to reality.
“The way they pour dirt on him, there’s nothing like it in any country… They pour the dirtiest dirt… They say, for instance, corruption has increased sixfold. But you look at the international results − it’s risen by three ranks,” said the elder Zelensky.
The closure of Viktor Medvedchuk’s TV channels had far-reaching consequences. With his decision, Volodymyr Zelensky showed Putin that, unlike Poroshenko, he would not allow propagandists to destroy his rating and destabilize the political situation. Of course, the master of the Kremlin understood that the lack of media support puts an end to his plans to bring pro-Russian forces to power in Ukraine. In other words, Putin lost the last illusions that Medvedchuk could ever take a high post in the Ukrainian government.
Should pro-Russian TV channels have been closed? Of course, but only if you have a strong army and are ready for the consequences. It was long clear that Medvedchuk is a traitor, and his media projects are funded by Russia. But Zelensky hardly thought about the long-term consequences and definitely was not prepared for a possible escalation of military actions. Since the Ukrainian president lacked sufficient experience in international politics and surrounded himself with equally incompetent friends, he seemed to think that everything would somehow calm down. Zelensky’s logic was childishly simple and naive: war benefits no one, so Putin will not start it.