In Ukraine, Western media support grants may fund censorship, cronyism and corruption

I doubt that the founder of the television station where I worked was guilty of rape, as accused. But censorship, cronyism, corruption? I have no doubt.

Espreso TV, a small, independent channel based in Kyiv, Ukraine, built a democratic reputation in early 2014 by livestreaming footage of the Euromaidan Revolution that ousted corrupt former President Victor Yanukovych. Its coverage of the revolution, and the revolution itself, inspired me to quit my job at the nation’s third-largest television channel and take a chance on smaller, poorer Espreso TV. In December 2014, I was hired as head of the investigative department. The editor-in-chief who recruited me promised there would be no political interference in my projects.

Despite the bravery of its cameramen during the revolution, it became clear that the real interest of the channel’s management was not in a free press, but in free cash. Its plan for “independent journalism” was little more than a scheme to cash in on Western values in the form of US and EU grants.

But initially, station management kept its word. I was allowed to choose my own team of six reporters, directors and cameramen, and we were allowed to choose our own topics and conduct our own investigations. In more than 40 episodes over the next six months, our investigative program, “Without Words,” explored the breadth of corruption in Ukraine. It exposed environmental workers selling contaminated lumber from the Chornobyl exclusion zone. It showed duplicitous volunteers pocketing donations meant for Ukrainian troops. It revealed how assets were being stripped from one of the few state-run plants equipped to repair disabled tanks.

Every week our investigations illustrated how, as the American ambassador to Ukraine recently put it, corruption is a greater threat to Ukrainian national security than Russian troops.

All seemed to be going well until March, when an Interpol announcement rocked our staff. The agency’s “Red Notice,” essentially an international arrest warrant, charged Mykola Kniazhytsky, a Ukrainian parliamentarian and the station’s founder and de facto owner, with the rape of a minor in Cambodia.

Members of Ukraine’s parliament are forbidden from owning any enterprise, including a television channel. But politicians routinely evade the law through elaborate incorporation maneuvers aimed at technical compliance. As a legal entity, Espreso TV doesn’t exist. It is registered as Goldberry LLC and Kniazhytsky’s wife, Larysa, holds a 99 percent majority interest. Though Ms. Kniazhysky has never made any public comment on or about her channel, but her husband appears there nearly every day. The TV studio is conveniently located in the basement of his parliamentary office.

The rape charge was trumped up – the work of a former business associate, Kniazhysky claimed – and Interpol soon retracted the warrant. But the scandal dredged up stories of what had turned the two former associates against each other. Konstantin Kagalovsky was the Russian businessman who founded Ukraine’s TVi television channel and had hired Kniazhytsky as general director. During the pre-Revolution years, as then-President Yanukovych tightened the vise on independent journalism, TVi was one of the few channels reporting critically about the government. According to Kniazhytsky, the disagreement began when Kagalovsky demanded that a Russian propagandist be given a job as an anchor at TVi. Kagalovsky said the conflict resulted from Kniazhytsky’s embezzlement of funds showered on TVi by the West in support of its independent editorial stance.

The feud also cast a new light on accounting practices at Espreso TV and ultimately led me to the conclusion that, in Ukraine, pro-democracy journalism and corruption are not mutually exclusive activities.

At Espreso TV, I was hired at a comfortable monthly salary of 15,000 hryvnia, or about $750. Oddly, on my official employment contract, this sum was not written – just “salary by agreement.” Each month I would receive about 2,400 hryvnia ($110) through my company bank card and the rest in cash placed in an envelope. Apparently, it was a way for the channel to reduce its payroll tax. The new Ukrainian parliament – of which Kniazhytsky is a member – put special emphasis on such violations this year, setting a punishment of up to two years of prison for hiding wages.

Speaking to colleagues, I learned that these practices were nothing new for Kniazhytsky. One former TVi employee from Kniazhytsky’s tenure there said she once saw the sum of 700,000 hryvnia on her company bank card. The huge amount disappeared the next day. In April 2013, as questions about the ultimate destination of TVi’s grants and income became harder to deflect, suddenly men in ski masks stormed the station, chiefly targeting and destroying financial records. Artem Shevchenko, Kniazhytsky’s second in command and close confidant (even baptizing each other’s children), declared himself head of the channel.

Another TVi veteran from that era, who also worked at Espreso TV, said that following the takeover, he saw Shevchenko regularly receive duffel bags packed with cash in large denominations. Thirty-six well-known journalists quit in protest of the affair. The station closed soon after, and Kniazhytsky founded Espreso TV in November 2013. That year, according to his parliamentary financial disclosure, he had only 10,000 hryvnia, or about $1,250, in his bank account.

Soon after the rape charge, Espreso TV underwent wrenching changes. Vadim Denysenko, the channel’s editor-in-chief and minority owner, the one who had recruited me and promised programming independence, abruptly left, citing misunderstandings about the channel’s policies. Fewer than 24 hours later, Kniazhytsky ordered our team to conduct, in his words, a “political investigation” of a rival journalist whom I knew to be an honest man. I refused. Soon our program was suffering unbridled censorship.

The first major instance came March 25, and involved a story about the director of the national opera, Anatoliy Solovianenko. Our investigation found he had opened a private firm in the opera house. This firm won all the contracts for exclusive VIP events there involving then-President Yanukovych and his ally, Russian President Vladimir Putin. The firm also resold goods and materials. Our program was prepared to report that opera funds, provided by the public, had been used to purchase strange things – raw leather the size of a soccer field, for example – which later could not be located.

Unluckily for our program, Kniazhytsky chairs the parliamentary committee on culture, which is responsible for all cultural programming. I was ordered not to broadcast the material. Later the same week, Solovianenko was awarded the Order of Merit from the president’s administration for his fine work in the field of culture. Furious, my team shared the censored material on Facebook. We later heard from journalists at other channels that their work on the same subject also had been censored.

Soon after this episode, Espreso TV management started sabotaging the program in another way. The objective seemed to be the destruction of the program’s ratings, which, inconveniently for them, were among the highest at the channel. The managers randomly changed the program’s airtime. One week, for instance, they promoted an upcoming investigation at 6:30 p.m. on Friday, then, at the last minute, and with no announcement, changed the actual airtime to 6 p.m. on Monday.

The next major incident of censorship occurred in late May in a story alleging corruption at the state rail company. Our investigation included embarrassing footage of a railway manager tasked with running tenders, wearing a $9,000 watch and driving an imported convertible sports car. Our team worked tirelessly to develop this story, and we even landed an exclusive interview with Andrey Pyvovarsyi, the new Minister of Infrastructure and a young reformer who talked frankly and openly about the need to reform the state-run rail system. Even though the Minister himself supported our investigation, Espreso TV did not. Katerina Ermolovich, the channel director who enforced the censorship, didn’t beat around the bush this time. Espreso TV refused to air the episode for a simple reason: “It will cost us a lot.” I learned later that TVi also closed an investigative project called “Exclamation Mark” after it reported on railway corruption.

From previous experience, the channel managers knew they couldn’t keep us from sharing the material through social media, so they decided to shut down the entire program based on its “low ratings.” Two weeks after I shared this material on social media, Espreso TV canceled all my programs, even a non-investigative program that still had high ratings, without notice or reason given. They didn’t fire me, possibly because they feared a scandal – but they left me with nothing to do.

While killing the stories our team developed, Espreso TV nonetheless used our work to apply for independent media support grants from the West. Ermolovich frequently bragged about American money the channel expected to receive. In March, management applied for grants of more than $100,000 from the U.S. Embassy to support the channel’s investigative work. Through a nonprofit organization unknown to me, the channel applied for additional grants from the European Union to support the second canceled program I headed.

Now Espreso TV only has one remaining investigative program, “Reportage and Investigations With Artem Shevchenko” – the Kniazhytsky loyalist hardly attuned to Western values. (When Kniazhytsky was accused of rape, Shevchenko leaped to his boss’s defense, saying that “to accuse someone of rape in Cambodia is similar to accusing them of smoking marijuana in Holland.”) Shevchenko recently became spokesman for Interior Minister Arsen Avakov, a blatant conflict of interest for a purported investigative journalist.

I hope that now, with no credible investigative programs on its schedule, Espreso TV will withdraw its applications for international funding. But knowing how the channel does business, I don’t count on it.