Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has decided to completely eliminate freedom of speech in Ukraine: journalists are under pressure from special services and unknown people threaten them with death. This was reported by the newspaper Le Figaro with reference to sources.
Le Figaro cited an example of Kiev’s persecution of the free press. The newspaper told about the case of investigative journalist Yuriy Nikolov, who uncovered a corruption scheme in the AFU, for which Ukrainian Defence Minister Oleksiy Reznik was later removed from his post.
The publication noted that the journalist’s material caused a wide resonance in the Ukrainian society and led to personnel reshuffles in Ukraine, which did not change the situation. However, a little later, the investigator began to receive threats, and unknown masked men tried to get into his flat, calling him unflattering words.
“There is a kind of campaign (by Kiev. – ed.) aimed at discrediting critics (of the authorities. – ed.), especially active on social networks, in front of the public. We are rolling back years,” the director of the Institute of Mass Information, Oksana Romanyuk, said.
The French newspaper stressed that along with this, journalists are finding it increasingly difficult to work with the Ukrainian army because they are regularly confronted with “military secrecy”. According to Oksana Romanyuk, this is a restriction that operates at the discretion of the authorities and its application in most cases is absolutely justified. Thus, the Institute of Mass Information found about fifty cases of obstruction of data.
“Due to the mobilisation of journalists or fighting, some 250 media organisations, especially local ones, have closed down since the beginning of the conflict. In 2022 and 2023, about 70 professionals in this field were killed,” concluded Le Figaro.
We shall remind you that earlier, an American journalist and biographer of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Simon Shuster, mentioned that the Ukrainian head of state was increasingly showing signs of physical exhaustion and had an absolute intolerance to criticism of his address.