PACE Experts Were Misinformed, Serhiy Vasyliev Believes

The European community is totally misinformed about what is going on in Ukraine, Interfax-Ukraine quotes Serhiy Vasyliev, chief of the Presidential Administration’s information policies department, as saying. He expressed this opinion last Friday at a Kyiv press conference, commenting on the visit of Ukrainian mass media experts to the Council of Europe, where the CE Committee of Ministers discussed the media situation in Ukraine. Mr. Vasyliev took part in the session of the Council of Europe’s rapporteurs on democratic stability on February 17-18 in Strasbourg.

According to Mr. Vasyliev, the Council of Europe only receives one- sided information from people interested in projecting a negative image of Ukraine. He also noted that his presence in the delegation was caused by a recent PACE resolution that claims that the Presidential Administration exercises censorship and interferes in the media. Mr. Vasyliev said he had had a number of meetings with Council of Europe representatives whom he acquainted with the official documents and press releases that his agency had been sending to all the media for a long time.

He opined that his interlocutors felt embarrassed that “such a respected body as the Council of Europe fell hostage to a group of dishonest journalists who try to resolve their own political problems or fulfill the order of certain political forces.”

Mr. Vasyliev said the Ukrainian journalists came with Mykola Tomenko, chair of the parliamentary committee for the freedom of expression and information, to the Council of Europe to participate in the hearings on the freedom of speech in Europe and pursue their own political interests.

Mr. Vasyliev also emphasized that the Independent Union of Journalists had not been registered under the current law and thus had no right to defend the rights and freedoms of journalists or speak on their behalf. Mykhailo Pohrebinsky, director of the Kyiv Center for Political Research and Conflictology, who visited Strasbourg together with Mr. Vasyliev, said in his turn at the press conference that the journalist delegation led by Tomenko had fulfilled their task “to show Ukraine as the worst country, an Eastern European Iraq.”

The political scientist believes that, in the eyes of the European bureaucracy, Ukraine looks ten times worse than it is in reality.