STB Television Channel Asks President for Protection

Den published this information on March 4. And the STB evening news bulletin broadcast on the same day an unprecedented statement from the channel staff in which they sounded the alarm and "asked the President for protection." For this is not the first bizarre happenstance with the channel, said Mykola Kniazhytsky live. First, the murder of Oleksandr Deineka on February 23 [Oleksandr Deineko was an employee of the Chief Directorate of the Ministry of Internal Affairs for Combating Organized Crime. He left the post a year ago, and when Kniazhytsky was appointed the president of Ukraine's National Television Company, Oleksandr Deineko became one of his advisors. He was supposed to help examine the situation in the company. It is not known whether Deineko was conducting any investigations after Kniazhytsky's team was thrown out of the UT-1 channel. Deineko was killed in the lobby of a building in Radiansky district with two shots in the heart and a coup de grace to the head]. Then the assault on an STB film crew in Lviv. On Monday, March 1, the basement of STB president Kniazhytsky's apartment house caught fire for no apparent reason precisely beneath his apartment. On Wednesday morning came the assault on Dakhno. All this happened within ten days.

The STB statement says that many of the channel staff have been shadowed and studio telephones have been tapped of late. Iryna Vannykova, a newscaster, said Oleksandr Deineka had also repeatedly told her about surveillance a few days before his death. STB president Mykola Kniazhytsky thus comments what has happened:

"We made a 'Sector of Shadow' program on the situation at the Zaporizhzhia ferrous alloys plant. And on Tuesday Dakhno, as STB commercial manager, was served a claim from the BIM law office as part of the lawsuit on behalf of the Ukrainian Credit Bank, their client. The claim essentially dealt with our tarnishing the Ukrainian Credit Bank's business reputation and knowingly spreading false information. The loss was estimated at five million hryvnias. On the same Tuesday he instructed lawyers how to react to the claim under the law. And on Wednesday morning, this simulation of robbery.

"I want to stress that I am not linking the two events, I am simply giving you the facts. Other versions are also possible."

"Do you think this string of 'accidents' is connected with a desire to sink the channel and for someone to take it in hand?"

"Yes, to sink the channel. But the situation is actually much more acute. We must have become a bargaining chip in the struggle of major financial and political clans. Since we stood in the way of all of them, someone decided to provoke a situation that might help some to defeat others in the future, i.e., to turn us against one side or another." Mr. Kniazhytsky also does not rule out the connection of these events with the unwillingness of certain forces to admit him to the National TV and Radio Council, where he is said to be a candidate for the post of chairman.

All this story again proves the danger of being a journalist in Ukraine as the elections approach. The opacity of TV channel funding, dependence of publications on political protection, and close intertwining of shadow, political, and the television businesses gives birth to high-handedness in the national information space. Mr. Kniazhytsky described at his March 3 press conference an unprecedented, truly deadly, situation in the Ukrainian mass media.