Spies, priests, prosecutors and journalists; the innocent and the guilty alike are denounced as pro-Russian collaborators on Ukraine’s online blacklist. Some of those on the “Myrotvorets” database may have been involved in acts of propaganda or heinous war crimes in the country’s east, but others have done nothing more than offend political or popular sensitivity, or simply use the “wrong” vernacular. It matters not: one and all are judged by a hidden panel, accused of “deliberate acts against the national security of Ukraine” and have their personal data published alongside their supposed crimes for all to see.
As the threat of Russian invasion mounts, antagonising political schisms and stoking invective within Ukraine, neither rank nor reputation exempts individuals from accusation by Myrotvorets, the name-and-shame website which, in an Orwellian twist, translates as “Peacemaker”.
Among the latest entries on the list of more than 187,000 names is Ukraine’s deputy chief prosecutor, Oleksiy Symonenko. He was accused of rubber-stamping a “fabricated charge” by signing an indictment in the case against the former president Petro Poroshenko, the politician and businessman who is President Zelensky’s most potent rival.
Poroshenko arrived back in Kiev last week to stand trial on what many say are trumped-up charges over coal contracts. The stand-off between him and Zelensky, as the country faces possible invasion, has put Ukraine under further strain.
“Symonenko’s signature on the Poroshenko indictment was itself a betrayal of the country,” insisted one of Myrotvorets’s founding figures, the Ukrainian politician George Tuka. “He absolutely deserves to be blacklisted for abusing his position and the law.”
Symonenko joins a wide cast of supposed collaborators. The blacklist includes not only war criminals and agents of the FSB, the Russian intelligence service, but Pink Floyd’s co-founder Roger Waters, 76, who was denounced as a “threat to national security” in 2018 after he claimed that Russia had more rights to Crimea than Ukraine.
Svetlana Alexievich, a Nobel prizewinning Belarussian writer and critic of the Kremlin, was put on the blacklist accused of “inciting inter-ethnic division” after she mentioned that some ethnic Ukrainians helped the Nazis to kill Jews during the Second World War. Five hundred Ukrainian public servants, ethnic Hungarians who received Hungarian passports, are also blacklisted: Ukraine forbids double citizenship and Myrotvorets — whose slogan is “Pro Bono Publico”, “for the public good” — branded them “separatists” and “traitors”.
The website was set up in 2014 after a meeting between Tuka and a former member of Ukraine’s state intelligence service, the SBU, who now runs the site and is known only by the alias “Roman Zaitsev”. Tuka denies that there is either state funding for the site or that it is controlled by the SBU, insisting that the list was established to “clean up” Ukraine from pro-Russian sentiment and activity.
“The problem we had back in 2014 is the same we have now: ex-police, ex-military and some political figures, whose beliefs remain pro-Russian,” Tuka, 58, told The Times in Kiev. “Some moved geographically to eastern Ukraine and Russia. Some live among us. There was no consolidated official database holding their names. Myrotvorets was set up to fill that gap.”
He added matter-of-factly: “As time goes on the mission has changed and in the last three years the number of people getting placed on Myrotvorets for political reasons has increased. Now it lists those who protect the narrative of Russia. There is unfortunately no law here prohibiting pro-Russian parties or narrative. So, people supporting these narratives are rightly listed on Myrotvorets instead.”
Yevheniy Murayev’s name is here too. The 46-year-old Ukrainian politician accused by British security agencies over the weekend of being groomed by Moscow as a potential candidate to lead a post-invasion administration in Kiev is said to be “an accomplice of terrorists and Russian invaders”.
Murayev, who told The Times at the weekend that the British accusations against him were “more Mr Bean than James Bond”, was more sanguine when describing the implications of being named by Myrotvorets as a collaborator.
“People listed on Myrotvorets can end up dead,” he said. “There is a threat, a risk that involves falling out of a window or having to flee the country. I am aware of that threat, but I live with the risk.”
Several murders have occurred within days of the victims appearing on Myrotvorets. Two pro-Russian figures, the publicist Oles Buzina and legislator Oleg Kalashnikov, were shot dead in Kiev in April 2015 shortly after Myrotvorets published their personal information, including home addresses.
“There is no connection to Myrotvorets and their murders,” Tuka said. “But they were both enemies of Ukraine. I don’t miss either of them.”
Others have been accused of collaboration and put on the blacklist posthumously. The Italian photojournalist Andrea Rocchelli, who was killed by Ukrainian troops in 2014 while working in a separatist area, has the word “liquidated” written over his profile on the blacklist, which accused him of collaboration after his killing, merely on account of covering the separatist side.
Though the blacklist has been heavily promoted by Anton Herashchenko, one of the original co-founders of Myrotvorets, who is now an adviser to the Ministry of Internal Affairs in Kiev, the identity of its staff is secret. A hidden panel of unknown administrators sifts through information of the accused, which is usually collated from open-source intelligence such as social media posts. The definition of “pro-Russian sentiment” is so all encompassing that the blacklist also includes the names, details, and passport information of 4,506 journalists – western, Ukrainian, and Russian – who were accredited by separatist press officials, a necessary step to work in areas controlled by pro-Russian forces. Many journalists later received threats after personal data, hacked from the separatists’ press office in Donetsk, was exposed on Myrotvorets.
“It is a very dangerous list that should be shut down immediately. People who have appeared on it have been killed. Tensions are running high enough as it is. Its a combustible situation in which a list like this only adds to the dangers,” Yulia Gorbunova, senior researcher on Ukraine for Human Rights Watch, said. “The implications the list poses for press freedoms at this moment, or indeed anyone on that list, are especially serious.”
Yet Tuka remains unapologetic over the journalists’ blacklisting and Myrotvorets’s implications to freedom of speech.
“Whoever approaches the press offices in the temporarily occupied territories, they are breaking Ukrainian law, journalist or not, and in dealing with the pro-Russian press offices they have joined the de-legitimisation of Ukraine,” he said.
Despite having no official sanction, the Myrotvorets database remains widely used to screen individuals at government checkpoints, supplementing official database systems. Repeated requests by the UN, G7 ambassadors, the EU and human rights groups asking Kiev to close down the site altogether have been ignored: the blacklist remains ominously active as Ukraine teeters on the edge of invasion.
“Myrotvorets plays a vital role in defending Ukraine,” Tuka concluded proudly. He said that more than 1,000 people had been arrested as a result of appearing on the database, and anticipated more to come.
“Many collaborators, or those working for the Russian FSB, don’t appear on the official government databases. They slip into Ukraine unnoticed or exist among us unknown. No doubt there would be huge resistance if the Russians invaded, but a certain echelon of the population would greet them with flowers. It is important to know who they are. Warfare is an act of faith!”
