‘Moscow wasn’t built in a day either’ Meet the ‘beautiful girls’ hired out of school to be the faces of Russia’s new pro-Kremlin TV stations in occupied Ukraine
Russian media agencies first started cropping up in Ukraine’s occupied territories in 2014, and they’ve only proliferated since Moscow’s full-scale invasion last year. Most of these outlets take the form of TV channels, in part because television broadcasting works more reliably in conflict zones than Internet access. The networks employ the same style and repeat the same narratives as Russia’s federal media back home; programming aims to convince viewers that the Russian army’s actions are good and just, whereas the Ukrainian army is behaving destructively and nonsensically. The independent outlet Verstka Media recently published an investigation into the people running these channels and the locals working for them. Meduza is publishing an abridged translation of the story.
Note: This article contains offensive language.
‘My deepest wish is for Donetsk to return to Ukraine’
In May 2021, the Ukrainian YouTube channel “National Platform for Recovery and Unity” published a news segment about an honors student at a university in Mariupol.
The student, 19-year-old Ksenia Misyurevich, had begun working at Mariupol Television, the city’s main Ukrainian-language broadcaster, concurrently with her studies. She hosted morning programs and news broadcasts, and she was the youngest journalist working at the station.
In the clip, Misyurevich says that she leads an active life in Mariupol but misses her parents and dreams about returning home to Kirovske, her hometown near Donetsk, which was in the conflict zone at the time. “Every day, I wake up with the thought of how cool it would be if Donetsk became part of Ukraine again,” she says, wiping tears from her face. “That’s my dearest wish.”
The Mariupol channel where Ksenia worked stopped broadcasting in early March 2022, when the entire city was left without power due to Russian artillery shelling.
Ksenia says she spent the first few months of the full-scale invasion at home in Kirovske. Her father, a miner who had long lived in the Donetsk region, went to fight against the Ukrainian army as a volunteer. He was killed a month and a half after he left. “We’ll honor your traditions forever,” Ksenia wrote in a social media group called Heroes’ Memorial. “There’s nobody like you left.”
Several months later, in August 2022, Ksenia returned to what was then a destroyed Mariupol, where many areas still lacked water and electricity. When she was invited to host a news program on a new network called Mariupol 24 that adopted the slogan “The first to be liberated,” she agreed.
Just like that, Ksenia found herself working as a newscaster again. Now, however, she was hosting pro-Russian segments about how quickly the city was coming back to life under its new leadership.
She later wrote on Telegram that she received multiple threats from acquaintances, classmates, and former colleagues after her first few broadcasts. Initially, she said, she found it difficult to cope. But now, since she’s started traveling to film “shoots with top figures,” networking with industry leaders, and growing professionally, she “couldn’t care less” about criticism from Ukrainians who fled the city.
She ended the post with an excerpt from a poem by the poet Pavel Beldyugov:
You’re one way, we’re another.
That’s just how it is — go fuck yourself.
‘My mission is to put people in a positive mood’
In August 2022, Mariupol had barely started coming back to life after Russia’s months-long siege earlier in the year. As Ksenia Misyurevich told Verstka Media, it was “desperate TV broadcasters” who didn’t want to leave their city who launched Mariupol 24. To furnish the channel’s studio, they gathered all of the surviving furniture and equipment they could find in other partially destroyed offices; their first broadcasts were filmed using security cameras, Misyurevich said.
Journalists from the TV station St. Petersburg, including its general director, Alexander Malkevich, took the young reporters under their wing, while the New Media Development Fund, a project founded by Malkevich, started providing support to media projects in Russia’s “new territories.” The organization delivered humanitarian aid to the journalists, transported them to training programs in Russia, and introduced them to editors from the country’s federal news channels. Once, for example, the fund paid for Ksenia to travel to the TEFI television awards in St. Petersburg, where she mingled with Russia’s “media society.” “It was a crazy, huge event! When I, a girl from the provinces, take pictures and drink cocktails with Mariya Sittel, that’s just — wow,” she told Verstka Media.
In early September, Malkevich came to the Mariupol 24 studio wearing camouflage and a t-shirt with the letter Z on the chest. He recorded a video with Ksenia, introducing her to followers as a new “star” and as the “face of Mariupol,” pointing out that the “occupied territories” could provide an “amazing career boost for people with strong spirits.” A month later, the New Media Development Fund installed 19 new windows in the Mariupol 24 office, and Ksenia appeared on Malkevich’s channel again. Malkevich said in the clip that Misyurevich was fulfilling an “almost therapeutic mission” for Mariupol residents and “reviving them with her energy.”
The new channel soon began broadcasting reports about humanitarian aid from Russia’s regions, about people injured by the “aggression of the Ukrainian military,” and about how the city was being rebuilt. On Mariupol 24’s group on the Russian social media site VKontakte, Verstka Media found roughly 100 clips about restoration work being conducted in the so-called Luhansk and Donetsk “people’s republics.” In this footage, the journalists refer to Ukraine’s Russian-occupied regions as “liberated” territories. Areas of the front under Ukrainian control, meanwhile, are identified as “under Ukrainian occupation.”
Before the September “referendum” on joining Russia, Mariupol 24 aired a report about how many residents had gotten up early to vote in favor of becoming part of Russia. “I support the Russian Federation — Mr. Vladimir Putin himself. I’m voting for him,” one voter tells a reporter, standing in front of broken windows.
In a segment titled “Relevant,” the station broadcasts regular reports from the Russian Defense Ministry about Russian missile strikes and the “destruction of the enemy.” It also shows excerpts from Putin’s speeches, as well as interviews with high-ranking officials from the occupied “DNR.” In a different segment, called “The People’s Opinion,” journalists talk with city residents about smaller-scale topics, such as whether they like Russian pelmeni (dumplings), how they feel about April Fool’s Day, and what they’ve been dreaming about at night. Occasionally, they touch on political issues, such as if residents consider Russia to be a key geopolitical player, if it feels like “peacetime” in the city, and if they feel a need to observe Valentine’s Day even though it’s a Western holiday.
Ksenia told Verstka Media that Mariupol 24 and 6TV, a channel from Horlivka (another occupied city in the Donetsk region), work in conjunction with First Republican, a Donetsk channel that first appeared in May 2014 and billed itself as an “opposition Ukrainian outlet.” The journalists hold joint planning meetings and coordinate their news segments with the company that owns them; about 50 percent of the content they air is the same, Ksenia said.
She also told Verstka that residents sometimes criticize Mariupol 24 reporters for being unobjective in their reporting, but she disagrees. “Occasionally we come to the studio after a shoot and discuss with our colleagues that there’s no way to hide what’s going on — people see with their own eyes that things aren’t perfect,” she says. “But we try, of course, to skip all the empty talk and be close to the people. Although at the end of the day, media — including TV — is a means of influencing human minds.”
Photographs of journalists who work in Ukraine’s annexed territories, as well as their personal data, have been published on Ukrainian sites numerous times. Ksenia told Verstka Media that she’s also received threats, and that she never knows who or what might be waiting for her when she arrives home late at night. But nonetheless, she says, she doesn’t regret returning to the city.
“I just got tired of running,” Ksenia admits. “I don’t want to flee to anywhere, to listen to anybody. I want to live at home — on my land, in Mariupol, in Donetsk, in the Donbas. It doesn’t matter to me anymore. I’m practically trying not to get absorbed into the news at all, into politics… I’m already tired of all of it. I want to live, to do the work I like to do, to go on [video] shoots, to sit in the studio, and to talk with people.”
Ksenia says her mission remains “to put people in a positive mood,” so they don’t feel as if “everything is all bad.” “So, viewers start to believe that it’s all going to happen, just not immediately,” she tells Verstka Media. “Moscow wasn’t built in a day, either. So, now is the time to live our lives, to work, and to watch Mariupol 24. There are some beautiful girls there.”
A Prigozhin-linked ‘debunker’
Alexander Malkevich, the media financier who’s taken the Mariupol 24 team under his wing, is involved in TV projects in other occupied territories as well. Known for his work as a media manager, political strategist, member of Russia’s Civic Chamber, and the head of the TV channel St. Petersburg, Malkevich bills himself publicly as an “exposer of fake news” and a “defender of national values.”
Since the start of the war in Ukraine, Malkevich has proposed creating a “Russian people’s cyber-army aimed at incapacitating Ukrainian Telegram channels”; tallied up the number of “false” stories circulating about the war and accused the foreign media of spreading them; and taught his followers to observe “digital hygiene” measures — for example, turning off all updates to prevent their devices from becoming “zombie bots that could be used for cyber-attacks.”
In addition to Mariupol 24, Malkevich was also involved in the creation of a TV channel called ZaTV in the Zaporizhzhia region, as well as one called Tavriya in the Kherson region. At the same time, he denies having control over the day-to-day work of these stations. One message from the Russian Civic Chamber that he reposted on Telegram emphasized that “Malkevich just shares recommendations.”
Through his organization, the New Media Development Fund, Malkevich provides humanitarian aid to media agencies in the occupied territories as well as assisting news outlets in the border towns in Russia’s Belgorod region by buying them monitors, hard drives, and other computer equipment. He first announced the New Media Development Foundation’s work in the occupied regions on September 29, 2022, saying he was just “accepting a proposal from colleagues to lead” the foundation.
In fact, he had created the foundation himself five years earlier in Omsk, Russia, where he headed a local news station called Channel 12. According to the SPARK-Interfax database, the organization was initially called the “Regional Initiatives Development Fund” and provided financial services. A founding member was one of Malkevich’s subordinates, Irina Yudina, who was later charged with embezzling state funds while working at Channel 12.
The organization was renamed to the New Media Development Foundation in late October 2022. That same year, an application from the organization appeared on Russia’s presidential grants website. The foundation requested nearly 5 million rubles (about $62,000) to train 50 “young specialists from the Donetsk People’s Republic, the Luhansk People’s Republic, and the Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions who dream of becoming heroes of the information front” and to provide them with a textbook written by Malkevich himself, titled “Real Russian Journalism for the New Regions.”
Outside of his public image as a media manager, philanthropist, and patriot, Malkevich is known to belong to the inner circle of Evgeny Prigozhin, the founder of the Wagner Group paramilitary cartel. After his dismissal from Channel 12 in 2018, Malkevich began working at several media projects owned by a holding company controlled by Prigozhin.
During that period, Malkevich wrote for Prigozhin’s Federal News Agency (FAN), launched a media agency called USA Really in the U.S., became involved in multiple educational projects related to Africa, and founded an organization called the National Values Protection Foundation. Among other things, Malkevich used the group to advocate for the release of Maria Butina, the Russian national who was imprisoned in the U.S. for conspiracy to act as an unregistered foreign agent in 2018.
In 2019, multiple employees of the National Values Protection Foundation were arrested in Libya on suspicion of attempting to interfere in local elections. According to the independent outlet Proekt, the group had been conducting street and telephone surveys about voters’ views on a potential presidential run by Muammar Gaddafi’s son. In the same report, Proekt refers to the National Values Protection Foundation as an “umbrella” for a range of foreign projects linked to Evgeny Prigozhin.
Malkevich himself has repeatedly told journalists that he has no ties to Prigozhin’s organizations. At the same time, people who know him personally have said that his connections go even higher, and that the list of people who hold him in high regard includes Kremlin domestic policy czar Sergey Kiriyenko.
“[Malkevich] is a professional; he’s money- and career-oriented. It’s fully possible that he’s completely sincere in his imperial beliefs,” said one political scientist. “When I met him, he was fully capable of building relationships with regional authorities. All that was left was for him to get a foothold at the federal level, which he went on to do through the Civic Council, Leaders of Russia, the presidential administration, and so on. The authorities value [people who show] a combination of professionalism and loyalty, patriotism and skills, capability, [and] experience. He’s certainly in good standing with everybody, not just Prigozhin.”
Another source told Verstka Media that he wasn’t surprised by Malkevich’s appearance in the occupied territories based on his work in various regions of Russia. “He has an understanding of how to build a TV channel in a way that doesn’t upset the authorities,” said the source.
Malkevich’s ‘proteges’
While Kherson was under Russian occupation, Malkevich worked as the head of the journalism and media communications department at Kherson State University, led the Kherson branch of the Russian Union of Journalists, and ran his own media school. He promised that the school’s most successful graduates would be hired by local TV and radio stations, where they would have the opportunity to “deliver accurate information to the region’s residents creatively and vividly.”
One of the graduates was 16-year-old Vladislava Lugovskaya. Like Ksenia Misyurevich, she has expressed intense gratitude to Malkevich for the opportunity to attend his school. Malkevich refers to these young journalists as his “pupils” and “proteges.”
Lugovskaya works at the local TV station Tavriya. She tells Verstka Media that she first came to the channel because she was “infuriated by the injustice” she witnessed: while Kherson was under occupation, she says, her friends and relatives who fled the city often asked about the cruelty of Russian soldiers, but neither Vladislava nor any of her loved ones witnessed violence from the occupying troops, and they consider all rumors about it to be disinformation.
“I joined [Tavriya] to host youth programs, but with an emphasis on politics, so that I could be sure to convey all information to young people first and foremost,” she tells Verstka.
In October, while the fight for control of Kherson was still ongoing, Vladislava and several other students from Malkevich’s school left the city in an evacuation. Along the way, they came under artillery fire, and Vladislava was wounded in the chest and stomach. She survived, the group eventually reached Crimea, and Vladislava moved to Moscow in November. There, she began making appearances on Russia’s largest TV channels as the face of pro-Russian journalism in Kherson and as a victim of the Ukrainian military’s actions. She continues to work with Tavriya from Moscow, and she regularly travels to Ukraine’s frontline regions and records segments about the “heroism” of Russian troops.
Vladislava has also started a Telegram channel where she shares posts from military correspondents and Russian-installed officials in annexed regions of Ukraine, as well as texts addressing “misguided Ukrainians.” In her own posts, Vladislava calls Ukrainian soldiers “Ukro-Nazis,” “fascists,” and “junkies,” while she refers to the annexed territories as “liberated,” calls Ukrainians “monkeys” and the derogatory term “khokhols,” calls Vladimir Putin “the true president,” and refers to protest rallies against Russian occupation as “fanatical insanity.”
She refers to herself as a “champion of justice.”
In March 2023, Putin personally presented Vladislava with Russia’s Order of Courage. After receiving the award, she appeared in a video where she expressed her gratitude to the Russian president. “After all, if it weren’t for Mr. Putin and some of his ministries, we wouldn’t be here,” the 16-year-old said in the video. “And neither would that sincerity and patriotism that’s now present in the liberated territories.”
Vladislava says she has her parents’ full support, though she declines to reveal their names or their professions, except that they had a business in Kherson before the start of the full-scale war. Vladislava is now enrolled in the 11th grade in a Moscow school. She hasn’t said anything about her relationships with her classmates there, though she does note that she’s had to cut ties with her past friends from Kherson.
“People there decided that I was dead to them,” she tells Verstka. “When we came under fire, they even wrote to me, ‘What a shame you didn’t die!’”
Another one of Malkevich’s “proteges” is 17-year-old Miroslava Butenko. A college student in Melitopol, Butenko caught the attention of local journalists when she hosted a concert marking Russia’s’ annexation of Zaporizhzhia and soon became a “journalist-blogger” at the Zaporizhzhia TV channel ZaTV.
Malkevich refers to Vladislava as his “youngest war correspondent,” while he calls Miroslava a “singer of peace.” On her TV program, “Worlds of Miroslava Butenko,” she covers topics such as humanitarian aid in the Zaporizhzhia region, patriotic initiative for young people, and concerts and conferences taking place in Russia.
Like Vladislava, when Miroslava isn’t hosting TV shows, she runs her own Telegram channel. It consists mostly of videos in which the young journalist speaks to her followers from her bedroom about topics such as the Russian army’s “massive strikes” against “Ukrainian militants,” and how the “Ukrainian military is compensating for its horrific losses by mobilizing teenagers.”
Competition from Ukraine
According to sources close to the Putin administration who spoke to Verstka Media, the Kremlin official responsible for curating this chain of pro-Russian TV stations in Ukraine’s occupied territories is First Deputy Chief of Staff Alexey Gromov, who also oversees Russia’s domestic TV broadcasts. The equipment to operate Russia’s channels in the occupied regions came from Deputy Digital Development Minister Bella Chekesova, who’s responsible, among other things, for financing and developing Russia’s state-run media.
The main difficulty Russia has faced in trying to establish the new channels in the occupied regions, sources told Verstka, has been “competition from Ukrainian media.”
“If a person who’s known to be an administration employee or a sympathetic local walks into an establishment, the employees there will change the channel from UNIAN TV or something [pro-Ukrainian] like that to [Russian state-run channels like] Channel One or Tavriya. If he says goodbye, leaves, and waits outside for a few seconds, he very well may hear them turn back to Ukrainian TV inside,” one source lamented, adding that this scenario is “typical” not only for the Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions but also for all of the Donbas towns that were captured by Russia in 2022.
Many local residents have been able to continue watching Ukrainian channels using satellite services. But according to Sergey Zhukov, who works for the Center for Strategic Communications and Information Security, not everyone in the area has access to satellite TV — and setting it up can be a challenge.
According to Ukrainian media expert Otar Dovzhenko, there have been no credible studies on media consumption in the occupied territories, so it’s effectively impossible to assess the popularity of pro-Russian or pro-Ukrainian channels there.
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“Even if someone tried to conduct [such a study], the results wouldn’t be valid, because during wartime, and especially under occupation, people are inclined to say not what they actually think and do, but what they consider it safe to say,” Dovzhenko told Verstka Media. “Moreover, the occupied territories vary greatly: some fell to the occupiers almost without a fight and have little destruction as a result, whereas in others, people aren’t thinking about television.”
According to Dovzhenko, many residents of the occupied territories use Telegram as their main news source. “And they might read a variety of channels: pro-Ukrainian ones, Russian ones, channels disguised as either kind, or others,” he said.
The Ukrainian outlet Detector Media analyzed the Russian Telegram landscape in the first six months of the war. According to its data, the number of people subscribed to pro-Russian channels grew rapidly and unnaturally beginning in February 2022, while the “disguised” channels Dovzhenko referred to became significantly more openly pro-Russian.
Sources from two Russian regional TV companies told Verstka Media about another problem facing the new Russian-backed channels in the occupied territories: professional Russian journalists are not flocking to Mariupol, Henichesk, or Melitopol like they did to Crimea nine years ago.
“In 2014, Moscow actively urged employees to go to Crimea, luring them there with high salaries, a warm climate, and pathways to obtaining housing. Not all of those things came to pass, but quite a few, especially technical workers — camera operators and directors — accepted the offer and were satisfied with it,” said one source from the All-Russia State Broadcasting Corporation. “But now there are neither [media professionals] eager to go to the ’new territories’ nor state officials calling for them to go there. Nobody knows whether these jobs will last or not. But everybody knows that there’s shelling there. If there was any recruiting at all, they would probably find some desperate people, even in those conditions.”
Citing its own sources, Reporters Without Borders has reported that the only compensation that can convince TV industry workers to move to the occupied territories has been cash: while local residents are offered about 30,000 rubles (roughly $374) per month to work on media projects in the annexed regions, Russians are offered 150,000–200,000 rubles ($1,870–$2,495) per month. According to the organization, Russia has found people to manage the new channels, but ordinary employees are still hard to come by, leading hirers to recruit local students.
Alexander Malkevich and the Russian Civic Council denied that the channels struggle to find employees, though they’ve made no secret of the fact that graduates of Malkevich’s own journalism school are being hired to work at the new stations. “Right now, there are many young journalists working in Zaporizhzhia and the Kherson area, and all of them are happy to report on events happening in their native regions. There are no staffing problems,” the Civic Council said in a statement.
The same old tactics
Journalists from Donetsk and Luhansk told Verstka Media that nine years ago, after Russia launched its 2014 invasion of Ukraine, propagandists in the occupied territories recruited high school and college students just like they’re doing now.
“[In 2014,] they would publish these funny newspapers with pretentious headlines and blatant propaganda. It wasn’t journalism,” said a reporter from a Donetsk newspaper who asked to remain anonymous. “Slogans, articles, and traditions from the 1960s–1980s. We couldn’t figure out who was writing them. Then it turned out that it was student journalists. In other words, they formed newsrooms from journalists who stayed around to work for ideological reasons and from students. All of those newspapers have since gone belly up.”
The situation with TV was similar. “They recruited very young people: recent high school graduates and college students — absolutely green,” said Ukrainian journalist Yulia Bozhko. “They were directed by people who stayed [in the occupied territories] to work due to their own convictions, as well as some old journalists. You could say they started a vigorous campaign to brainwash the rest of the remaining population.”
Andrey Dikhtyarenko, the editor-in-chief of a Ukrainian news site in the Luhansk region, noted that only a handful of journalists agreed to cooperate with the new authorities in 2014. At the same time, he said, of the 15 previously independent newspapers that existed, only one remained, while the only one of the region’s three TV channels that continued operating was Luhansk Regional Television.
“This was clearly not enough, [so] then a larger structure, Mediagroup Lugan, began operating in the city,” said Dikhtyarenko. “The organization appeared in the city in the late spring–summer of 2014. It consisted of transplants from Crimea. These people created the website Luhansk Information Center, went on TV, and even tried several times to launch their own newspapers and fill the information vacuum.”
According to Donbas journalists, in addition to launching new media outlets, the Russian-backed authorities would send out “guides” about what topics the media should cover and how they should be covered. In 2015, Dikhtyarenko’s newsroom obtained copies of several of these documents, which contained pre-written headlines, predetermined interview subjects, pre-written quotes, and story topics chosen in advance.
According to Dikhtyarenko, the person responsible for sending out these “guides” was Russian-Ukrainian political strategist Vyacheslav Matveev. According to Myrotvorets, a Ukrainian site that publishes personal information about individuals accused of colluding with Russia or participating in separatist movements, Matveev was employed until 2014 at the All-Russia State Broadcasting Corporation, where he worked with Ukrainian media outlets and politicians. Today, he’s the Russian-installed deputy labor and social policy minister in Ukraine’s occupied Kharkiv region, while Moscow Civic Chamber member Pavel Karpov controls the local pro-Russian media, according to Dikhtyarenko.
“It’s now my ninth year observing this [situation], and I can see that the fundamentals of their work haven’t changed: it’s the same topics, the same experts, anti-Ukrainian propaganda, disinformation, information campaigns, and the repetition to the local population of assertions like ‘Russia is our friend,’ ‘Russia is saving us,’ ‘Ukrainians are our enemies,’” Dikhtyarenko said.
‘We’ll always call things what they are’
Some Mariupol journalists who left the city are already planning to return. Donetsk native Mykola Osychenko, the president of the TV channel Mariupol Television, left Mariupol in March. Questions about the work of pro-Russian media hit him “right in the heart,” he said on Telegram.
“It’s very painful for me that these people decided to throw their whole lives away for a few tens of thousands of rubles,” he wrote, adding that the Mariupol journalists who decided to start “praising the Russian world on TV” have virtually “strangled their consciences” and forgotten about “Russia’s spring atrocities.”
Osychenko told Verstka that he intends to return to the city after it’s liberated, and that he’s ready to rebuild independent television channels not just in Mariupol but also in Donetsk, where he lived and worked until 2014. At the same time, he said, he predicts that reconnecting with his audience will be difficult after months or years of propaganda being broadcast. But he notes that journalists won’t be the only people returning to liberated Mariupol; they’ll be joined by “tens of thousands of Mariupolites,” which will accelerate the process.
“It’s unfortunate that we can’t bring back more than 100,000 viewers,” Osychenko said on March 5, 2023, the 26th anniversary of Mariupol Television’s founding. “But we’ll always remember them in our broadcasts, I can promise you that. And I can also promise that we’ll always call things what they are: murderers are murderers, traitors are traitors, cowards are cowards, and Russian soldiers are war criminals.”
Regarding his young former colleagues who went to work for pro-Russian outlets, Osychenko says he feels “fatherly pity.” He recalls Ksenia Misyurevich, who now works at Mariupol 24 and dreams of one day working at one of Russia’s top stations in Moscow. Osychenko says he used to view her like one of his own daughters, and that he tried to look after her and help guide her in her career. He first took notice of her when he taught journalism at Mariupol State University, and he was the one who invited her to try for a job at his station.
“Ksenia spoke Ukrainian beautifully, and she never said that she wanted the DNR or LNR to become Russian,” he says. “Now I feel bad for her because she’s young and she made a difficult choice. Working with her before the war, I was preparing for her to go conquer Kyiv within a few years. With her talent, I was sure that’s where she was headed. She had a big future ahead of her. I think she understood that too.”
Story by Regina Gimalova, Anna Ryzhkova, and others at Verstka Media