Earlier this month, after President Volodymyr Zelensky’s office misled journalists with a hoax that Chief of Staff Andriy Bohdan was resigning, Bohdan announced that his team does not need journalists to communicate with the public.
Now, a conflict between the presidential office and the media is growing: Bohdan is suing three investigative journalists and the national broadcaster for defamation.
On Aug. 20, Bohdan filed the lawsuit in the Shevchenko District Court in Kyiv against three journalists from Schemes, an investigative program of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and national broadcaster Suspilne, which airs Schemes weekly. The three journalists are Natalia Sedletska, Valeria Yegoshina, and Maksym Savchuk.
The details of the lawsuit are currently unavailable, so it is unclear which of Schemes reports on Bohdan the chief of staff found defamatory.
“At this point, we have not received the text of Bohdan’s lawsuit. Therefore, we cannot comment on it,” the editorial board of Schemes wrote on Twitter on Aug. 21. “We are confident that the information we publish is reliable and are ready for the trial.”
Bohdan is a former lawyer whose most famous client was oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky. After Zelensky’s victory in the presidential election, Bohdan was appointed his chief of staff, heightening concerns over Kolomoisky’s suspected influence on the new president.
Moreover, as a former government official, Bohdan cannot hold top public offices under a law that purged officials who served under ousted President Viktor Yanukovych. To suppress criticism, Zelensky renamed the presidential administration to the “president’s office.”
Schemes did several investigations into Bohdan. One of them revealed his multiple trips to Tel Aviv, where Kolomoisky resided at the time, while the lawyer was de facto running Zelensky’s election campaign. The show also reported on his secret meeting with the then-head of the Constitutional Court.
In an interview with Ukrainian news site Ukrainska Pravda published on April 25, Bohdan said he was preparing to sue Schemes’ journalists for spreading false information that he had taken 11 flights to Russia, six of which were through Belarus. However, the journalists never reported that. In their investigation, they said Bohdan had made three trips to Russia since 2014 and crossed the Belarusian border 11 times “in an unknown direction during 2018-2019.”
