The National Police will investigate two separate cases of so-called “black PR” ads being used against two presidential candidates, incumbent Petro Poroshenko and Volodymyr Zelenskiy.
Interior Minister Arsen Avakov earlier said a video depicting frontrunner Zelenskiy being hit by a truck constituted a threat against a public figure, Ukrainian news website Gordonua reported. The clip first appeared on April 10 on a Telegram messenger channel of European Future for Ukraine, a group associated with Poroshenko’s campaign.
The video, which used footage from a real Zelenskiy campaign ad, ended with the image of a cocaine line being snorted through a rolled-up dollar bill – a reference to unsubstantiated rumors that Zelenskiy is a drug addict.
“In recent times, we have had many situations when public figures received jokes, then threats, then faced real injuries and accidents,” Avakov said on April 11 during the Kyiv Security Forum, according to Gordonua. “We have to react to such things (and) prevent them so that the candidates’ campaigns don’t cross a red line.”
Members of the Verkhovna Rada, Ukraine’s parliament, have also expressed concern over a scene from Zelenskiy’s satirical television series, Servant of the People, where fictional Ukrainian President Vasyl Holoborodko, played by Zelenskiy, dreams of shooting lawmakers who refuse to vote for a package of important reforms.
“I don’t understand where this impulse comes from,” Rada Speaker Andriy Parubiy said in an interview with the Ukraina TV channel on April 14. “It’s a big question for me what the cooperation will be like with a person who sees relations with the parliament that way, not like in civilized countries.”
Vice-Speaker Iryna Herashchenko even called on Interior Minister Avakov to open a criminal case against the show’s creators for the scene.
However, lawmaker Anton Herashchenko, an adviser to Interior Minister Avakov and of no relation to the vice-speaker, suggests that the two videos are fundamentally different because Servant of the People is a work of fiction.
“There are hundreds of movies in America and Europe that show attacks and shootings of parliaments and presidents. The video with Zelenskiy (being hit by a truck) is an attempt to call for the murder of a real person,” he told Obozrevatel TV on April 14.
Zelenskiy’s team has now launched a website – the Petro Oleksiyovych (Poroshenko) Library of Black PR – to collect negative campaign ads that attack the frontrunner.
The Mezhyhirya mansion “became a symbol of the corruption of (fugitive Ukrainian President Viktor) Yanukovych’s rule,” Zelenskiy’s team wrote on its Telegram channel.
“The symbol of the incumbent ‘guarantor’ (of the Constitution’s) rule will be the library of black PR named after Petro Poroshenko,” the website goes on. “You are witnessing the dirtiest (ever) political campaign.”
Mezhyhirya was the opulent estate north of Kyiv where Yanukovych had his private residence.
The campaign ad collection is divided into three categories: incitement of hatred among Ukrainians, lies about Zelenskiy and his team, and fear mongering.
The “black PR” generally depicts Zelenskiy as a puppet of oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky, who owns the channel that broadcasts his comedy shows, and a Ukrainophobe backed by the Kremlin. His leadership, the argument goes, will turn Ukraine away from its pro-European course and return it to dependence on Russia. Zelenskiy and his supporters are labeled as “little Russians,” an imperial Russian term for Ukrainians implying that Russians were the superior nation.
Read more: Disinformation, ‘black PR’ emerge before April 21 runoff election
Billboards
Zelenskiy is not the only one targeted by negative ads.
On Sunday, social media users in the cities of Kyiv, Dnipro, Cherkasy, Kharkiv, and Odesa posted photos of a new series of billboards against Poroshenko. The billboards, which were stylized in the Poroshenko campaign’s color and font, featured the words “The end” and showed Poroshenko walking out of the image.
National Police Press Secretary Yaroslav Trakalo told the Ukrainska Pravda news site that the provocative billboards violated the law on outdoor political ads by not including the names of the individuals who ordered them, their circulation, and the printing house.
City communal services will remove the ads and the individuals responsible for them will be fined, he said.
