Listed by Myrotvorets, Euroradio editor alleges factual distortions

Yauhen Kazart­sau learned two weeks ago that he was added to the Ukrain­ian Myrotvorets data­base. He tried to “present argu­ments why what was writ­ten is false and manip­u­la­tion, received no response — that’s their right.” He doesn’t con­sid­er it nec­es­sary to respond fur­ther “to an obvi­ous and pos­si­bly coor­di­nat­ed attack.”

Yauhen Kazart­sau. Pho­to: Nasha Niva

Euro­ra­dio edi­tor-in-chief Yauhen Kazart­sau has been added to the Ukrain­ian Myrotvorets data­base. The por­tal, which doc­u­ments signs of crimes against Ukraine’s nation­al secu­ri­ty, post­ed a pro­file with his per­son­al infor­ma­tion.

Myrotvorets claims the jour­nal­ist par­tic­i­pat­ed in “acts of human­i­tar­i­an aggres­sion against Ukraine,” spread Russ­ian pro­pa­gan­da, and manip­u­lat­ed pub­licly sig­nif­i­cant infor­ma­tion in the Kremlin’s inter­ests, Nasha Niva report­ed on June 16.

The alle­ga­tions against Kazart­sau trace back to his years at the Russ­ian state-run out­let Sput­nik, from 2015 to 2020. Crit­ics accuse him of echo­ing Krem­lin talk­ing points and pub­lish­ing sto­ries that cast Belaru­sian vol­un­teers in a neg­a­tive light dur­ing the con­flict.

“I found out about two weeks ago that I had been added to the data­base. Well, they added me—so be it,” Yauhen Kazart­sau told BAJ.

“The text on Myrotvorets is writ­ten by two ‘sup­port­ers’ of mine who have been attack­ing me for sev­er­al months now. They wrote to the [Euro­ra­dio] donors and post­ed things on Face­book. By the way, I worked anony­mous­ly for secu­ri­ty rea­sons dur­ing these years, but they out­ed me because appar­ent­ly they don’t care about the secu­ri­ty of oth­ers.”

Kazart­sau calls the post on the Ukrain­ian vol­un­teer por­tal “manip­u­la­tive”: “I nev­er hid that I worked for Sput­nik — it’s on my LinkedIn and oth­er places. But the links they pro­vide dis­tort things. For exam­ple, if you fol­low the links, nowhere do I deny the exis­tence of polit­i­cal pris­on­ers. The arti­cle where I sup­pos­ed­ly call a vol­un­teer a ‘Nazi’ — that’s an inter­view with his friend, who says it nev­er hap­pened, and a quote from Belarus’s Min­istry of Inter­nal Affairs. Of course, it’s unpleas­ant that some­one per­ceives manip­u­la­tion and dis­tor­tion of facts as truth and doesn’t read fur­ther. But what can you do?”

Kazart­sau has start­ed gath­er­ing anony­mous ques­tions on X, invit­ing his fol­low­ers to share their con­cerns so he can address them direct­ly.

“I’ve head­ed Euroradio’s edi­to­r­i­al board for a year and a half. The media pol­i­cy of full sup­port for Ukraine and con­dem­na­tion of Russ­ian aggres­sion hasn’t changed in any way. We’ve pub­lished arti­cles and videos about vol­un­teers, Russ­ian war crimes, report­ing from Bucha, and so on. And that will con­tin­ue. Those who want to fig­ure things out rather than throw around words — they’ll fig­ure it out,” Kazart­sau not­ed.

The jour­nal­ist says he tried to con­tact Myrotvorets:

“When I learned I was in the data­base (I learned, by the way, from Russ­ian media), I wrote to this project — they have an address, say­ing if you think some­thing is a mis­take, write. With quotes from the same links, I jus­ti­fied why what was writ­ten is false and manip­u­la­tive. I received no response — that’s their right. I don’t plan to do any­thing else.

If they think I belong there — I’ll be there with Svi­at­lana Alek­siye­vich, Max Korzh, and Siarhei Tsikhanous­ki. Not the worst com­pa­ny. In gen­er­al, I don’t think it’s nec­es­sary to respond to an obvi­ous and pos­si­bly coor­di­nat­ed attack by ‘do-good­ers.’ And there’s plen­ty of work to do any­way.”