Yuriy Dud and Co — Young video bloggers in service of Russia’s GRU
Information about Dud’s bias driven by Russian military intelligence has leaked to the Russian media.
In September, when I was actively covering the Belarus unrest and all the phenomena accompanying it, such as the widespread exposure of Russian GRU’s trail, I penned a piece titled “NEXTA creator’s interview with Yuriy Dud: GRU doesn’t let strangers anywhere near its people.” The op-ed explained that the interview that Stepan Putilo, the man behind the main protest-promoting Telegram channel in Belarus sat down precisely with Russian host Yuriy Dud for a solid reason.
Indeed, what’s wrong with the star of Russian “independent journalism”, Yuriy Dud, winner of the “Profession — Journalist” prize established by Open Russia NGO, led by Mikhail Khodorkovsky (the guy tenderly cared for by the GRU), who interviewed Alexander Nevzorov, the elite pundit from the GRU’s journalistic workshop, now interviewing another star — the creator of the Telegram channel with more than a million readers, the one that’s been promoting the Belarusian opposition, supervised by the GRU, covering GRU-coordinated protests, and being cross-promoted by the GRU-affiliated Telegram platforms?
What can I say? Two blooming younglings, both fed from the same trough of the Russian military intelligence, met for a nice conversation –that’s what it is.
After I released that article, I received a bulk of disgruntled comments both in the comment section and my DMs, coming from Dud’s fans, NEXTA readers, those empathizing with the Belarusian protesters, and just internet bots. Most of the real users behind those comments seemed to be mad at me simply due to their unwillingness or inability to actually think.
And now, less than six months on, we see in open sources some very interesting reports stating that the ideologist of the “For Putin!” campaign, ex-deputy of the State Duma with the pro-Putin United Russia party Konstantin Rykov owns 50% of the content on Yuriy Dud’s YouTube channel, which pretty much explains how this ambitious journalist rookie managed to make his way up so high from the bottom. But there’s more…
The thing is that Konstantin Rykov is parf of the closest entourage of Vladislav Surkov, the GRU’s gray cardinal and the architect of unrecognized republics. By the way, if someone is not in the know, it’s Rykov who has once set up such online media outlets as Vzlyad.ru and Dni.ru, which are now under the direct control of Vladislav Surkov’s right hand Alexei Chesnakov and, as a result, directly subordinate to the Russian Ministry of Defense, or rather, its military intelligence, where a separate structural unit is responsible for the media domain.
So, my dear fans of Mr Dud and the NEXTA channel, as well as sympathizers of Belarusian protests, here is such an easy puzzle for you to solve: Add all these things up, won’t you?
