Ukraine: Tulsi Gabbard, Elon Musk and Journalists on a Blacklist
Some claim it’s a “kill list”. If so, who wants them whacked?
A Ukrainian “blacklist” is targeting various world figures, including artists, politicians and journalists. No surprise, the mainstream media have shown no interest in the case because it goes against their pro-Ukrainian narrative. But the infamous “blacklist”, posted on a website called Myrotvorets, does exist, and it raises an important question: are we talking about a kill list?
Who Is Targeted and Why?
At the beginning of October, Pink Floyd’s ex-singer Roger Waters said in an interview that he was placed on what he called a “kill list” in Ukraine. Criticizing that country’s government is a high-risk project, it seems, because Waters expressed his feelings more than once in this regard, although he hasn’t been necessarily complacent towards Vladimir Putin.
Should Waters be concerned? According to Liberation, a French newspaper, “Myrotvorets website does not call for the murder of people” who appear on the list, but “it doesn’t condemn the deadly attacks that target them either.” Small consolation.
One of the men behind that obscure website is George Tuka, governor of the administrative region of Luhansk, but the initiative was not endorsed by the Ukrainian state, we are told. On the other hand, Myrotvorets has received “high-level support” within the state apparatus in Kyiv, again according to Liberation.
The website compiles information on the targeted personalities through open sources and computer hacking. Besides Roger Waters, billionaire Elon Musk has also seen his photograph and biography displayed on Myrotvorets. Both men are not the only ones.
Former Democratic member of the U.S. House of Representatives, Tulsi Gabbard, is also part of the Ukrainian blacklist, just like Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, ex-U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, ex-German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, French actor Gérard Depardieu, as well as French politicians Eric Zemmour, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, and Ségolène Royal. Some asserted that priests and children also appear on the infamous list, but this information needs corroboration.
All these personalities are accused of being Russia’s accomplices.
A Blacklist That Could Lead to Assassinations
The international community is alarmed by this case because journalists are themselves targeted by the Ukrainian blacklist, at a time when the death of Dara Dugina, journalist, political scientist and daughter of a Russian nationalist, is still fresh in memory. U.S. intelligence, for that matter, believes that parts of the Ukrainian government authorized the car bomb attack in August that killed Dugina.
In 2015, a Ukrainian author, Oles Buzina, was murdered after the text of one of his speeches was published on the Myrotvorets website. The day before, Oleg Kalashnikov, a politician, was killed in Kyiv.
The German Federal Foreign Office asked the Ukrainian government to shut down Myrotvorets, to no avail. International organizations had already called it out in 2016, bringing attention to the threat it posed to the safety of journalists. G7 ambassadors joined the chorus of protest, but the Ukrainian government turned a deaf ear.
Sources
Castanet, La Dépêche, Libération, Rebel News, Solidarité et progrès, The New York Times
