Anatoliy Shariy: a fugitive Ukrainian journalist in the service of the Kremlin
The notorious Ukrainian video blogger and political observer Anatoliy Shariy has been recently announced a suspicion of committing high treason, and at the same time he was put on the wanted list by the Ukrainian authorities.
Anatoliy Shariy, who is currently in Spain (we will cover his financial well-being in this sunny country separately), completely rejected all the accusations in his Youtube channel and linked the suspicion, stated by the Security Service of Ukraine, with his political activities — the leadership of the party, which he modestly named with his own name.
However, in fairness, it should be said that Shariy’s activities as a blogger and politician have long gone beyond the legal boundaries, and he obviously works in the interests of the Russian special services and uses his multi-million Youtube audience to spread fakes and promote the Kremlin’s narratives.
Anatoliy Shariy can under no circumstances be considered an independent journalist and politician. To be more convincing, let’s divide the evidence into economic and political:
Even a very cursory look at Shariy’s video blog on Youtube indicates that the creation of his content is the work of a fairly large team of people. The average length of a video on his channel is 10 minutes, the number of videos uploaded per month can reach 70 and even more. In each of them, the blogger analyzes in detail the events in Ukraine and in the world, and clearly demonstrates documents as arguments (which need to be found and examined somewhere), infographics (which need to be created) and videos (which need to be edited). One person, even busy with the creation of such amount of content for days, is not able to perform such a volume of work. In the Russian propagandist Kirill Frolov’s e-mails for 2016, compromised by hackers, there is a mention about a team of twenty people helping Shariy to create content for the YouTube channel. The letter also specifies that the monthly budget for this project is about 1.2 million Russian rubles ($ 16,600 at the exchange rate of that time). That is, on average, one employee of Shariy’s YouTube channel received $ 830 at that time.
Based on this, a question arises: where does the money come from? Shariy categorically refuses to cover this topic. However, his work for Russian politicians close to the FSS is already a proven fact. So, on August 28, 2018, the Crimean politician Alexander Yuryev wrote an accusatory post about an official in Yalta, Sergei Kalinichenko. And on the same day (!) a video about Kalinichenko with the same evidence appeared on Shariy’s YouTube channel.
In the leadership of Shariy’s party there are personalities who have a direct connection with the pro-Kremlin movements and the Russian special services. So, in the electoral list of the “Party of Shariy” at number 3 there is Antonina Beloglazova (employee of the Shariy’s project Sharii.net since 2016) — a member of the Russian extremist and ultranationalist movement NOD (the National Liberation Movement), which promotes extreme chauvinism, militarism, aggression against other states, unconditional support for Putin, etc.
Antonina Beloglazova has repeatedly visited Moscow — in particular, she took part in a mass demonstration of the NOD. In the video, accessible in the Internet, Beloglazova is joyful that “Crimea was joined to Russia three years ago and now most of the Ukrainian land has become a part of the Russian Federation.” Comments here are completely unnecessary, but let’s recall — this is said by a third person in the “Party of Shariy”. Shariy himself totally supports such statements and directly mentioned it in his videos. It must be said separately that since neither Shariy himself (he was excluded from the lists due to violation of the electoral legislation), nor his wife Olga (who lives abroad and is a purely formal head of the party named after her husband) could lead the party, it is obvious that all management issues “on the ground” are entrusted to a third person in the party — who directly supports the occupation of Ukrainian territories and aggression against Ukraine.
Finally, it is worth noting that Anatoliy Shariy, who in many videos called himself a political refugee, fled from Ukraine to Lithuania after when in 2011 he used a traumatic gun at McDonalds and caused bodily harm to another person.
Taking into account this incomplete list of Anatoliy Shariy’s “achievements”, the criminal case against him on the fact of high treason is in no way a violation of the rights and freedoms of a journalist and a citizen, but this is an absolutely necessary measure to suppress the illegal activities of the Kremlin agent (disguised as a journalist and politician) aimed at undermining the territorial integrity and constitutional order of Ukraine.
