This article appears in the October 28, 2022 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
French Public TV Files Complaint Against Myrotvorets ‘Kill List’
[Print version of this article]
Oct. 20—The French public media group, France Télévisions (France TV), told the leading French daily, Libération, that it intends to file an official complaint with the Ukrainian government about the inclusion of two prominent France TV senior journalists, Liseron Boudoul and Gilles Parrot, on the notorious Ukrainian kill list Myrotvorets. The French journalists were included on the Myrotvorets database with their “crime” apparently being their having reported from the Donbas. France TV reported that it intended “to complain about it with the embassy of Ukraine in Paris, and to file a report with the Quai d’Orsay [the French Foreign Ministry]”. Moreover, it reserves “the right to take legal action” to protect its reporters. So far, this development has gone unnoticed in other mainstream media, but has been picked up by many smaller blogs and websites, both left and right.
The France TV initiative is an important break with the continued, official toleration, in the halls of government in Washington, London, and Brussels of the Myrotvorets (translated: Peacekeeper) death list, and its cousin hit list, kept by the Center for Countering Disinformation (CCD). The CCD, a sub-unit of President Zelensky’s National Security and Defense Council since April 2021, receives U.S. government funding. A few similar anti-CCD/Myrotvorets initiatives have been taken in recent months, among them a Parliamentary question to the Danish Foreign Minister, an official query to the government in New Zealand, and a very few others.
To call attention to the scandal and demand the shutdown of the CCD/Myrotvorets, EIR News Service held two international media briefings, the first Sept. 7, and the second Oct. 6, both with speakers from many nations, many of whom are on the hit lists.
While NATO governments continue to permit, even encourage, Ukraine’s hit list operations, this week, Myrotvorets brazenly added the head of state of Kazakhstan, President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, to its listing of those guilty of variations of what it calls “information warfare,” even “crimes against humanity.” The CCD, for its part, added Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni to its blacklist earlier in October. The Myrotvorets hit list also includes Syrian President Bashar Al Assad, and former President of Georgia, Mikheil Saakashvili, as well as former Prime Minister of Ukraine, Yulia Tymoshenko. Listing by the CCD has been cited by Myrotvorets as reason enough to add people to their list.
Libération ‘Fact Check’
While the issue of the Ukrainian hit list operation had been carefully avoided until now, Libération, France’s mainstream opinion-setter, nevertheless ran a fact-check section on the topic Oct. 14, publishing a long answer in response to a question from a reader.
The Myrotvorets site, writes the daily, was created in 2014 to name and blame the “enemies” of Ukraine. Libération, which probably examined EIR’s investigations, notes that Myrotvorets targets many foreigners. In effect, the site presents files of thousands of Ukrainian and Russian citizens, but also internationally known public figures such as Schiller Institute founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche, Ray McGovern, Scott Ritter, Henry Kissinger, former German Chancellor Gerhardt Schröder, journalist Eva Bartlett, rock star Roger Waters, and many others. The posting of French figures includes former French presidential candidates Marine Le Pen, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, and Ségolène Royal, as well as Marion Maréchal, Thierry Mariani, Éric Zemmour, François Asselineau and many others. Besides France TV’s Boudoul and Parrot, Myrotvorets also lists Alain Barluet of Le Figaro.
While absurdly claiming that it may seem “abusive” to call this a “kill list,” since the Myrotvorets site does not explicitly call for the murder of people on file on its database, Libération does nonetheless emphasize that the deadly attacks that target people on the list, are not condemned in any way. Just the opposite.
Thus, the site crosses out the photos [of the deceased] with a large red banner indicating “liquidated,” for all the people on the list who were killed, thus seeming to be pleased.
Then follows a very useful investigation by Libération into the role of Ukrainian officials and services behind this NATO-backed monstrosity which clearly has to be shut down, in which Libération concludes:
What is certain, however, is that the site has support at a very high level in the Ukrainian state apparatus. Anton Herashchenko, adviser to the Ukrainian interior minister and former deputy minister, publicly praised the site for its work in May 2016. As early as 2014, when he was a deputy, he urged his Facebook followers to make the site known and to participate in it, noting that he himself had received numerous reports of “terrorists and separatists.” In publications in 2015 and 2016, the politician even explained that the site had gradually become “a real tool for all intelligence and police services in Ukraine.” According to [the Myrotvorets self-professed founder, George] Tuka, the purpose of the site in 2014 was to “cleanse” Ukraine of pro-Russian activity. But its mission has gradually evolved. Now, it claims to list people “for political reasons” and therefore all “those who protect the Russian narrative.”
In France, no matter the government’s position, namely, giving full backing to Kiev, the fact that two France TV reporters are being presented as guilty of “propaganda for Russian fascism,” as well as listing a French journalist “for whom a passport number appears,” constitutes “a sensitive subject for the French media,” says the paper. This is clear, even if France TV prefers, for the moment, “not to make comments.”
Panic-stricken, the Ukrainian embassy in Paris, on the day Libération’s Myrotvorets article came out, asked the publication to add a paragraph to its online version, stating that the reason the embassy did not have to provide a comment, was “because Myrotvorets has nothing to do with Ukrainian authorities, and even less with the embassy.” The embassy simply specified that there are “legal proceedings underway in Ukraine, particularly because of the presence of files concerning minors” and that “in no case do the Ukrainian authorities rely on this site for anything.”
This last point is an exceptionally blatant lie since the Myrotvorets database is used and recognized by the Ukrainian courts, as was exposed by a Sept. 11, 2018 report published by the Ukrainian civil rights platform Uspishna Varta.
In 2016, Myrotvorets Gave Names to France
Not only does Myrotvorets serve as a data base for the Ukrainian judicial system; in 2016, it provided to Paris, “at the request of French services,” names and contact information of 7291 “Russian citizens who participated in dictator Putin’s war against Ukraine in the Donbass and Crimea.” This is what Myrotvorets itself said at the time, as revealed in Norway on October 16, 2022, on the site of Pål Steigan, a Norwegian communist activist, who tracked back through past postings.
2016 Myrotvorets post is accompanied by a picture of Anton Herashchenko (advisor to former Interior Minister Arsen Avakov, and, since 2014, in charge of Myrotvorets supervision) displaying a memory stick in front of the plaque of the French Embassy in Kiev.
Who is former Interior Minister Arsen Avakov? He is infamously credited as the co-founder of the Nazi Azov Brigades, co-founder of the Myrotvorets deathlist database in 2014, and a personal collaborator of none other than Victoria Nuland, currently Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, who was the U.S. political godmother of the 2014 Maidan coup that toppled Kiev’s elected government, to put in a U.S./UK/NATO puppet regime. At that time, Nuland was U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs.
Avakov’s Facebook page has a posting from May 2015 of Nuland, Avakov, and U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt, chumming it up in Kiev.
On the France TV initiative to protect its journalists, the Quai d’Orsay told Libération that it has “no comment to make.” Between delivering weapons to Kiev and protecting its citizens, the French government has obviously made its choice. At least, for the moment.
