On Oct. 14, answering a question from a reader who asked the French daily Libération, “What is the Myrotvorets platform, presented as the Ukrainian authorities’ ‘hit list’?” the French daily’s “Check News” wrote a long answer.
Perhaps most important is their report that two journalists from French public TV channel TF-1 are on the Myrotvorets list, and that TF-1 is filing an official complaint with the Ukrainian government and is threatening to sue over this. The Ukrainian embassy in Paris freaked out and told Libération they have no comment “because Myrotvorets has nothing to do with the Ukrainian authorities, and even less with the embassy.” They stated that there are “legal proceedings in progress in Ukraine, notably because of the presence of files concerning minors” and that “in no case do the Ukrainian authorities rely on this site for anything” (which is, of course, a lie since its database is exploited and recognized by the Ukrainian courts, and since it exchanges names with the government’s own kill list, the Center for Countering Disinformation).
Libération further reports that Myrotvorets “claims to list the enemies of the Ukrainian nation. The site offers free access to files on tens of thousands of Ukrainian personalities, and also, especially on foreigners. We find more or less complete notices classified in different categories such as “traitor to the motherland,” “Russian mercenaries,” “Russian war criminals,” or “accomplices” of the latter.”
Most of the info comes from open data, says Libération. And in some cases, “they are also the result of hacking. Because, behind Myrotvorets, there are among others, hackers. Among their feats of arms, they had, for example, managed in 2016 to recover the database of the Ministry of the Interior of the ‘Donetsk People’s Republic.’”
Calling them a “kill list” may “seem abusive, since the site does not call for the murder of people on file. But it does not condemn the deadly attacks that target them [people on the list]. Thus, the site bars the photos with a large red reference indicating ‘liquidated,’ for all the people on the list who have been killed, thus appearing to congratulate themselves. This is the case, for example, of Italian journalist Andrea Rocchelli, killed by Ukrainian army fire while covering the war in Donbass in 2014, and added posthumously to Myrotvorets.” They delicately mention the murders of Ukrainian MP Oleg Kalashnikov, shot and killed on April 15, 2015 in Kiev and on April 16, 2015 Ukrainian editor Oles Buzina was murdered in Kiev, when his car was blown up. They were both on the Myrotvorets list, but Myrotvorets denies having anything to do with their killings. They don’t mention journalist Serhiy Sukhobok, who was killed in Kiev on April 13, 2015. Nor, perhaps the most important person on the kill list: Russian journalist Daria Dugina, died who died on Aug. 20, 2022, when her car blew up in Moscow. Her father was driving behind her, and witnessed his daughter’s murder. He is also on the Myrotvorets list.