Tinder scandal: how Petrov got involved in a criminal case
How the authorities "hooked" Petrov
How "Joker" blackmails business under the protection of the authorities
"I don't earn anything, I only spend"
What a threat to society is Volodymyr Petrov
Disinformation at any time is a great threat to any society: false data distorts reality, shifts emphasis, distracts from real problems, directs people's thoughts and actions in the wrong direction, disorients society and, as a result, provokes harmful social processes, and sometimes and destroy someone's life. It probably doesn't need to be explained separately why fake news is especially destructive during a full-scale war.
In recent years, Volodymyr Petrov, a black political technologist, blogger, owner and host of the "Iceland" TV channel, has been doing exactly this, a person who is not ashamed of the fact that he professionally misleads Ukrainians and earns a large fortune from it. Petrov's actions have crossed the line of the law more than once, but no law enforcement agency is still trying to stop him. Moreover, the information terrorism of 46-year-old native of Kryvyi Rih Volodymyr Petrov is given the green light in the highest government offices in Ukraine today. We offer to understand how it happened.
Author of scandals
To begin, a little history. For the first time, Petrov's name became widely known in 2009, when he worked for the presidential candidate Arseniy Yatsenyuk, whose page he managed in Livejournal, where he "burned himself". Having forgotten to change the account, Petrov replied to a certain user on behalf of the presidential candidate: "And in general, I go up to your mother and pee in her mouth. Will you stand up for mommy or shut up the squealing shit?". Not much has changed since those times - it is in this style that Volodymyr Petrov conducts his public rhetoric to this day.
As part of his work for Yatsenyuk, Petrov dealt with a sex scandal against three People's Deputies from "Bitkivshchyna" Serhiy Teryokhin, Ruslan Bohdan and Viktor Ukolov, who were publicly accused of corrupting children in the "Artek" camp. Petrov was involved in promoting this story in the most dignified way in his "living journal" under the pseudonym Lumpen. The situation became so loud that there were polygraph tests, and one of the participants, Ukolov, turned to the Christian faith and started singing in the church choir.
In 2010, an aspiring black publicist Petrov registered the B&D news agency, whose editor-in-chief was Oleksiy Durnev, a well-known blogger today, with whom Petrov has been conducting his dirty information campaigns ever since. The loudest of them was sent to Petrov's recent employer, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, when Durnev, already a TV presenter on the TV channel "TET", in 2013 arranged for the head of the "Batkivshchyna" faction in the Verkhovna Rada to provoke homosexuals, as well as running after him with carrots. At that time, Petrov was also responsible for defamation of the "Khortytsia" brand and a black campaign against Viktor Pylypyshin, the head of the Shevchenkivka District Administration of Kyiv.
Petrov, an unscrupulous black PR man, doesn't care who to take orders from and against whom. During the years of Yanukovych's rule, he actively fulfilled the tasks of the Party of Regions to discredit the opposition and independent mass media. While media people fought for freedom of speech, the political technologist opposed the "Stop Censorship" movement. He publicly promised to make every effort to ensure that the "journalist party" that remained after the Revolution on the granite, disappeared from Ukraine. Petrov's campaign against the newspaper "Dzerkalo Tyzhnia" was especially noticeable. Both the usual fakes about venality and the "Ass Man" distributing a newspaper in Kyiv were in circulation. Petrov claimed that he did not plan to destroy "Dzerkalo", but he could: "If I were ordered to destroy "Dzerkalo Tyzhnia", I would destroy it not in a month, not in two, but in a year, I think this newspaper would cease to exist."
In 2012, during the parliamentary elections, Petrov received an order from the odious "regionalist" and Ukrainophobe Igor Markov (suspected of crimes against national security and currently hiding in the Russian Federation), who ran for the 133rd district in Odessa. The task of Petrov and Durnev was to informationally "destroy" his competitor Oleksiy Goncharenko, to disrupt his pre-election activities, and also to register as technical candidates in order to "pull" votes away from Goncharenko. "Our task is to destroy a person who lies," Petrov directly stated at the time. As a result, Markov won the election, and Petrov and Durnev received awards for helping to bring a pro-Russian politician into the Council.
Petrov appeared again in Odesa during the 2014 parliamentary elections already in another district, 135, where another "regional" Serhiy Kivalov was running for the Council. In order to prevent his competitors from turning to him, Petrov registered again as a technical candidate, and involved his friends who ran in the guises of Super Mario, Spider-Man and Wolverine. Later, those who turned the elections into a farce also appeared in the scandalous 205th district in Chernihiv, where the leader of the "UKROP" party, Gennadiy Korban, and the "BPP" candidate, Serhiy Berezenko, competed for the deputy mandate. Petrov's task was to prevent Kolomoisky's candidate from winning the elections.
In May 2013, the opposition held a "Stand Up, Ukraine!" rally against Yanukovych. Petrov countered it in his own way: an armored personnel carrier with carrots and rabbits drove up to the protesters, the equipment provoked a fight, during which the activists and journalists were attacked by hired young people, one of whom was Vadym Titushko, whose last name later became nominal. Yes, Volodymyr Petrov was the author of "Titusok". At first, he admitted that it was he who rented the armored personnel carrier for the campaign, but then began to deny it when a criminal case for violation of public order began to "loom" on the horizon.
Tinder scandal: how Petrov got involved in a criminal case
Although Petrov's pranks still reached one criminal case. At the beginning of November 2018, Lumpen began to "warm up" another sex scandal, when a student of the Kyiv Polytechnic Institute, Natalya Bureyko, accused the deputy head of one of the departments of the National Police and the husband of the deputy head of the SBI, Oleksandr Varchenko, of harassment on the Tinder dating app and threats. The next day, the girl deleted all messages about it and published a post with an apology, but this was enough for Petrov to fan the "fire".
Three weeks later, Petrov and two of his friends — Oleksandr Baraboshka and Volodymyr Koval — were arrested on suspicion of organizing attempts to discredit law enforcement officials. Petrov and Koval were placed under house arrest, and Baraboshko was detained in a pretrial detention center. The chief military prosecutor at the time, Anatolii Matios, stated that Petrov and Co. had access to confidential information from the closed databases of the State Security Office. Matios named Petrov as the technical customer of the information leak. "They buy the traffic of your phone from the law enforcement officers, analyze connections, understand the circle of communication…", the prosecutor explained the mechanics of the trio's actions.
Based on this fact, on November 8, 2018, the investigative department of the Security Service of Ukraine in Kyiv and the Kyiv region opened criminal proceedings No. 42018000000002771, in the framework of which Petrov Volodymyr Volodymyrovych is suspected of committing the following crimes:
- violation of confidentiality of correspondence and conversations (part 2 of Article 163 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine, sanction — deprivation of liberty from 3 to 7 years)
- Violation of privacy (Parts 1 and 2 of Article 182 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine, sanction — deprivation of liberty from 3 to 5 years)
- illegal handling of weapons (Part 1 of Article 263 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine, sanction — imprisonment from 3 to 7 years)
- interference with the activities of a law enforcement officer (part 1 of Article 343 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine, sanction – arrest for up to 3 months)
- knowingly false report of a crime (part 2 of Article 383 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine, sanction — imprisonment from 2 to 5 years).
As part of the specified criminal proceedings, an examination of Petrov's phone was carried out, as well as an urgent search of the political technologist's apartment 3 weeks after the opening of the proceedings. Until now, for 5 years, the case is at the stage of pre-trial investigation. And although the law enforcement officers claim that they have a complete evidence base, are ready to prove his guilt and submit the indictment to the court, they still do not do it. It is believed that Petrov is a person from Zelenskyi's government, so the investigation is trying to find some new information against Petrov so that the Office of the President does not protect him.
How the authorities "hooked" Petrov
Criminal proceedings against Petrov were opened six months before Volodymyr Zelenskyi became the president of Ukraine. Many facts indicate that since then, instead of going to jail for his activities, Volodymyr Petrov was taken by the authorities "on the hook" in criminal proceedings, and continued to work quietly - but now already in the Office of the President.
Firstly, one of Volodymyr Petrov's lawyers is Kim Veremiychuk, a person from the team of the deputy head of the Office of the President Andriy Smirnov.
Secondly, Petrov's friends and his accomplices in the Tinder scandal worked in the President's Office: blogger Oleksandr Baraboshko was an assistant to the deputy head of the OP Kyryl Tymoshenko, and Volodymyr Koval was seen as an unofficial assistant to the adviser to the OP head Mykhailo Podoliak. Yes, Oleksandr Baraboshka's phone number in the GetContact application is associated with the tags "OP", "Assistant to Kyryl Tymoshenko".
Thirdly, since 2019, Maksym Chichkanov has been Petrov's proxy, to whom Petrov issued a power of attorney to represent his interests and who, since 2020, has been working in the apparatus of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine.
Fourthly, in 2021, the outspoken provocateur Petrov, together with his friend, ex-prosecutor from Luhansk Oblast, Serhiy Ivanov, will be hired on the Rada TV channel, where they will begin to “wet ” all factions except the ruling party faction. For example, Petrov compared the "OPZZH" faction to a garbage can, ridiculed Petro Poroshenko, discredited anti-corruption activists, and mass media criticizing the government. The parliamentarians could not tolerate this for long, and as a result, they managed to get the information terrorists fired from the parliamentary TV.
How "Joker" blackmails business under the protection of the authorities
And one more nuance. Several years ago, an anonymous "Joker" channel appeared in the Telegram messenger, which periodically published various "pours" of information about Ukrainian politicians, officials and businessmen, which often provoked scandals. Oddly enough, according to information from various unrelated sources, the author of this channel is none other than Volodymyr Petrov. Some other tg channels also write about it.
Negotiations on behalf of Petrov and the "Joker" channel are conducted by 26-year-old blogger Lilia Bagirova, the ex-fiancée of a member of the "Mushroom" band Kyivstoner, who currently lives in the United Arab Emirates. The "Joker" Telegram channel regularly publishes advertisements for Bagirova's personal project "#BAGIROVANews".
According to media reports, Liliya Bagirova worked for the head of the Khimprom drug syndicate Yehor Burkin (Levchenko), a Russian who is under sanctions and recognized as a threat to Ukraine's national security. Journalist Denys Koshelnyk posted a video of a telephone conversation with Lilia Bagirova, during which he confirmed the fact of this cooperation. According to Lilia, Burkin asked to contact political technologist Volodymyr Petrov to support him in the information field. Again, judging by Lilia's words, she organized such contact twice, for which she received "thanks".
In order to understand how Petrov earns money with the help of "Joker", you can consider the case of the online casino "Kosmolot" as an example. In January 2024, "Joker" began to publish post after post about the fact that the Russian casino "Kosmolot" is operating in Ukraine and its owner Serhiy Tokarev is a Russian. Then he started a campaign to put pressure on bloggers promoting "Kosmolot", and then began to scold the Ukrainian mass media, which deleted the news with the statement of the Minister of Digitalization Mykhailo Fedorov that the Russian owner of the casino "Kosmolot" is trying to get Ukrainian citizenship. In three days, from January 28 to January 30 inclusive, Petrov in "Joker" dedicated 28 negative posts to "Cosmolot".
"Friends, now you understand why everyone thinks that Cosmolot is a Ukrainian casino? They just buy everyone. They bought everyone. You ask me why, for example, your favorite patriotic bloggers advertise Kosmolot, the answer, friends, is simple, they simply cannot refuse the amount of money paid to them by the Russian casino Kosmolot. Dirty Russian money," wrote "Joker" on January 28, 2024 in one of the posts.
The fact that the owner of the Kosmolot casino Serhiy Tokarev is a citizen of the Russian Federation and owns real estate and cars in the aggressor country is a real fact. The problem is that "Joker" took up this topic with only one goal — to get the same amount of "dirty Russian money" and more. Therefore, when he achieved this with his attack on the casino and Tokarev, the rhetoric in the direction of "Kosmolot" changed dramatically, literally the next day, and over time, the interest and attention to this from the "joker" Petrov simply disappeared.
And already on January 31, he writes: "I was contacted by Kosmolot, they did a good job, they asked me to give their position, that they are not that bad, now I will not hate, but advertise Kosmolot." And on February 3, the last post of "Joker" about "Kosmolot" is published with the message that someone in the Ukrainian media is continuing the campaign against this casino. "My personal conflict with Cosmolot turned into Cosmolot raiding and someone's attempt to make money. As soon as I stopped writing about Kosmolot, the wave died down and for money on other TG channels they started posting custom articles and continuing informational attacks against Kosmolot, but already for money."
Everything is true, Petrov wrote posts against "Kosmolot" so actively not for money, but for free. For money, he abruptly stopped doing it, starting to justify the Russian casino. Moreover, notice that "Joker" does this without any shame, not being ashamed to admit that "he was contacted by "Cosmolot", and now he "will not hate them, but advertise them". How is it similar to the same shamelessness and unprincipledness that Petrov himself is imbued with, who is not ashamed to confess in various interviews about all his trips to prostitutes, drug use, about earning "black money" or about the fact that he provided money for treating a child solely for the sake of PR.
Today, "Joker" has a new "victim" - the online taxi service Uklon. The scheme is the same — the tg channel publishes several negative posts about the company every day, until the company comes to Petrov and asks: "How much does it cost to stop this?" The reason for the attack on the taxi was that Uklon drivers worked during the curfew and that Uklon cooperated with the Fondy payment platform, which operates in the Russian Federation. From the middle of February to today, Volodymyr Petrov devoted 316 posts to "Uklon" with abuse and hate in their direction. And it continues to this day. Obviously, Uklon turned out to be more stable than "Kosmolot", and everything is not going to "cooperate" with the media killer Petrov.
It is obvious that Volodymyr Petrov does not care at all about the Russian origin of the Kosmolot casino or the cooperation of Uklon with a Russian company. And this is not a "struggle for the truth". He just makes money on these topics. And as soon as he receives funds, he stops worrying about all this, after which he chooses the next topic and the next "victim".
According to the language of the Criminal Code, what Petrov is doing in the "Joker" telegram channel is ordinary extortion and racketeering. It will not be difficult for law enforcement agencies to identify the administrators of this channel and find them, but, as in the case of the criminal proceedings regarding the Tinder scandal, which has long been ready to go to court, but continues to gather dust, Petrov is allowed to do what he does with impunity, in exchange for information support of the authorities and the same law enforcement agencies.
"I don't earn anything, I only spend"
The only value that Volodymyr Petrov pursues is money, and a lot of money. "The more money there was, the more I wanted to brag. It just happened like that, it seemed that you were the one…", he admitted in one of the interviews to journalist and blogger Roman Skrypin.
Incomes from election work are always large — hundreds of thousands of dollars, especially if you are responsible for black PR and "destruction" of opponents. And Petrov, in the same interview with Skrypin, does not hide the fact that the "black money" earns. Therefore, in Petrov's declarations, which he had to fill out when he was registered as a technical candidate, sometimes for deputies, then for president, only a small part of his earnings was always reflected.
For example, from Petrov's declaration for 2017, his official annual income was only UAH 123,807, which at that time was equal to about 4,300 US dollars. In the following year, 2018, Petrov officially earned a little more — 157 thousand 96 hryvnias (about 5,500 US dollars). But with these modest official incomes, Petrov demonstrates, to put it mildly, a luxurious way of life.
A black PR man lives in a house with a living area of 246 square meters in the city of Bucha at 50a Shevchenko Street. Since 2011, on the basis of a sales contract, it was registered to Volodymyr Petrov, but in 2020, apparently due to open criminal proceedings and in order to preserve the property from potential confiscation, Petrov re-registered it to his wife Tatyana.
In addition, an apartment of 72 square meters in Kyiv at 48b Antonovycha Street is registered to Petrov. Similarly, in 2020, she was re-registered as her wife Tatiana. The cost of a similar apartment in Kyiv reaches at least 120 thousand US dollars.
Petrov and his wife also own several plots of land in Buch and Borodyansky district of Kyiv region, as well as a number of elite foreign cars. In 2012, Petrov bought a 2010 Porsche Panamera turbo for $200,000, and in 2015, a rare 1969 Chevrolet Camaro for $41,500. Tatiana Petrova, whose income is not indicated in the declarations of the "joker", in 2016 became the owner of a Porsche Cayenne for 47 thousand dollars, and in 2018 she bought a brand new Lexus RX300 for 64.6 thousand dollars.
In numerous interviews, Volodymyr Petrov has repeatedly boasted that he buys expensive things for thousands of dollars, and that he can afford a personal driver and expensive pleasures. In particular, regular trips around the world. In 2021 alone, Petrov made 13 trips to European countries — to Italy, France, Portugal, Spain, Austria, Iceland, Germany and Turkey, where he spent the New Year holidays from December 26, 2021 to January 11, 2022.
All this — expensive foreign cars and numerous trips around the world — for an official annual income of no more than $5,500. How much does Petrov really receive for his media-killing activity? The tax service should have been interested long ago, but so far, apparently, it does not bother him with the questions of where the money comes from and why taxes have not been paid to the budget.
"I don't earn anything. I didn't earn anything, I only spent," says Petrov, as if mockingly, in an interview in which, among other things, he still refuses to speak directly about the sources and size of his earnings, trying to turn this conversation into a farce.
What a threat to society is Volodymyr Petrov
Actually, most of everything Volodymyr Petrov does and says is a farce. A professional farce for the sake of earning money and achieving the tasks set for him. In his interviews or broadcasts, he is never sincere, in what he says it is often difficult for an ordinary viewer to understand what is the truth and what is a deliberate fabrication. How much truth is in what Volodymyr Petrov says, probably only he knows. He plays with the audience, mocks and laughs at it, because he understands that whatever he "feeds" to the audience, the audience will "swallow", which means that Petrov will make money from it again.
What he does is not what is not journalism, it is classic propaganda, information terrorism and media murder. All of Petrov's speeches on the air or posts in social networks are based not on facts, but on emotions. Petrov's goal is to cause people to hate this or that person or company, to stir up anger, to make them manifest it in their comments or even in their actions. Dry facts and truth do not contribute to this. But emotional attacks, obscene swearing, embellished with conjectures and fictions are another matter. This is exactly what propaganda in Russia has been doing for many years. And in Ukraine, Volodymyr Petrov is doing this.
At the end of 2023, the National Council of Television and Radio Broadcasting considered the issue of granting a digital broadcasting license to the "Iceland" TV channel. During the meeting, the chairman and members of the board criticized the director of the TV channel, Pavlo Nemeryuk, for the complete lack of fact-checking in the channel's work, the spread of false information and manipulations, the sending of evaluative judgments, and continuous obscene swearing. In particular, towards the National Council itself: Petrov and Ivanov spread information that the National Council allegedly supported Viktor Medvedchuk's TV channels, and its members allegedly hid abroad after the start of the full-scale invasion.
Olga Gersimyuk, head of the National Council, pointed out to the head of "Icelandia" that all this was false information, to which Nemeryuk replied: "The main thing is the result", implying that all attacks by Petrov and Ivanov were aimed at obtaining a license for the TV channel.
"So this is not blackmail, and not pressure, and not an attempt at threats? Gerasimyuk was indignant at the time. — Do you think that when you beat someone up, you achieve a result?". Nemeryuk answered: "Yes." The head of the National Council emphasized that "Ukrainian society, traumatized by the war, needs support, and calls for enmity and discrimination and insults are destroying it."
Isn't it similar to what Telegram channel "Joker" Petrova does? It's the same: a brazen attack without stops and any restrictions, humiliation and insults using false information to achieve the result - getting money. Blackmail, pressure and threats - Olga Gerasimyuk aptly described everything that Petrov and his entourage do in a few words.
The existence of people like Volodymyr Petrov is beneficial to politicians and the authorities. He is a good tool for fighting with competitors: like a dog who is called "fas", due to his lack of moral qualities, Petrov is an ideal figure in this sense. But the existence of people like Petrov is very harmful to society. Because you never know what order and from whom he will receive and start implementing tomorrow. A lot of people have already become victims of his fakes - just remember his recent attack on journalists Myroslava Barchuk, Vitaly Portnikov and Serhiy Rudenko and the TV channel "Espresso" with the delusion that they were the ones who poisoned Viktor Yushchenko.
As Petrov himself claimed, "at work, I am capable of anything, except murder or sex with minors and men." And if tomorrow he receives an order from the FSB of the Russian Federation? Or maybe it was already coming, as some journalists and publications suspect, citing examples of his statements about the "civil war in Ukraine", invitations of pro-Russian propagandists to his broadcasts, and his work for the Kremlin's technical presidential candidate Mykhailo Prokhorov in 2012.
Volodymyr Petrov is an unprincipled person. After the scandalous dismissal from the state television channel Rada, he himself admitted that he is a monster. "I am a person with transparent, almost non-existent moral boundaries… And just as small monsters live in people, so in me, in a monster, a person lives. And when everyone is trying to control and raise their monsters, I am trying to raise and raise this person in me."
He still manages to make money from information terrorism for only two reasons. The first is that people are attracted to him by watching his television channel "Iceland" or reading his telegram channel "Joker". The second is that the government does not stop or interfere with him, because he works for the government. As soon as his audience understands what and why Petrov "feeds" them, and stops paying attention to him, he will have significantly fewer customers. And, probably, then he will cease to be useful and interesting to the authorities. And then, finally, the criminal proceedings for discrediting the family of civil servants will be brought to court. And maybe others will be opened.