The sanctions are still insufficient because the FSB still has enough resources to finance large international information sabotage. Yes, I'm talking about the shameless publication in The Washington Post and Der Spiegel of "insights from an anonymous source from almost Odesa Armenian Khurshudyan" about "the coordinator of the Nord Stream attacks Chervinsky".
Yes, exactly "from an anonymous source." Who said "from the Kremlin"? The Moscow journalist Khurshudyan, who has been heading the Kyiv branch of the Washington Post for 1.5 years, did not say that! And "leak from a friend in the Armenian diaspora, Margarita Simonyan" was not written anywhere either, so it is not true!
But where exactly Khurshudyan got the Kremlin's theses is not important. Only the fact itself is important. Because this is not some Little Creek Magazine with 300 subscribers, not the yellow press. And not a tabloid. These are two quite reputable international media outlets.
I doubt very much that they would allow such a "yellow" or even brown publication for no reason. A publication that touches on the security of NATO, the European Union, and individual states will have an impact on geopolitical and global economic processes, on the war in Europe. Probably, someone had to lobby for this text. It is unlikely that it was done for free. And the order of the amounts is obviously determined by the scale of the publications. And Russian structures still have these sums. Despite all the sanctions.
And this must be overcome by joint efforts.
Yes, Colonel Chervinsky immediately denied the slander through his lawyers. And I hope he has filed or is going to sue. Yes, I really hope that the Ukrainian authorities will lodge an official protest with the management and owners of both publications. In the end, Khurshudyan will return to Moscow or to hockey - no problem.
Strict control over the appointments of such journalists during the war is a really complicated issue. Not technically - we have good specialists. It's about diplomacy. And with this we have problems.
And we have problems with Khurshudyan's talks. Because Chervinsky's objections are not enough.
We still need to somehow resolve the issue with Khurshudyan.
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Speaking of connections, the situation with Khurshudyan LLC is very interesting. First, the date of her birth is classified, "somewhere in the early 1990s' (possibly 1992, because in 2022 she writes that she "did not expect to celebrate her 30th birthday in a bunker during the war"). Her relatives are from Odesa, and her great-aunt still lives there.
For 5 years, from the fall of 2014 to the fall of 2019, Khurshudyan dealt with hockey matters at The Washington Post. She even received some awards for her good commentary on hockey events. And somewhere in the same place, on the hockey stands, she apparently learned to "speak fluent Russian" (the second or third generation of relatives from Odesa could hardly get "fluent Russian"), for which she was involved in commenting on events in Ukraine in 2014, immediately after the downing of the Boeing airliner by terrorists.
At the same time, she began to stubbornly submit proposals to various publications, "let me become your foreign correspondent" (in Moscow, you mean?). And in October 2019, the "hockey columnist" was suddenly sent to Moscow, because in December 2019 she was appointed a foreign correspondent-what an unexpected and great opportunity! At the same time, in August, the still "prominent hockey columnist" manages to interview Zelenskyy because "Russian forces have amassed along the border." She or her curators had a stormy 2019: she managed to be active since August, although she nominally appeared in Moscow only in December... Well, it happens: different departments got confused about the dates.
Then Khurshudyan spun around the "unfortunate Donbas" and fled back to Moscow. Although in January 2022, she was almost forcibly transferred to Ukraine: "I had all my stuff in Moscow," "I had a real life there [in Moscow]. I have friends there - many friends."
And then she became the head of a department in Kyiv and actually joined the cohort of "good Russians" (she did not learn the language, of course) who respectfully advised us on what to do with the war, with the state, and with the authorities.
About the author. Oleksiy Holobutsky, political scientist
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