Dozens of familiar names on one site. Viktor Medvedchuk’s propagandists reappear

The familiar faces of Russian propaganda

Disinformation researchers were already writing about golos.eu in 2024, describing it as a pro-Russian project posing as an independent media outlet. In December 2025, the UK added it to its sanctions list for its role in destabilizing Ukraine.

The project did not disappear. In January 2026, it returned under the name Europe Speaks («Говорит Европа») at govorit.eu. When the UK imposed sanctions on the new domain on 11 May, the site moved to govorit.tv the following day. Looking at the website, we recognized familiar faces: almost everyone who had spent years appearing on Medvedchuk’s TV channels was there. The site has a section called "Activity", which lists 80 authors and the number of pieces published under each name.

The list is led by Mykola Azarov, Prime Minister under Viktor Yanukovych, who fled to Russia in 2014. His name appears on 2,171 publications on govorit.tv. Second is Russian political analyst Vladimir Kornilov, a regular guest on Russian TV propaganda programs (1,315 pieces). Third is Olena Markosian, spokesperson for Medvedchuk’s Ukrainian Choice organization, whom the Chesno movement added to its Register of Traitors (1,155 publications). On the day Russia launched its full-scale invasion, she claimed that a military operation had begun in Donbas and that Ukraine had started it. Fourth is Mykhailo Chaplyha, a former civil servant. Until 2021, he was a regular guest on Medvedchuk’s channels. After they were shut down, he moved to YouTube channels run by former TV hosts (1,059 publications).

The list continues with people who hosted programs on Medvedchuk’s channels or regularly appeared there as commentators: presenters Diana Panchenko, Nadiia Sass, Oleksandr Shelest and Vasyl Apasov. Politicians Spyrydon Kilinkarov, one of the key figures in the Communist Party of Ukraine, and Maksym Holdarb, former leader of the political party Union of Left Forces. Medvedchuk himself is listed as the author of 246 publications. The site also features sitting MPs accused of treason: Oleksandr Dubinskyi (394 publications) and Nestor Shufrych (91). We have highlighted the presenters and experts from this list in the graphic.

Eighty names — that’s quite a crew. Some hosted programs on Medvedchuk’s TV channels, others appeared there as commentators, while others served his political projects or joined him in parliament. Putin’s crony, whom Ukraine exchanged with Russia in September 2022, had gathered these people around him long before the full-scale invasion. Despite various bans, they have stuck together and promoted narratives that serve Russia’s interests.

We have already covered some of them in our database of pseudo-sociologists and covert political promoters. Texty.org.ua adds people to the database if they have published questionable polls or covertly promoted politicians. Medvedchuk’s associates turned out to be the largest group of covert political promoters in the database. Of the 80 authors listed on govorit.tv, 18 are in our database.

Two rounds of sanctions

In its "About the project" section, govorit.tv describes itself as "an open network bringing together independent media outlets, civil society organizations and expert institutes across Europe". It claims its mission is to overcome division and polarisation. The contact page lists an address on Paulay Ede Street in Budapest. The website offers a language switcher with nearly 40 languages, including Ukrainian. The site’s predecessor, golos.eu, first appeared in 2014 under the name "Voice of Truth" («Голос правди»), which explains the 2014 date in the website’s data.

Registration records we checked using the who.is service show that the govorit.tv domain was registered only on 12 May 2026. The owner’s details are hidden behind Withheld for Privacy, a privacy service offered to Namecheap customers. This means the Icelandic address in the registration record belongs to the privacy service, not necessarily to the site’s owner.

This is common practice: the same company is listed as the owner of nearly 300 million domains worldwide. In 2024, The New York Times found that the same Reykjavík address was being used to conceal the identities behind, among others, websites linked to identity theft and disinformation.

The website’s server has been moved to Kazakhstan: govorit.tv’s IP address belongs to the network of Kazakh hosting provider Hoster.KZ. The publication acknowledges this itself, presenting the move as proof of its principles. It claims that in 2026 it "was forced to stop hosting the website in the EU and move it to Kazakhstan" because of "systematic pressure from European authorities". At the same time, the website states that "the editorial team and key journalists decided to move to Budapest".

What actually lies behind this alleged "pressure"? The answer can be found in the British government’s sanctions decisions and the history of the website’s Telegram channel: until 13 January 2026, it was called @golos_eu and belonged to golos.eu.

Like the current Europe Speaks, golos.eu presented itself as a European media, describing itself as an "opposition" project with an editorial office in Brussels. But it was primarily aimed at Russia’s supporters in Ukraine and supporters of the war in Russia itself. According to VoxCheck and Detector Media, golos.eu published content by Medvedchuk, Panchenko, Markosian, Lazariev, Montian, Derkach, Molchanov, Chaplyha and Sass — the same people now appearing on govorit.tv.

When the British government sanctioned golos.eu on 9 December 2025, it cited the website’s role in destabilizing Ukraine. The government also referred to leaked documents indicating that funding for the site came through Pravfond, a foundation established and financed by Russia to "support compatriots abroad", which Estonia considers a front for Russia’s military intelligence agency, the GRU.

Over the past six months, the project has changed domains twice and moved its server to Kazakhstan, but its content has remained the same. The golos.eu archive has been transferred to govorit.tv, with authors’ pages still featuring articles from previous years. The site remains accessible from the EU. We verified this in September 2026 using a Romanian VPN.

The project’s ties to Medvedchuk go beyond its contributors. Content from golos.eu was shared by the Telegram channel of The Other Ukraine (Drugaya Ukraina), a movement controlled by Medvedchuk. According to the Security Service of Ukraine (SSU), content from the Other Ukraine was also distributed through another Medvedchuk media project, the Prague-based Voice of Europe. Czech intelligence services found that some people who gave interviews to or published content on Voice of Europe had been paid to do so. They included politicians from six EU countries, and the payments came to light ahead of the European Parliament elections.

In March 2024, the Czech Republic sanctioned the website, Medvedchuk, and Voice of Europe’s head, Artem Marchevskyi, a former chief producer at 112 Ukraine. The EU imposed sanctions later. Afterward, Voice of Europe, like the relaunched golos.eu, continued operating from Kazakhstan. These projects have moved their operations outside the EU, yet their websites remain accessible from Europe and feature the same people.

"Still working"

The people behind the website are following much the same pattern as the website itself. Many have been sanctioned, charged with crimes, or become defendants in court proceedings. But many others managed to leave Ukraine and continue working for Russia just as they did before the full-scale invasion, and some even from under arrest.

Denys Zharkykh, a host on 112 Ukraine, crossed the Ukrainian-Slovak border in September 2022, Schemes reported. Nadiia Sass, a host on NewsOne, 112 Ukraine and ZIK, moved to Belarus 11 days before the invasion. Ruslan Kotsaba, who hosted the program "I think so" on NewsOne, left for the United States in 2023 as a political refugee and failed to appear at a court hearing in his treason case.

On 14 August 2025, Ukraine’s Security Service (SSU) and Office of the Prosecutor General notified Viktor Medvedchuk and 12 other members of The Other Ukraine organization of suspicion in absentia. They included Denys Zharkykh, Artem Marchevskyi, Yan Taksiur, Ruslan Kotsaba, Yurii Dudkin, Oleh Yasynskyi, Oleksandr Lazariev and Roman Kovalenko. According to investigators, the organization works for Russia’s military and political leadership and carried out assignments for the Federal Security Service and Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service.

Kyrylo Molchanov, a political strategist from Medvedchuk’s media circle, has also been served with a notice of suspicion. He was detained in Poland in spring 2025 after being invited to Germany, supposedly to receive a grant. According to the SSU, by August 2025 he was in custody in Kyiv and cooperating with investigators. Before that, he had worked simultaneously for Russia’s Federal Security Service and Foreign Intelligence Service.

Even detention has not stopped them from continuing their work. Oleksandr Dubinsky, who has been in custody since November 2023, was served with a new notice of suspicion of treason in May 2026. The State Bureau of Investigation found that he had continued spreading anti-Ukrainian propaganda even from jail.

What they are "sowing"

Headlines on govorit.tv are generally designed to blame the Ukrainian government, the West or Ukrainians themselves. We identified four main narratives in articles published over the past few months.

Ukraine allegedly does not want peace. In June, the website published an article by Medvedchuk himself titled "Putin names the only condition under which the conflict in Ukraine would end immediately". On 17 September, MP Artem Dmytruk, who illegally left Ukraine in August 2024 and is wanted internationally, published a piece titled "Officials scare people with winter, forgetting about negotiations with Russia". The narrative is consistent. Russia is supposedly always ready to negotiate, and the war continues only because Kyiv and Brussels want it to.

The government is illegitimate. In July, former MP and owner of the NASH TV channel, which was blocked in 2022, Yevhenii Muraiev argued that "elections without millions who have left the country are not democracy, but the formalization of a colony". Dmytruk wrote that "peace without Zelenskyy’s removal is merely a postponement of ruin". For Ukrainians, this narrative discredits any future election before it is even announced. For foreign audiences, it seeks to portray Kyiv as an illegitimate partner that cannot be negotiated with.

Mobilization. In August, Vasyl Apasov, a former host on NewsOne and ZIK, raised fears that the mobilization age would be lowered to 21. In July, another former NewsOne host, Ruslan Kotsaba, wrote that "bearded patriots in the rear call on those caught in the street to go and die". In June, political analyst Oleksandr Dudchak floated a claim in the form of a question: "Is Brussels preparing raids on Ukrainians to replenish Kyiv’s army?"

Winter, debt and corruption. Olena Markosian warned that "Ukraine is entering Autumn without gas stations, electricity or Western support". Oleksandr Dudchak predicted that Ukraine’s national debt could exceed UAH 12.3 trillion (about $274 billion) by the end of 2027. Rostyslav Shaposhnikov, head of the NGO Road Control, who has been under sanctions imposed by the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine since May 2025, promoted the claim that "war until victory is the best license to steal".

What these narratives have in common is that they are mostly built around real issues. Problems with mobilization exist, corruption scandals are real, and the coming winter will be difficult. The authors at govorit.tv quickly jump on each topic as soon as it appears in Ukrainian media and follow the same formula: take a genuine problem, amplify it with exaggeration or a small dose of fabrication, and push it towards the worst possible outcome.

And they leave it there. These articles offer no alternative scenarios, no solutions, and no mention of who started the war. The Ukrainian authorities are always portrayed as acting in bad faith. Readers who consume only this kind of content are left with a picture in which everything has already been lost, and the only rational option is to stop resisting.

These pieces are often based on YouTube broadcasts by the same people in Medvedchuk’s circle, who dissect painful issues every day on their own platforms. The website publishes them as opinion pieces.

One such platform is the channel run by Oleksandr Shelest, a former NewsOne host. Shelest has been under sanctions imposed by the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine since April 2025, when YouTube also blocked his channel for viewers in Ukraine. But the channel remains active, with 972,000 subscribers and 6,400 videos. Some broadcasts attract between 400,000 and 900,000 views.

His guests often overlap with the names listed on govorit.tv: Oleksandr Lazariev, Yurii Dudkin, Yevhenii Muraiev, Mykola Azarov, Maksym Holdarb, Snizhana Yehorova, former Communist Party MP Spyrydon Kilinkarov, Kost Bondarenko, Andrii Zolotarov, former Radical Party MP Ihor Mosiychuk, and Yevhen Kopatko, a sociologist who worked with the Party of Regions’ campaign team.

We reviewed the titles of broadcasts published over the past few months. During this period, the channel returned to two topics more often than others. The first was replacing the government: "Zelenskyy won’t give up power even after losing the election"; "Fedorov auditioned to replace Zelenskyy"; and "Zelenskyy to be replaced by a military junta in Kyiv". The second was mobilization, with a particular focus on women: "Kellogg was paid to push for women’s mobilization" and "Women’s forced busification". These topics align with what we document in our monthly and weekly monitoring reports of pro-Russian and other destructive Telegram channels.

Political analyst Oleksandr Lazariev is also active on YouTube. Before 2022, he was a frequent guest on 112 Ukraine, NewsOne, and ZIK. After the full-scale invasion began, he left for occupied Crimea. His channel has 143,000 subscribers, and its headlines focus on alarmist stories designed to spread fear: "September in flames. After the warehouses, an attack on energy infrastructure. Will Kyiv be taken? The government flees" (331,000 views); "Assassination attempt on Zelenskyy"; and "Ukraine’s new leader — Biletskyi. How Fedorov was pushed aside".

Vasyl Apasov and Mykhailo Chaplyha co-host the Catharsis («Катарсис») channel, which has 83,000 subscribers. Govorit.tv also frequently republishes content from this channel. In recent months, the duo has pushed the same themes as the other platforms: "Yalta 2.0 as early as December?"; "Ukraine will never join the EU"; and "Elections won’t save us".

Mykhailo Chaplyha also regularly appears on Politeka Online, a YouTube channel with 1.33 million subscribers. Back in 2024, Detector Media described the channel as "a living database of the Security Service of Ukraine (SSU)". Chaplyha even has his own playlist there, featuring 263 episodes, the earliest of which were published five years ago. The channel also features Ruslan Bortnyk, Dmytro Spivak, Andrii Zolotarov and Andrii Yermolaiev, all of whom contribute to govorit.tv. Sitting MPs Dmytro Razumkov, Maksym Buzhanskyi and Anna Skorokhod, whose rhetoric we have examined separately, also appear on the channel.

As we can see, since 2021, the landscape and tools used to spread Russian narratives have changed significantly, but many of the same faces remain among those acting in bad faith.

The scheme we traced has two layers. First, propagandists fill YouTube channels, where the same people offer daily, emotional and misleading interpretations of real problems, steering their audiences towards catastrophic conclusions.

Then websites turn their videos into text and attach the names of recognizable Ukrainians to them. This turns a single broadcast into dozens of pieces of content. The same scheme was used when Medvedchuk-linked TV channels operated in Ukraine. Broadcasts were turned into text and distributed across their network of propaganda websites. These figures’ Ukrainian backgrounds help present the propaganda they produce as part of a domestic Ukrainian debate.

Sanctions and criminal cases have an impact, but they do not bring the propaganda machine to a complete halt. The website changes its name and address, its authors move to different countries, but the talking points and faces remain almost unchanged.

This story was created as part of the Disinformation Booster Academy training course, organized by the NGO Common Sense Communications in cooperation with Deutsche Gesellschaft e. V., with the support of the German Federal Foreign Office. #civilsocietycooperation

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