Mykolaiv journalists required not to aks Zelensky about airport

Photo credit: faktor.te.ua Mykolayiv journalists Andriy Lokhmatov and Tetyana Lokatska were told by phone not to ask the President Volodymyr Zelensky questions about controversial activity of Mykolaiv airport. Such a demand was addressed to the journalists just before the visit of the head of state to Mykolaiv on July 17. In his Facebook page, Andriy Lohmatov, said that on July 16, he got a callfrom an unknown phone number. "Call an unfamiliar number (…). - Hello, Andriy, is it convenient for you to speak now? - Yes. - You have to attend the meeting tomorrow in Mykolaiv ... (I think I wont’t interrupt him, sayingthat it is unlikely I will manage to attend it) ... I strongly request you not to ask any questions and not raise the question of the airport at all, so that we do not meet with you and do not return to this issue. I hope you understood me well, goodbye ", - Andriy Lohmatov transmitted the main point of the conversation. Another journalist Tatyana Lokatska reported in Facebook about the similar conversation she had. "Well, only yesterday, we were speaking about threats the journalists had and would have. I am sitting and writing a statement. In the evening, I got a call from an unknown number: - Hello, Tatyana? - Yes, I am listening, who is it? - I won’t name myself for now. Tomorrow, there will be the meeting and there will be the head of state, so this is a persistent recommendation: not to raise the issue of the airport, so that I do not have to name myself and to meet with you at another time and in another place. - Thank you, I was not going to ask this question tomorrow, but now, I will definitely ask it. Goodbye ", - wrote Tetyana Lokatska. As Andrei Lokhmatov noted commenting the incident to the IMI correspondent in the Mykolaiv region, he did not exclude that these telephone calls he and Lokatska received were either threat or provocation. "A person called in the evening from an unknown phone number (…) And then this was an impression the person read out the text, as if he did not speak by himself, but he was reading it. And given that both me and Tatyana Lokatskawere told it with the same wording, so we have a suspicion that the person who called us had the text prepared for two of us. The only question is, why he called from an open number. We do not exclude this was really a threat due to someone’s reluctance that some inconvenient issue to be raised in presence of the President, or it is kind of provocation aiming some goal we are not aware of, " the journalist said. Tetyana Lokatska told IMI correspondent they both with Andriy Lohmatov filed a complaint to  the police. They related these calls to their journalistic activities, including investigations into the Mykolaiv airport. "Friends were trying to call this number, they said someone even replied. This is not a disconnected number, it was checked out, the phone number was assigned to someone. But this, let the police to sort it out. We have several hypothesis of who it may be, provocateurs or not. But it looks like a threat, so we applied to the police, so there were no questions afterwards saying why you kept silent about. Then let's see how the police will find someone or this will be us who find someone behind it. But this is precisely happened due to journalistic activities, since we were involved in this issue of the airport as journalists, "Tetyana Lokatskaya said.