Five Zaporizhzhia media outlets receive terrorism threats

Five Zaporizhzhia media outlets received emails threatening to explode the buildings housing various institutions and organizations on December 12. The letters also mention bombs planted at media offices in Kyiv and other oblasts of Ukraine.

The online media outlets Pershyi Zaporizkyi, Accent, Zaporizhzhia Investigation Center, Zprz.City, and the editors of Inform.zp.ua confirmed receiving such emails to Natalia Vyhovska, the Institute of Mass Information representative in Zaporizhzhia oblast. In total, the news outlets received seven letters with similar content.

The senders threaten to bomb Mykolaiv's Channel 2, Radio Knyha, Rivne 1, BC Kremenchuk 2, Radio Lviv, UNIAN, and Radio Liberty.

Photo by dnepr.express

Three letters were signed as Petro Pavlovych Vrublevskyi, who calls himself a combat veteran and a “war invalid” “who lost his health in the war for Ukraine and his family.” Other senders had female names: Natalia Viktorivna Lozova, Tetyana Volodymyrivna Stepanova, Yulia Pavlivna Bilyak, Daryna Oleksandrivna Fedorenko, but the content of the emails was nearly identical.

The letters list the objects where bombs have allegedly been planted and the sender's intention to blow them up. The lists of mined objects contain various addresses in Kyiv and other oblasts, including Odesa, Kharkiv, Rivne, Mykolaiv, Khmelnytskyi, Cherkasy, and Kryvyi Rih. The sender claims that schools, embassies, police, a healthcare center, hotels, media offices, and universities have been mined.

The emails use many loanwords from Russian, stylistically incorrect vocabulary, and have grammar errors. For instance, in all the emails, the names of the “mined” universities across Ukraine are written in Russian. There are also factual errors in the names and addresses of the sites: namely, some of the media outlets mentioned do not exist or their addresses are invalid. There are also some errors in the listings of other institutions and organizations mentioned in the letters.

All the senders call on the receipients to join them “on the square near the Verkhovna Rada” on December 14 to ensure “that the power belongs to the common people.” Each email contains threats, with the senders saying that if they are not heard, they will be bombing “state administration bodies and their families who live in prosperity.” They also call for mass murder.

Furthermore, the senders use hate speech and insults referring to the current President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky and his wife.

All the letters contain thanks to the Khimprom cartel and "the administration of the darknet forum Rutor" for “training and funding,” with a link to join them on social media. According to “Slidstvo.Info”, the drug cartel Khimprom is a criminal group that may be behind the synthetic drug dealing network in Ukraine and Russia. Ukraine has opened mltiple cases against the cartel and its activities have been described in dozens of court rulings. The darknet forum Rutor is a real community on the Internet shadow market, offering customers both “illegal transactions” and “gambling entertainment.”

The email domains of the senders lead to websites of various foreign companies, including the Japanese electrical company Idea Electric Industries Co, the Japanese spa Bijin-yu Shofuen, the Beauty EST beauty salon in Dammam, Saudi Arabia, and the Vietnamese Wyndham Legend Halong Hotel.

As reported earlier, on Decembr 12, the PBC branches Suspilne Rivne and Suspilne Lutsk received emails claiming a bomb had been planted in their office.

On November 26, four media outlets received emails threatening to explode the buildings housing various institutions and organizations.