Former chief editor of Medvedchuk's ZIK says she is leaving the Public Health Center
Darya Hordiyko, the former chief editor of Victor Medvedchuk's TV channel ZIK, announced that she was resigning as the head of the communications of the Ministry of Healthcare's Public Health Center.
She wrote about this on Facebook on March 5.
She says the whole situation is cancel culture and notes that "sometimes people make mistakes. Sometimes serious mistakes."
She also added that almost every journalist in Ukraine has worked for pro-Russian media holdings:
"Cancel culture. Take nearly any media worker and start looking into where they worked (which is our job, the Internet remembers everything). And there you have it, 9 out of 10 will have worked for Inter, or 112, or Vesti, or ZIK, or Kurchenko's media holding (right, @Antonina Dolomanzhi, "Komsomolskaya Pravda", 2018?). Sometimes people make mistakes. Sometimes serious mistakes. And sometimes – when it is profitable – they present their manipulations and unwillingness to work as high principles."
Hordiyko said that she did not cling to her position, that her husband was fighting on the frontline, "but today's efforts are better directed to our common main goal – the fight for victory."
"That's what I do. That's what my family does. And yes, my support for the Armed Forces is not abstract and impersonal, but very much even personified – it is difficult for me to be abstract when my husband is out there fighting. I believe in Ukraine's victory over the aggressor country. I see no point in clinging to positions. I'm leaving. We have our own thing to do," she wrote.
On March 4, five employees of the communications department of the Public Health Center resigned after the former chief editor of Medvedchuk's TV channel ZIK, Darya Hordiyko, was appointed head of the department. They resigned "in objection to the appointment of a person who has put a lot of effort into spreading Russian propaganda and has openly promoted the Kremlin's narratives and agents while working a ZIK top executive, as manager." The staff of the communications department believes that appointing people who worked for the enemy during the big war is unacceptable.
Medvedchuk's channels and Darya Hordiyko's involvement
In the summer of 2019, it was reported that the ZIK TV channel has been bought by Victor Medvedchuk's associate Taras Kozak, who also owned the TV channels NewsOne and 112 Ukraine.
Several top executives and journalists resigned from ZIK immediately after hearing the news.
Later, the journalists who remained on ZIK started reporting censorship on the channel.
Namely, the then editor Ihor Krymov has said that the channel was banned from covering the July 2 rally on Independence Square, where people protested the Yanukovich Administration deputy head Andriy Klyuev and video blogger Anatoliy Shariy registering as candidates.
According to Krymov, the channel's chief editor Darya Hordiyko barred the rally from being covered live, arguing that the event was "not interesting."
Subsequently, former ZIK employees, Ukrainian NGOs, media experts and journalists protested against the "creeping Russian occupation of the Ukrainian media space" and called on the state leadership and the law enforcement to prevent the use of Ukrainian TV channels for the promotion of pro-Kremlin propaganda and the creeping occupation of the media space by Russia.
On February 2, 2021, the President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, signed into effect the decree by the National Security and Defense Council to apply five-year sanctions against People's Deputy Taras Kozak and legal entities that own the licenses of the TV channels "112 Ukraine", NewsOne and ZIK.
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