In Zaporizhzhia, Parliamentary candidate promised local journalists political purge and castration

Mykola Fursenko, an independent Parliamentary candidate in the electoral district 74 (Zaporizhzhia), promised local journalists political purge and castration. The scandal started with a post on Facebook.

President Petro Poroshenko was reported to request that the Prosecutor General’s office investigate Dmytro Mendeleyev, the ‘Dzerkalo Tyzhnia’ newspaper journalist, for the article about governmental structures illegally selling weapons on the internal market, and Fursenko reacted to this news. He stated that after the elections, in Zaporizhzhia political purges would be conducted to get rid of such shameless journalists. In another Facebook post, he said he planned to invite other Parliamentary candidates to subject local journalists to ‘castration’ – to take away licenses from the journalists he would qualify as corrupt.