The Kyiv Court of Appeal has dismissed an appeal filed by “Servant of the People” MP Maksym Buzhanskyi, who was challenging a first-instance court ruling in the lawsuit against Detector Media.

The ruling was issued on 31 August 2026, reports Detector Media, which has obtained a copy of the verdict.

Buzhanskyi filed a defamation claim in June 2025, seeking to have information reported in Yaroslav Zubchenko’s August 2019 news article “Nazi Maidan and the Heroic USSR: Maksym Buzhanskyi’s Views”, published on MediaSapiens, declared false.

In particular, the MP challenged the phrase: “Overall, the freshly minted ‘servant of the people’ has almost the complete set of features of a typical pro-Russian blogger/politician.”

Buzhanskyi also asked the court to declare the information about his activities reported by Chesno Movement with links to Zubchenko’s article inaccurate along with his inclusion in Chesno Movement’s Traitors Register on the basis of that information.

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The Shevchenkivskyi District Court of Kyiv fully dismissed Buzhanskyi’s claim. The court ruled that the reported information constituted a value judgment and a subjective assessment of the MP’s activities as a public figure and politician.

The Court of Appeal agreed with this finding. The court said that the disputed sentence in the article was a summed-up analysis of Buzhanskyi’s public statements, which the author had cited and referenced.

“This phrase contains no specific factual data that could be vetted for accuracy; rather, it constitutes an assessment of the claimant’s activity as a blogger and politician. The first-instance court therefore correctly classified this information as a value judgment,” the Court of Appeal’s ruling states.

The court added that the information published by Chesno Movement and the methodology used to compile the Traitors Register suggested that this was not a matter of the MP being officially declared a high traitor but rather an assessment of his public activity.

The court stressed that Maksym Buzhanskyi was a public figure and that, as per ECHR and Supreme Court case law, the limits of acceptable criticism of him are considerably broader than those applying to private individuals.

The Court of Appeal also stated that the MP’s demand for “the takedown of all information” could not be granted, since data on an official’s parliament work were open access information and their takedown would amount to censorship of Chesno Movement’s work, which runs counter to the principles of a democratic society.

The Court of Appeal’s ruling may be challenged through cassation before the Supreme Court within 30 days of its announcement.

Human rights lawyer Valentyna Telychenko, who represented Detector Media‘s interests, said that the claim had been entirely without merit, since the published article had clearly and unambiguously distinguished between factual data (quotes from Maksym Buzhanskyi’s public posts) and analysis and conclusions regarding the newly elected member of parliament.

“It’s disappointing that an MP couldn’t tell the difference between factual data and value judgments, and thought he could challenge an assessment of his own work in court. And it’s even more disappointing that he never disavowed his posts. A cassation appeal in this case makes no sense whatsoever: the ruling dismissing the MP’s claim is final, it is lawful, well-founded, and has taken legal effect,” Valentyna Telychenko said.

Previously

On 31 December 2025, the Shevchenkivskyi District Court of Kyiv ruled to dismiss MP Maksym Buzhanskyi’s claim for defamation and information takedown. Buzhanskyi demanded that his profile be removed from the Traitors Register by the NGO Chesno Movement.

It was reported in September 2026 that the Kyiv Court of Appeal had dismissed Buzhanskyi’s motion challenging the first-instance court ruling in the case concerning his profile on the Chesno Movement website.