Photo by poltava.to
More than six messages with threats were sent from Russia to the editorial email address of Zaporizhzhia’s inform.zp.ua website, as well as to its chief editor Erik Brynza privately, from April 6 to 11. Some of the emails are written in verse.
Eric Brynza shared this with IMI’s representative in Zaporizhzhia region.
According to him, the editorial email account received two such letters lately. The first one is from “Artem Osipov,” the second one from “Artem Krasilnikov.” Both letters were sent from mail.ru addresses on April 8 and 11 respectively. In these emails, the authors are threatening the editors’ team with criminal prosecution in accordance with Russian Federation’s laws on “promoting fakes,” “supporting Zelenskyy’s neonazi regime,” and “spreading misinformation about the actions of russian army.”
According to the website’s editor, he received four private messages with threats via Telegram on April 6, 7, 8, and 9. All were sent from Russian phone numbers, two were written in verse and contained threats about criminal prosecution, interrogations, and incarceration. For example, one message reads: “Deceiving the public with your agenda, spreading fakes for your propaganda, don’t you get a suspicion that Zelenskyy is a liar? Are you ready, through capitulation, with penal institutions as the place of your emigration, to meet such a shameful end?” The private messages also repeatedly state that all the journalists who “support Zelenskyy’s neonazi regime” will be sent “to investigating authorities to be questioned and charged, with subsequent deployment to penal facilities.”
On April 7–11, the Volyn media outlets Konkurent and Volyn Online received similar letters.
061.ua has received similar threats multiple times before: on March 25, March 26, March 28, April 3 and 4.
On March 25, several Ukrainian news outlets received emails with threats: European Pravda, Glavkom, and the Zaporizhzhia websites 061.ua and inform.zp.ua.