Graham Phillips is a British journalist who has free-lanced for both Russian and Western channels but became a “fully crowdfunded journalist” in 2016. He became known for his reporting of events in Ukraine in 2014. Now, it appears, corporate media is returning to events of 2014, and twisting them, in an attempt to discredit him.
On 9 May 2014, during Victory Day celebrations in Mariupol, Ukraine, dozens of armed militants barricaded themselves inside a police station and exchanged fire with government forces. During the fighting, the building burned down. Pools of blood and singed bodies appeared in the street.
But how many people were killed? Local news reported two deaths. Ukraine’s interior minister said 21 people died in the fighting. Human Rights Watch could only confirm seven deaths after visiting all four hospitals where the wounded were taken.
None of that seemed right to Phillips so he set out to investigate in the way that made him popular in east Ukraine’s crisis: by interviewing people on the street.
Some people told him that more than 100 people had died in the fighting.
On 20 May 2014, RT, which employed Phillips as a freelancer three days a week, said that Ukraine’s national guard detained Phillips at a checkpoint outside Mariupol on suspicion of being a spy. According to the ministry’s press service, Phillips was detained for “filming facilities which are forbidden from being filmed.”
Phillips was deported to Poland and banned from Ukraine for three years in 2014. He was accused of being a “Kremlin propagandist” and supposedly “supporting terrorism” but has always denied this and maintains his reporting is independent, The Courier wrote on hearing of his return to Ukraine during the current conflict. An entirely different tone of reporting compared to those when he was detained in Ukraine six years before.
In March 2022, Phillips returned to Ukraine for three weeks and posted his first video report on 14 March. The next day Tanya Kozyreva – an “investigative journalist” who, judging by her Twitter posts, also appears to be an activist for Zelenskyy’s cause – tweeted the news of Phillips’ return to Ukraine and asked YouTube to consider banning what she described as his “disinformation” channel.
Let me introduce you to Graham Phillips, British journalist well known in Ukraine (holding Z bag). He was embedded with pro-Russian separatists and Russian troops in 2014.
And he is back to Ukraine in 2022.
Dear @YouTube consider the ban of his disinformation channel. pic.twitter.com/cQ22wyLWEl
— Tanya Kozyreva (@TanyaKozyreva) March 15, 2022
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