An oligarch-owned Ukrainian television channel has launched an unusual Christmas special: a series of three meetings between ordinary Ukrainians and President Petro Poroshenko.
The first two parts of the miniseries, titled “Christmas Meetings with the President,” aired on the Ukraina television channel on Jan. 22 and 23, with the final segment scheduled to air at 11:50 p.m. on Jan. 24.
Ukraina is owned by industrial magnate Rinat Akhmetov, who made his fortune in the eastern Donbas regions, which has been partially occupied by Russia since 2014.
In the three videos, Poroshenko meets with ordinary Ukrainians at the winter residence Syniohora in the Carpathian Mountains. Seated around a wooden table in a rustic setting, the guests tell their stories to Poroshenko, ask questions about the situation in the country, and receive answers.
While all the guests are “ordinary” Ukrainians, they are also citizens with an active civic position.
The first episode features Vadym Ostapchuk and Larysa Radkevych, a couple from Donbas who left their jobs as professors in Donetsk to participate in the EuroMaidan protest and then fight for Ukraine in the Dnipro 1 battalion.
In the second, Poroshenko meets with military chaplain Father Leontiy Nykytenko and discusses the new independence of the unified Orthodox Church of Ukraine as well as his efforts preventing attempts to provoke religious conflict in Ukraine.
The mini-series is not the first family’s only cooperation with the Ukraina television channel. In May 2017, first lady Maryna Poroshenko began hosting a morning exercise show, “In the Rhythm of Sports,” on the network. During the roughly three-minute segment, the first lady demonstrated basic exercises that can be done at home to improve one’s fitness and health.
The owner of the station, Akhmetov, is Ukraine’s richest person — and he’s getting richer by the year.
A key backer of disgraced ex-President Viktor Yanukovych and his Party of Regions, Akhmetov lost access to some of his assets when the war hit the eastern region of Donbas. Worth some $15 billion before the war and $4.5 billion in 2015, he was back up to $12.2 billion in 2018, according to the Novoe Vremya magazine.
All the main TV stations in Ukraine are owned by several oligarchs – Akhmetov, Victor Pinchuk, Ihor Kolomoisky, Dmytro Firtash and Serhiy Lyovochkin.
Poroshenko himself owns a TV station, Channel 5. Prior to the election, he promised to sell it but never did. Channel 5 wasn’t chosen to air the “Christmas Meetings,” although earlier in January it aired a very complimentary 50-minute film about Poroshenko’s top ally, lawmaker Ihor Kononenko.
The “Christmas Meetings” appears to be a public relations campaign connected to the upcoming election. With its focus on patriotic residents of the Donbas and a clergyman, the series highlights areas Poroshenko likely views as his strengths: his wartime presidency and his efforts towards church unification — important themes in the president’s re-election campaign.
According to public opinion polls, Poroshenko is currently the second most popular candidate, following former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, the frontrunner. And, until recently, comedian Volodymyr Zelenskiy, who announced his candidacy on New Year’s Eve, held second place.
Despite the mini-series’ clearly political context, Liubov Vasylyk, a media expert at Detector Media, a media watchdog NGO, praised “Christmas Meetings with the President” for going beyond the traditional PR framework.
“The authors of the project found a successful approach: they emphasized not the president, but the invited guests and showed how they view the country’s development,” she wrote on Detector Media’s website. “We see the president every day, but here the opinion of ordinary Ukrainians dominates.”
