I liked Ukraine, the country as it was — far from perfect, however, it was a country, had its charm, people got on. I’d created a life there, purchased an apartment in Odessa even From Odessa, watching Maidan begin filled me with a sense of foreboding. More, a sense of wrong being perpetrated, as looking at Maidan coverage in western media, all there was, was blanket pro-Euromaidan coverage.
Working as a freelance journalist in Odessa as I was — although to take into account that there was less news there than Kiev, hence less earnings, and also that I was working on longer, book projects, I’d also built up a business as an English corporate teacher — I began actively writing posts on my blog on the side of Maidan I saw wasn’t being covered by the west In December of 2013, I was surprised to get a message on Facebook from a producer at the channel Russia Today, inviting me on air for an interview.
I’ve never thought of working with Russian media, but, from Odessa, I did the interview, and my relationship with RT began.
By this time, I’d already started doing some of my own filming, just picking up my camcorder, and going with it. And things went from there. I was doing my own recording, travelling all around the then east of Ukraine, and Crimea, also interviews for RT. In April, RT asked me to go to Donetsk for a week of work, so I left my home in Odessa, and it all began. My relationship with RT ended in July of 2014, after my 2nd deportation, and I worked for a bit for Russian channel Zvezda, but for some 2 and a half years now, I’ve been working entirely for myself. I’ve covered extreme war in Donbass, from battles at Donetsk airport, Debaltsevo, to daily shelling of Lugansk, where I lived under blockade for a month, in 2014. I’ve filmed civilians killed by Ukrainian shelling, on a daily basis, Donetsk, January 2015. MH17. It’s not something I could ever have expected would happen in my life, nor in a country, as it was Ukraine, where I moved, liked, and just expected a positive new experience in life from. However, it’s happened, and I’ve stayed with it, and will stay with it till the end. At all times, I’ve done my best, always reported things as they are, the reality of the situation, fought propaganda where I’ve seen it, brought the truth out of Donbass, and the real situation there.
The positive and negative energy in flux around the whole Russia issue served to elevate me and several others to the top position among so-called Kremlin Trolls. As I alluded to earlier, the pressure I applied about MH17 and the “kill list” stories really infuriated Euromaidan Press and the whole of the opposition. In a funny twist of fates, the site dedicated to us Putin fans, kremlintrolls.com lowered the status of the top three original Kremlin Trolls, my comrades; Marcel Sardo, malinka1102 (Malinka), and @mkj1951 (Marilyn Justice) to “ordinary trolls”, and elevated me, Graham Phillips, RT’s Mark Sleboda and Dmitry Zolotarev, and a few others up there with the outlets Sputnik UK, New Eastern Outlook, and even the Russian Embassy in Ottowa(?) to the pinnacle of Rusky propagandists.
Created by the notorious founder and director of Internet Haganah, and of the Society for Internet Research, Andrew Aaron Weisburd, kremlintrolls.com was intended to serve in the same ways the anti-Islam Haganah (Zionist for the early Israel Defense Forces) was leveraged to defame anybody remotely against Israel’s policies. While Internet Haganah operated from Weisburd’s home office under the guise of an internet anti-extremist security league, my suspicions are that he’s more likely a freelancer and functionary of the Israeli and probably the US intelligence community. His LinkedIn profile reveals recommendations from West Point graduates like Robert A. Fox, who’s a fellow in the Foreign Policy Research Institute’s Program on the Middle East as well as a Senior Fellow at the Center for Cyber and Homeland Security at The George Washington University. Fox was an FBI Special Agent on a Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) and Executive Officer of the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point (CTC), and he recommended Weisburd for intelligence analysis alongside other quasi-spooks offering accolades. The “rabbit hole” on Weisburd is deep and dark, but his Kremlin Troll charts prompted New York Times political writer Scott Shane to request an interview with Malinka when she was a top three troll. At this point it’s appropriate for me to introduce the person behind the “Malinka” twitter feed, a lady whose witty grandmother disguise demands that I withhold her real name to protect she, her husband, their children and grandchildren from the people who create “kill lists” targeting Putin fans.
Letter from Malinka1102: Putin Twitter Spy
When you asked me how I got into this whole anti-Russia affair, I tried to remember how I’ve got into twitter life in the first place. I recall opening my account a long time ago but not having even used it much until 2014. I remember I used to watch BBC, Channel 4, read The Guardian for news and had my favorite journos there. Then the Ukraine, Crimea, and anti-Russia events started. It was then I noticed something is was not quite right, the information from UK news and from Russia was very different.
Since I have a lot of friends in Russia, and since I go there every year, I also had firsthand knowledge and reactions to events from Russians. So, naturally, I wanted to get all possible info from different sources to make up my own mind on these important developments. That’s how I got became a kind of twitter aficionado. It did not take long for me to realize that UK media (and western MSM in general) were propagating their own anti-Russia narrative, the very same journos, who I had great respect for, were very biased and the often-twisting facts to fit a clear agenda. So then and now I check different anti- and pro-Russian sources on the same subject, including the quotes and etcetera, before tweeting.
I’ve been blocked by many officials and journos just for asking questions or confronting them with facts from western media (to avoid being accused of citing Russian sources [which equal] as they say, “propaganda”) Also, as you probably know, I’m on the list of “Top Kremlin Trolls”. I’ve been challenged a few times to reveal my [identity and] personal [information] to prove I’m not a troll (@FactCheck and one NYT journo in DM). But I declined those requests since it doesn’t matter who I am. It seems apparent to me that what is really important is what I say. So, it is with a clear conscience I can tell the media or anyone: “No, I’m not paid by anyone, I have no connections with Russian government or secret services.”
My own relationship with Malinka came about in the most natural way. Despite what is often claimed about Vladimir Putin taking over social media I can tell you this, the Russians don’t know any more about Twitter and Facebook than the Americans or Germans do. You “follow” somebody on Twitter because they follow you or “like” you and vice-versa. Malinka retweeted some article of mine, or I liked or retweeted some information she found. This is the way of social media. Even though social media experts can profile accounts like I’ve done for reports and stories, in general, your following is made up of people following the same message you do.
Malinka first retweeted and followed me over a post on my personal blog back in December of 2014 in which I profiled some of the real NATO agents and their trolling activities. I recall this time when the Kiev Post’s Christopher Miller was just building up his reputation as a US State Department anchorman in Kiev. Miller would later go on to work with my old friend Pete Cashmore’s Mashable (as a kind of reward for Russophobia), but he and the now notorious Eliot Higgins (aka Bellingcat) got their start battling ordinary people like Malinka on Twitter. I’m now blocked from seeing Miller’s tweets, which is interesting since I’m unaware of anyone else in the world blocking me.