Volodymyr Volodymyrovych Petrov (; born. 20 November 1977) is a Ukrainian pro-Russian propagandist, campaign manager, producer, and blogger.
He is known for being the author of the pedophilegate at Artek, which helped pro-Russian candidate Viktor Yanukovych win the 2010 Ukrainian presidential election.
He managed the election campaign of Ihor Markov, a pro-Russian politician wanted by the Security Service of Ukraine, which resulted in Markov's election to the Verkhovna Rada. He worked for the campaign of candidate Mikhail Prokhorov during the 2012 Russian presidential election.
He is best known for creating the titushky in 2013, whose provocations and clashes led to the Maidan casualties, Yanukovych's escape and Russia's annexation of Crimea.Чорні справи Володимира Петрова. Організатор тіндерного скандалу створив тітушок, влаштовував провокації на Майдані і працював на Арбузова // fakty.org 25.01.2022; Анна Вернигора, politeka, 3 December , 14:20
He was a candidate for the 2019 Ukrainian presidential election.
He is the founder and host of the YouTube channel ISLND TV. On 15 December 2021, he became the host of the Rada TV channel, on 17 December he was scandalously suspended from the airwaves.
He is known for his anti-Ukrainian statements, particularly about the Euromaidan, the Ukrainian language; derogatory remarks about the Ukrainian military, Ukrainian refugees. He declared that he did not consider Crimea to be Ukrainian. He spread Russian propaganda, as well as lies and fakes about the Russo-Ukrainian war on his airwaves. A number of Ukrainian media outlets, journalists and politicians have called Petrov a "campaign manager" and "media killer", and his activities have been characterised as "pro-Russian", "anti-Ukrainian" and "propagandistic".
Early life
Volodymyr Petrov was born in 1977 in Dnipropetrovsk.
His parents are Lyubov Volodymyrivna Petrova, a native of the city of Salavat in the Russian Federation, and Volodymyr Rudolfovych Petrov, a native of the city of Petropavl in the Kazakh SSR, a Russian, former military man. They divorced when Petrov was six years old. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Petrov's father went to live in Russia.
Education
He graduated from Kryvyi Rih National University with a degree in mining engineering.
Career
In 2002, he was a journalist for Vulychne Telebachennya, a project of Victor Pinchuk that played an important role in campaigning and manipulating in favour of Leonid Kuchma in the early 2000s.
Petrov then moved to work for the pro-Russian, now closed, KRT TV channel, where he rose to the level of editor-in-chief and director. KRT was owned by Donetsk prosecutor and Prosecutor General Hennadiy Vasilyev.10 фактів із життя Володимира Петрова // Dmytro Dobryi, Espreso TV, 14 March 2019https://detector.media/withoutsection/article/31740/2007-02-26-vladimir-petrov-ukhodit-s-posta-io-gendirektora-kanala-krt/ | Владимир Петров уходит с поста и.о. гендиректора канала КРТ
He became famous thanks to his LiveJournal blog, which he maintained since the 2000s under the pseudonym Lumpen. In the public political space, Volodymyr Petrov's name loudly surfaced in the summer of 2009 because of the scandal with Arseniy Yatsenyuk's LiveJournal. On Petrov's LiveJournal page, an obscene comment on behalf of Yatsenyuk appeared in the name of Yatsenyuk to one of the users. Later Petrov explained that he forgot to re-login.
In 2010, Petrov registered B&D News Agency.
2012 Russian presidential election
Volodymyr Petrov campaigned during the 2012 Russian presidential election as a campaign manager for Russian oligarch Mikhail Prokhorov.
According to various estimates, Prokhorov participated in the election as a technical candidate. Sergey Mironov, chairman of the Just Russia party and another Russian presidential candidate, has openly stated that Putin and Prokhorov had "essentially the same headquarters." In fact, Prokhorov was a political technician.
According to an investigation by journalist Dmytro Gordon, Petrov's work in this presidential campaign was supervised directly by the Fifth Department of the Russian Federal Security Service (officially known as the Service for Operational Information and International Relations); Prokhorov's PR was also organised by Timofey Sergeitsev, one of the ideologists of Rashism and author of the scandalous article What Russia Should Do with Ukraine, Russian political technologist Dmitry Kulikov, and Iskander Valitov, a political technologist with experience of campaigns in Ukraine.
Petrov received approximately $1.5 million for his work for Prokhorov, and it was with this money that he then bought a house in Bucha. In February 2020, he transferred the house, which has an area of almost 250 m2, to his wife through a deed of gift.
In 2012, when he was working with Prokhorov on the Federal Security Service's behalf during the election, Petrov "joked" that he would soon be promoted to colonel. He lived in Moscow for months.
Cooperation with the Yanukovych regime
During the presidency of Viktor Yanukovych, Petrov's company worked for Presidential Administration. In 2009–2013, he was active against Yulia Tymoshenko and the united opposition.
During the 2009–2010 presidential campaign, Petrov was the author of the pedophilegate, when three MPs from the Yulia Tymoshenko Bloc, Viktor Ukolov, Serhiy Teryokhin and Ruslan Bogdan, were accused of allegedly sexually abusing children in the Artek camp. Volodymyr Petrov's public involvement was manifested in the fact that he helped to spread the story through his blog. On 13 October 2009, on his LiveJournal, he published a letter from MP Hryhoriy Omelchenko to President Viktor Yushchenko. On the same day, 13 October, Vadym Kolesnichenko, a member of the Party of Regions, also spoke about the Artek scandal. This was the impetus for the consideration of the "pedophile case", with the three accused MPs demanding that all checks be carried out. At the time, the MPs categorically denied this information. The consultant in the case of the "injured party" was, among others, a lawyer and pro-Russian propagandist Tetiana Montyan. She, like Petrov, was actively involved in the promotion of the pedophilegate.
In October 2011, the falsified case against three MPs from the Yulia Tymoshenko Bloc was closed.
One of Petrov's clients in the 'pedophile case' was pro-Russian politician Volodymyr Sivkovich, who is suspected of treason for creating a network of Russian agents in Ukraine. Serhiy Teryokhin said in an interview with Dmitry Gordon that he was involved in the promotion of the pedophilegate. At the time, Sivkovych was an MP from the Party of Regions, and after Yanukovych's victory, he became deputy prime minister, in charge of the security forces in Mykola Azarov's government. Petrov's second client in the case of alleged pedophilia at Artek is Volodymyr Oliynyk, a pro-Russian politician and former MP from the Party of Regions who also fled to Russia and was suspected of treason by the Security Service of Ukraine. According to an investigation by journalist Dmytro Gordon, Sivkovich and Oliynyk were the main coordinators of the paedophile case, and it was from them that Petrov received money for promoting the scandal. In an interview with Ukrainian blogger Lilia Bagirova, Volodymyr Petrov said that the story of the "pedophiles" helped to "bring down" Yulia Tymoshenko in the second round, she lost to Viktor Yanukovych by less than 3.5 percentage points.
During the Yanukovych presidency, actions against the opposition were the leitmotif of Petrov's public actions. One of the most notable victims was his former employer, Arseniy Yatsenyuk.
In 2012, Petrov helped the leader of the now banned pro-Russian party Rodina, Ihor Markov, who was then one of the main Ukrainophobes, according to The Ukrainian Week, to get into the Verkhovna Rada. He is currently hiding in Russia and is suspected of crimes against national security, and is a supporter and sponsor of the DPR and LPR terrorist groups. Petrov was inventing everything for Markov's campaign, and Russian campaign manager Semyon Uralov worked with him. Now Uralov is discussing on air with DPR terrorist Denis Pushilin, Russian World ideologue Aleksandr Dugin and Deputy Chairman of the Federation Council Konstantin Kosachev about how to "denazify" Ukraine. Markov won the election. The technical candidate Petrov received 525 votes. According to Oleksiy Honcharenko, an MP from the European Solidarity party, Markov spent millions of dollars on his campaign, including a performance by Russian singer Lev Leshchenko at his 9 May event. After Markov's election victory, Petrov began to work more actively in Kyiv, with Alexei Sitnikov, a Russian campaign manager, as his supervisor.
Between the elections, Petrov worked against journalists opposed to Yanukovych. While media professionals were fighting for freedom of speech, the political strategist opposed the Stop Censorship movement. In particular, he publicly promised to make every effort to ensure that the "journalistic party" that remained after the Revolution on Granite disappeared from Ukraine. Petrov's campaign against Dzerkalo Tyzhnia was the most notable.
Vladimir Petrov introduced the use of titushky into the practice of political technology. On 18 May 2013, the then Minister of Internal Affairs Vitaliy Zakharchenko and Petrov's team started a fight at the opposition rally Rise up, Ukraine! attended by several thousand people. Accompanied by the traffic police, an armoured vehicle with clowns inside and on the armour, provided by Volodymyr Petrov, began to ram those who had come to Sophia Square and the surrounding streets against the Yanukovych regime. The vehicle provoked a fight, during which activists and journalists were attacked by hired thugs, one of whom was Vadym Titushko. It was on that day that the word titushky was born. At first, Volodymyr Petrov admitted that he had rented a car for the action. But now he denies any involvement because of a potential criminal case. At the time, Serhiy Lyovochkin was the head of President Yanukovych's administration. Petrov only admitted to working with him at the end of 2018, after his arrest.
After Vadym Titushko beat up journalists, the Maidan began to use the following tactic on a massive scale: they launched titushky, who were invented and brought to the Maidan by Volodymyr Petrov in 2013. The provocations and clashes were meant to stir up the situation as much as possible. All of this subsequently led to the Maidan casualties, Yanukovych's escape, Russia's annexation of Crimea and the war in Donbas.
Post-Euromaidan activities
In the autumn of 2014, after the outbreak of the Russo-Ukrainian war, Petrov helped pro-Russian politician Serhii Kivalov get into the Verkhovna Rada in the early parliamentary elections in Odesa. At that time, Kivalov won his constituency by a slim margin due to two things: the total control of the District Election Commission and the fact that a lot of technical candidates, including Petrov's associates Oleksandr Baraboshko and Oleksiy Durnev, were running against his competitors. In total, 40 people were running in the 135th constituency at the time.
On 6 September 2015, NLO TV premiered the Lumpen Show, an information and entertainment project in which Volodymyr Petrov promoted anti-Ukrainian narratives and hosted broadcasts with openly pro-Russian persons.
In 2016, he hosted the Dangerous Tour programme on the Russian federal TV channel Friday! together with TV presenter Zhanna Badoeva, who is under National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine sanctions for anti-Ukrainian activities.
Television channel
One of Petrov's projects is the ISLND TV YouTube channel, which was launched in spring 2018 and publishes several programmes on politics, science and culture.