News that Ukraine captured Russian President Vladimir Putin’s closest ally in Ukraine, the oligarch and opposition politician Viktor Medvedchuk, drew furious condemnation from Kremlin officials and made waves on state media.
Medvedchuk, one of Ukraine’s richest men, escaped house arrest on treason charges days after the Russian invasion. His eventual capture was announced by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Wednesday.
“I propose for the Russian Federation to exchange this guy of yours for our boys and girls who are now in Russian captivity,” Zelensky said in a video address posted on Telegram. Medvedchuk was handcuffed and disheveled, dressed in army fatigues with a Ukrainian flag patch—a disguise worn to flee from the country, according to Ukrainian officials.
Medvedchuk boasts close ties to Putin and was seen in Ukraine as a means of communication with the Kremlin, while also playing an intermediary in POW exchanges between Ukraine and Russian-backed militants in eastern Ukraine. Medvedchuk has been regularly photographed alongside Putin, who is reportedly his daughter’s godfather.
Despite their close ties, it appears that the Kremlin is making no commitment to a prisoner swap to help get Putin’s close pal out of jail.
The reason? Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov pointed out that Medvedchuk is a Ukrainian citizen: “In regard to the exchange, which various individuals in Kyiv are talking about with such passion and glee, Medvedchuk is not a citizen of Russia and has nothing to do with the special military operation. He is a foreign politician.” He added that Moscow has “no idea” whether Medvedchuk himself would want such an exchange.
Since no one can predict what Putin might like to do with respect to his ally, state TV pundits turned to their usual tactics: portraying the captured fugitive as someone who was unjustly detained and is being brutally tortured in Ukraine.
“You can tell that Medvedchuk was bathed and photographed in a rush,” Olga Skabeeva, the host of state TV show 60 Minutes, claimed on Wednesday. The photos clearly show that the man was tortured… This torture apparently lasted for approximately one month.”
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“These are ISIS methods,” her co-host Evgeny Popov added. He raged about Zelensky’s offer to exchange Putin’s ally for the captured Ukrainian soldiers: “For decades, all of the Ukrainian politics, all of the Ukrainian economy has been based on cronyism.” The remark only brought to the forefront the irony of such a statement, due to the outsized influence of Putin’s circle of oligarch cronies on Russia’s economy and politics.
In a statement about Medvedchuk’s arrest, Ukraine’s security service, SBU, said: “You can be a pro-Russian politician and work for the aggressor state for years… You can even wear a Ukrainian military uniform for camouflage. But will it help you escape punishment? Not at all! Shackles are waiting for you and the same goes for traitors to Ukraine like you.”
Medvedchuk was closely linked to Ukraine’s TV channels 112 Ukraine, Zika, and Newsone, which were shut down last year amid allegations that they broadcast Russian disinformation. He reportedly made millions from buying a stake in a Russian oil refinery in the mining city of Novoshakhtinsk for an artificially low price. Medvedchuk bought a majority stake in the refinery under the name of his wife, TV star Oksana Marchenko, in an apparent attempt to avoid U.S. sanctions.
On Wednesday, Marchenko posted a video appeal to President Zelensky, demanding her husband’s immediate release. She claimed that her husband didn’t violate any laws and didn’t leave Ukraine, accusing authorities of holding him for political motives. Donning a headscarf, Marchenko also made an appeal to the president of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, which was broadcast on Russian state TV.
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In a Telegram post, Dmitry Medvedev, deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council and former Russian president, weighed in on the capture.
“These freaks who call themselves the Ukrainian authorities say that they want to beat a testimony out of Viktor Medvedchuk, ‘quickly and fairly’, convict him, and then exchange him for prisoners,” he said. Medvedev doubled down on his statement with an overt threat: “These people should watch out and lock the doors well at night to make sure they do not become the people who are going to be exchanged themselves.”
Looking up at Medvedchuk’s picture on the jumbotron during the broadcast of 60 Minutes, Viktor Baranets, a former military spokesman who’s now a columnist with the daily Komsomolskaya Pravda, complained about his disheveled appearance: “He’s being held in captivity for no reason whatsoever, but to torment a person this way, to drive him to such a state, and to publicly talk about it, shows that the Ukrainian president’s morality is rotten.”
Dmitry Egorchenkov, director of the Institute for Strategic Studies and Forecasts, claimed that the entire capture was “artificially staged” and the capture happened long ago: “He was gone for 48 days, now they dragged him out, claiming they just caught him.” Trying to ratchet up the drama, Egorchenkov threw out a startling comparison: “When I see the staged pictures with Medvedchuk, the first thing that comes to my mind is Saddam Hussein.”
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