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Oleksiy Arestovych about Mykhailo Podolyak

11:43 I'm wondering if you keep in touch with Podolyak.

No [shakes head].

How do you evaluate his performance on "Грэм" and the answer to the question of a resident of Zaporizhzhia about there being an imbalance with those who serve and who do not, the war is for the poor and not for the rich and actually accusing the person asking the question of Russian propaganda. How do you rate it?

Well, I don't listen to Misha Podolyak. I only hear fragments like this. I sympathize with him very much because he is forced to edit what he really wants to say to such an extent. I know him well. He is an exceptionally smart, sober person, and evaluates everything perfectly. But he is at work. And he is forced to edit so much that it is not understandable any more where's the truth and where's the work.

Concering Russian propaganda, it's a very mossy one. We often accuse Russia of being party lined, callous, but what are we like? As soon as anyone says anything, it's Russian propaganda right away. Do you understand in what idotic position a person, or rather Ukraine, the official propaganda of Ukraine, puts itself when it draws such a parallel, common thought and realism equal with Russian propaganda? Well, this is what Misha is forced to do today.

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Arestovych's involvement with the HUR and Budanov

Arestovych is frequently depicted, including by Ukrainian government speakers, as an irrelevant pro-Russian blogger hack inflating his importance. There is actually a lot of evidence that this is not true.

There's enough to talk about here that I'm going to split it into several posts, each focusing on a different area of his involvement. While I've touched on some of the topics in past posts, this will be more of a narrow-scope deep dive into one topic at a time, and incorporate the latest available information. In this case: his genuine history with the HUR and its current head Budanov. The post will be split into the pre-full scale invasion and post-full scale invasion timespans. The former will go into both Arestovych's claims, and the public evidence available to support his claims, as of April 2024. The latter runs into the issues of the far more limited information available in the middle of full-scale war, as well as the intense politicization that's occurred around Arestovych in the past two years, but there's a few interesting items worth presenting.

Pre-full scale invasion

Arestovych's account

Pieced together from various interviews:

Arestovych served 1999-2005 in Ukrainian military intel, hinting that he ultimately quit because he was given what he considered destructive orders after the Orange Revolution. Among his specialties at that time was "information counteraction", which he described as "to bring public opinion to certain indicators on a certain issue in a particular region." In other words, public info ops on behalf of the military.

During his stint in the HUR, he befriended Roman Mashovets, a fellow young officer who would go on to become a deputy head of the Office of the President. In addition, he says he's known Kyrylo Budanov for "many, many years" due to their HUR connection, since before war broke out in 2014, and calls him a "comrade in arms" whom he worked with in the Donbas in 2018, when Budanov was a HUR special ops officer and Arestovych was a Ground Forces intel officer. When Budanov became head of the HUR in the midst of the Wagnergate scandal involving his predecessor, he asked for Arestovych's help in managing the public reaction.

The available evidence

We'll start with the documentation Arestovych himself has presented, before moving on to external sources.

While you could perhaps argue that documents could be forged, I find this possibility highly unlikely, given any journalist could easily request confirmation from the Ministry of Defense (and indeed they've done so, and published the results, on other occasions, such as when they took a misheard quip from one of his livestreams to mean he was claiming he was a colonel and obtained official confirmation he wasn't.) Given no one has been able to find irregularities in his formal records and awards despite several years of such intense public scrutiny, I think it's safe to conclude they're legitimate.

This is certification from 2020, showing that he was in the military from August 1994 to April 2005, and from September 2018 to September 2019:

(It's worth noting that this timespan overlaps with his infamous appearance at a conference with Dugin, which he's said was part of his intel work.)

In his early days as a public figure, he also presented a certificate of merit from the HUR dated September 2003 (original on left, machine translation on right, though note that the machine translation inaccurately parses the handwritten date as 2002 instead of 2003), evidence that he was specifically in the HUR and that he wasn't too shabby at his job.

After war broke out in the Donbas, Arestovych fought as a volunteer and a Ground Forces intel officer (more on that in other posts), but he doesn't seem to have formally returned to the HUR. However, there's evidence that Arestovych continued to be informally involved, in the form of a HUR departmental award that he first posted a picture of in August 2014. While the award has no date on it, the one who signed the award, a Yu. A. Pavlov (the machine translation slightly fudges the hand-written initials), was director of the HUR from March 2014 to July 2015.

There's not much in the way of outside evidence of Arestovych's connection with Roman Mashovets, who keeps a relatively low public profile. But there's an interesting tidbit from Mariana Bezuhla, an MP who, though known for social media drama and a bitter grudge against Zaluzhnyi, is nonetheless Deputy Chairman of the Committee on National Security, Defense and Intelligence, with considerable insider knowledge. She accused Arestovych and Mashovets of having been the ones to recommend Zaluzhnyi, at the time a dark horse candidate with numerous other generals above him in seniority, to the Office of the President for the position of Commander-in-Chief.

But the most interesting piece of evidence for Arestovych's status within the HUR, and his relationship with Budanov, is this 15-minute video (in Ukrainian, with manual English subtitles) from August 2020, the time of Wagnergate:

At this time, the young and then-relatively-obscure Budanov had just been made head of the HUR, and he gave an unprecedented first "interview" not to any journalist or news outlet, but to Arestovych, who at the time held no official position and was supposedly just a milblogger, putting forth the case that Wagnergate was a Russian false flag.

I put "interview" in quotes, because, if you watch it, it feels less like any normal interview and more like a creative collaboration between two people pretending they don't know each other as well as they actually do. Budanov gives Arestovych a surprising amount of leeway in steering the conversation:

A: Mister Kyrylo, thank you for agreeing to give us an interview regarding the scandalous situation that arose around the allegedly detained mercenaries in Belorus, and released. First, I would like to share the probable actual event that took place and the informational version, which is now being actively discussed in Ukraine and around it. I am interested in, first of all, as a person who comments on military-political events, the informational version that was given to us. In my opinion, it [version] contains a number of logical inconsistencies that are difficult to explain. I would like to ask you as a professional to go through these logical inconsistencies. The first thing I am interested in, if you will allow me, is that personally I do not have a very high opinion of the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation. Could there be a situation when during a year and a half, a year or half a year, or even a month, some person is collecting information about professional mercenaries who have fought and are "under Mueller's cap" and allows them to go to the territory of the union and still of another state in an organised group of 33 people? To what extent is this possible from the point of view of the Russian special services, that they didn’t know anything about it, and the Belarusian too? B: (dryly) First, good afternoon. [They both chuckle.]

Budanov offhandedly confirms that Arestovych served in the HUR:

A: Tell me, you are the Chief of the DIU [short for Defense Intelligence of Ukraine, another name for the HUR], can operations be planned with so many logical errors? From my point of view, as a former DIU officer-- B: I know. A: --this is terribly unprofessional.

And at the end, as if realizing how odd it looks for the head of national military intel to be interviewing with a glorified blogger (there won't be any other similar situations until well after the full-scale invasion, and Arestovych was indeed questioned about this by a journalist in one of his later interviews), Arestovych asks Budanov his reasons for the interview. Budanov explains that, in addition to the needs of the situation, he has considerable regard for Arestovych himself:

A: In my memory, you are almost the first Chief of the Military Intelligence of Ukraine who generally gives interviews to the press, and to a blogger - a representative of unofficial media - you are the first. What allowed you to take such a step? This is an unprecedented event. B: Firstly, the event is unprecedented, and secondly, I have great respect for you, you can be said to be my colleague. This is basic.

So I think the evidence is quite strong that Arestovych indeed served in the HUR, and he was considered trustworthy enough and good enough at informational work that, more than a decade after he officially quit, despite his already quite controversial public reputation, he had the head of the HUR declaring his "great respect" and specifically choosing him for his one media appearance for cleaning up the Wagnergate scandal.

During the full-scale invasion

There's understandably not a lot publicly known in a time of full-scale war, and a time when Arestovych has become enormously famous, (at least partially deliberately) controversial, and politically inconvenient to many, but there's a few interesting items worth mentioning:

In December 2022, Budanov was asked if Arestovych really worked in the HUR in an interview, and he answered "as far as I remember, yes."

In June 2023, Arestovych was asked about rumors that Budanov had been heavily wounded in a strike on HUR headquarters, and he answered that he knows the HQ building well, the strike was nowhere near Budanov's office, and he'd spoken to Budanov after the alleged incident and he'd looked perfectly fine. Presumably this was through a video call, if we can believe the most interesting and problematic source we have:

In February 2024, the investigative outlet NGL.media published an article claiming that Arestovych was able to leave Ukraine the previous fall, despite the borders normally being closed to men of military age, because he had a letter from the HUR. The publication reached out to Arestovych, the HUR, and the State Border Services for comment before the article came out, but got no response from the first two and a refusal to comment from the last.

The timing of the article is suspicious--toward the end of Zaluzhnyi's time as commander-in-chief, while rumors were swirling that Budanov was a candidate for his replacement. Given the byzantine nature of Ukrainian internal politics and the degree to which it controls domestic media, the article may well have been an attempt to discredit Budanov at a sensitive juncture, as a pretext to bring up an earlier case of a suspected corrupt official leaving the country with a letter from the HUR, as well for tying him to Arestovych, who at the time had a roughly 80% distrust rating in surveys, and whose court cases the article gives accounts of in a misleading fashion.

Indeed, the HUR's social media channels came out with a denial only hours later. The quickness of the denial is also unusual, notably faster than the HUR's come out with denials of other seemingly more major information attacks, including rumors of their own head's injury or capture.

And instead of accepting the official HUR answer, the publication doubled down, directly publishing the list of Arestovych's borders crossings that it had obtained from its source, with what it considered sensitive information redacted, and declaring it would sue the border service to force it to release copies of the documents Arestovych had used to leave. (The State Border Service later issued a denial as well, though the comments are mostly disbelieving, given the quite low regard the organization is held in.)

When asked about the article a few days later, Arestovych responded by criticizing everyone involved: the HUR press services for responding to rumors, the media for obsessing over the personal details of a supposed irrelevant blogger instead of paying mind to the real issues they were facing. But he didn't confirm or deny anything about himself.

Given all this, it's hard to say how trustworthy the list of crossings is. The HUR and border service have issued denials, but they'd have reason to issue denials regardless if Arestovych was secretly working for the HUR. NGL.media certainly seems confident that their source is legit, but we don't know how exactly they know, and we don't know what they chose to edit out. Keeping in mind the above complications, however, the table is worth a look:

There are some irregularities in the "reason for departure" column, such as the use of Russian words instead of the Ukrainian counterpart at some points, but this might be an artifact of the publication's redactions or the work of individual Russophone border guards.

While some of Arestovych's nine trips abroad weren't known to the public, others sets of dates do match up remarkably well with appearances abroad that were previously known (though usually not publicly announced, some trackable by an outsider only through diligently keeping tabs on mentions of Arestovych online in multiple languages) with photo and video documentation. For example:

His May-June 2023 trip, during which he appeared in Europe and Israel

His March 2023 trip, during which he appeared at a conference in Lithuania

His February 2022 trip, during which he gave an interview in Italy

His December 2022 trip, where he appeared at a conference in Poland

His November 2022 trip, where he gave an interview in Lithuania

His September 2022 trip, during which he gave a talk in Lithuania

And his current extended stay goes without saying. Interestingly, the dates of the earliest trip on that list corresponds with the dates of the Istanbul negotiations, suggesting he was there in person.

It's worth noting that, in addition to his current trip, his May-June 2023 trip is attributed to a letter from the HUR as well, and he would've been on this HUR-related trip at the time he said he had recently (presumably long-distance) been in touch with Budanov.

In summary, Arestovych officially worked for the HUR in his younger days, he's definitely informally cooperated with Budanov and the HUR in the past, and the evidence around his continued involvement with them since 2022 is problematic, but intriguing. Most likely some answers will only be available after the war, if then.

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@summeroffice asked if I knew where the first clip in this compilation (of Arestovych mentioning Podolyak sitting next to him) came from--I actually didn't notice this was a different clip than the one I saw before, so thanks for pointing it out!

Found this around 33:00 in the Day 48 (April 12, 2022) Feygin livestream. Interestingly he's wearing the exact same outfit the next day as well--was he so busy that he didn't have a chance to change?

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Arestovych seeming to be messing around with someone just offscreen (most likely Podolyak, given the late spring 2022 date and his mention of Podolyak sitting next to him in a different stream from around this time?)

(Source)

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@summeroffice the video where Arestovych mentions that Podolyak is sitting next to him (and seems to get a bit touchy-feely, if you watch what's visible of his arm)

MTL of the subtitles:

F: You probably talked to Mikhail after yesterday's broadcast, didn't you? A: Mikhail is already tired of me Solid Mikhail, right, left, what, it’s ... here he is sitting, writing his comments next to me with his elbow, literally touching F: but ... and you tell us A: I look at what he writes there, but you can’t speak, you understand only Mikhail should talk about it and after reading all this I am forced to say: "Misha, right now, I will also comment, because people want to, and you need to comment on comments" Mikhail by the way have a conscience

(Tiktok source, originally from Day 50 | April 14, 2022 Feygin livestream)

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The love triangle vibes here are fascinating.

(Source)

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Getting bullied on air (by Podolyak? No conclusive evidence, but they're definitely on friendly teasing terms, and he's mentioned Podolyak sitting next to him in streams from around this period.)

(from May 2022, thanks to @summeroffice for finding the original video!)

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When you can't tell them you misspent your youth getting into dumb internet fights with Israelis on a military forum

(Source)

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Every time Arestovych randomly brought up Podolyak on Facebook during his first stint of advisorhood

I actually kind of wonder if Podolyak and Arestovych ever met before the OP, since Arestovych did military commentary quite a few times for a program for the publication Podolyak was editor-in-chief at. But according to Arestovych, they first met two weeks into Arestovych's time as part of the TCG (which would seem to be mid-November 2020.) Arestovych would be appointed as an Advisor to the OP on December 1, 2020.

Anyway, these are just the mentions I managed to find. Additions welcome!

2020

December 10

2021

January 26, the post defending Podolyak's rather passionate birthday congratulations post for Zelenskyy

January 30

April 21

May 9 (note: he doesn't have a salary)

October 4

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Interview with "И грянул Грэм" where you can phone in and ask questions, or ask them through Telegram.

22:53 You once in August in an interview voiced that it would be nice and it would be worth creating a database of translations of the most common statements of Russian politicians and officials so that people around the world understood what they are saying in fact, they are a softened form of translation and at the Centre of Translation at the University of Vienna we want to create just such a project because we consider it to be a new type of translation. Is it still relevant for the Office of the President and how can you be contacted if this is interesting? Thank you.

Hello, Ksenia. Of course you can contact my assistant Максим [they're speaking in Russian] through "И грянул Грэм" and accordingly, the topic is very relevant. Translations are undoubtedly important, namely identical or authentic words that are spoken by certain representatives of official representatives of the Russian authorities are certainly important because they are blasphemous, they are absolutely obscurantist and they are absolutely aimed at the public opinion of other countries and that public opinion in European countries, first of all, be understood.

26:37 Mykhailo promised to give an interview from Crimea at the end of the 2023. It was like on the stream of Yulia Latynina. Will Mykhailo succeed?

Look, definitely. I will definitely in any case do a stream or an interview from Crimea undoubtedly because Crimea will be de-occupied. I really like it of course when you said that you will definitely be there on June 23, for example, or on July 23. Look, it seems to me that with the intellect of people who say this like this, there are a little problems. This is a war. War does not have… It is not a film that you go see in a cinemat at 16.00. Question, will it be on June 23 or July 23 or August 23 or at the end of the year. This is a war. But the fact that we will be in any case on the Yalta embankment - undoubtedly.

45:19 Marat asks: how does Mykhailo feel about Bulgakov, Pushkin, Vysotsky and the demoliton of their monuments in Ukraine.

The question absolutely sounds wrong. Please understand, it immediately asks, will the monuments be demolished. But what is a monument for a writer or a composer and so on? It's ridiculous. In fact you individually determine whether you need it from the point of view of your inner needs, do you need "The Master and Margarita" [a novel by Bulgakov], do you need "Theatrical Novel" [by Bulgakov], do you need "Flight" [a play by Bulgakov], "The Day of the Turbins" [a play by Bulgakov] or something like that or not. It's an individual need.

Of course, monuments are in fact the ideological influence of a particular country. Through the monuments of Pushkin, for example, Russia says, look, there is great Russian culture, and you are nobody, you're provincials, you're insignificant, that is, the monument solves another problem, not your individual consumption of a cultural product. I emphasise again, in this you're free, you can consume Pushkin, it doesn't matter. But a monument is the ideological influence of the country of origin of this or that cultural product, so learn to tell this apart.

But this will definitely not affect your choice of this or that literary object for reading. This is an obvious thing, right? If you want to listen to Tchaikovsky, you will listen, if you want to listen to Rachmaninoff, Prokofiev, you will listen, Rimsky-Korsakov, please. But in parallel, you'll listen to Vivaldi, right? You will make your own choice and not the imposed ideological product. It is very important to learn to tell this apart because when someone comes, look, you have demolished a monument to Pushkin, probably we can come to you to cut your children. Do you understand the absurdity of posing the question?

49:27 I generally evaluate people not according to their passport but by their individual actions. And I think this is right, ethnicity does not matter at all in whether you're a person or a non-human, this is an obvious thing.

52:18 References the film "Stalingrad" (2013) by Fedor Bondarchuk, and "Burnt by the Sun" (1994) by Nikita Mikhalkov.

52:41 Why Mykhailo doesn't go to the TV station «Дождь»?

Look, I want values not to be a word. If you adhere to some values, you must understand them. You can't take an ambivalent position on the war. You can't say that our [Russian army] boys are dying and after that throw a tantrum when this mistake is pointed out and instead of apologising continue to play this game that not everything is so simple. It doesn't work like that. That is, either there are values and then we are not hypocritical or values are a way of commercialisation. For me the first is acceptable, the second is not.

53:27 Our viewer writes that Oleksiy Arestovych actually performs the same job as an adviser to the Office of the President but without official status. Is that so?

Oleksiy Mykolaiovych today is a blogger, he comments on the war, he does it professionally and effectively and accordingly, he really works in the paradigm of the state information policy and so on, he is no longer an employee of the Office of the President, no doubt, but since he is an intellectual smart person and understands exactly the value of the word, then he certainly works in the paradigm of the state and state interests.

54:08 At the very end, probably a little personal question from the viewer, he said that in one of the interviews he heard that at the end of the war, Volodymyr Zelenskyy wanted to go to the sea and drink beer with his friends. What would Mykhailo want?

I just want an end to the war with minimal losses. That is, if we can minimise losses as much as possible. And the next it will be a large amount of work to punish the war criminals of the Russian Federation on one hand, this is after the war, and on the other hand, I think that there will be a lot of hard work to perpetuate the memory of people who gave their lives for their country. That is, not to erect monuments, that is to go to the family and pay tribute.

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Arestovych's government work before the full-scale invasion: a writeup

See my previous writeup on Arestovych's military resume here. I was originally hoping to cover the entirety of Arestovych's time in government in one post, but there's really so many layers, and so much more info you can find from him and others about this era, that 2/24 makes for a natural stopping point.

Disclaimer that I don't know Russian and I only know the tiniest bit of Ukrainian, so I'm getting almost all my info through MTL. I probably got overzealous with censoring user names this time, but since I already went to the effort I'll keep it that way. I'm going to try to cover this period in more detail than I did the military period, which also probably means running into more of my limitations regarding knowledge of Ukrainian politics and governance. As usual, corrections and additions welcome!

A note to start

Recently, this interview with Arestovych came out, containing one particular passage that I promptly added to the writeup on his military career:

One of my military specialties is an information counteraction officer. There is even an educational task there: to bring public opinion to certain indicators on a certain issue in a particular region. This is a task for novice lieutenants. A separate town is taken, and you must, on a separate issue, bring it to certain indicators in one or two months.

With the caveat that I can't access most of his video material, since his speaking style doesn't work well with auto-subs, this is the most direct confirmation I recall from him of what seemed likely the case: he was trained in his intel officer days in not just analyzing information, but putting it out, public-influencing work that sounds an awful lot like what he's doing now. This fits in with the 2015 interview where he mentioned he was a type of military specialist that couldn't normally be called to the front involuntarily, and Budanov's striking decision to interview with him in the wake of Wagnergate back when he was ostensibly just a glorified milblogger.

I think that gets at a larger point when it comes to trying to figure out Arestovych--I hadn't initially wanted to dig into his pre-OP military career, because I knew I'd be falling into a deep rabbit hole, but you're going to get a very different impression of him if all you know about those years is the accusations by his haters that he's just a talking head making up his military cred for the sake of his ego. (Really, with maybe one early exception, I'm not sure he's publicly gone into any of his personal heroic deeds unless someone else made it public or raised a fuss first. The "33 combat outings" meme was from a conversation he thought was off-camera, people were spreading nasty rumors about the minefield incident, and it's actually one of his former enemies who first revealed his role in the defense of Kyiv.) He might not resemble most people's idea of a soldier (then again intel spooks have a whole different set of stereotypes), but his military background is an important part of him. Even as he's ostensibly just a hot Youtuber and (ex-)official in civilian government these days, he's in fact still using a lot of the skills he got from the GUR, he has a lot of military ties, and I really do think that a sizeable part of his self-conception (and self-romanticization) is that he's an officer sworn to Ukraine, with a duty to the state as a whole, above any personal comfort or political faction. You can argue over his interpretation of that duty, but not that he's put his life on the line for it. It's relevant context to this part of his life even as he, uh, proceeds to thoroughly torch his reputation in military/volunteer circles for god and country I guess.

Backstory

The start of this writeup overlaps chronologically with the end of the previous one--Arestovych was serving in the army through Zelenskyy's presidential campaign, election, and first months in office in 2019. While some people now claim he used to be a full-on Poroshenkobot, that's something of an overstatement. He said a lot of rude things about Zelenskyy and his supporters, and pushed various narratives against him during the election, but he still generally gave credit where credit was due; meanwhile, he had considerable criticism for Poroshenko, freely admitted Poroshenko was corrupt, and considered Poroshenko's own policy failures to blame for Zelenskyy's rise. But he considered Poroshenko the only viable candidate in terms of national security, and lost friends over the names he called anyone who'd vote for anyone else (including Yuriy Romanenko, the journalist he's currently doing his Alpha and Omega roundtables with, whom he only made up with years later). In his words, a surgeon has a cemetery behind his back, until he learns, and a commander-in-chief has ten. He fully expected a Russian escalation within the next president's term, they didn't have the time to train up a new president, and corruption wasn't going to matter if they got overrun.

That year and a half between early 2019 and mid 2020 swings between measured analysis, snarking at Zelenskyy's early blunders, cautious optimism, and profanity-laden personal attacks on Zelenskyy and everyone who voted for him. He maintained from the start that Zelenskyy had personal virtues and the potential to learn, but he was clueless and squeamish, and his original team was a mix of similarly clueless idealists and cynical players in the pockets of oligarchs who'd rapidly turn on each other once in power. He consistently pushed back against narratives that Zelenskyy personally was a Russian agent, in a somewhat "don't attribute to malice what you can attribute to incompetence" way, but considered him beholden to Kolomoisky, and suspected pro-Russian and "anti-Maidan" elements in the team.

You can definitely look for ulterior motives in Arestovych's takes (certainly, people joked he'd been paid off by the other side in the comments every time he wrote something kind of nice about Zelenskyy or vice versa), but at the same time...this is basically the reaction you'd expect for someone who's interested in deeds over politicians, but also genuinely believes the leader society chose might get people killed and just has to live with it. Regardless, after commenters went "instead of bashing Zelenskyy for what he did wrong, how about you do something about it," he openly announced early on, in July 2019, that he'd work for the Ze team if they had the willingness to take on a vocal critic. And apparently, for some time that summer, he actually got in touch with them and tried to offer them advice. The arrangement was likely informal, I don't think he ever met Zelenskyy himself at this point (based on things he later said), and it's unclear whom among the team he met--at that point, Bohdan was still head of the OP, Yermak was only a presidential aide, his old GUR friend Mashovets wasn't yet in, and the OP would suffer heavy turnover between then and his actual appointment as advisor over a year later. But by October 2019, he'd apparently given up on cooperation after seeing all his advice go ignored. By June 2020, he'd been banned by Zelenskyy's Facebook page, probably because he kept tagging Zelenskyy in his snarky posts (he later said that the OP read everything he wrote about them, and seemed quite impressed that they had the fortitude to invite him anyway.)

August 2020 appears to have been a turning point for him. He sounded genuinely happy at Budanov getting appointed to head the GUR in the aftermath of Wagnergate; while it's unclear how much of his initial attempts to clean up the scandal was to help him and how much he would've done regardless out of principle, that experience, combined with other dramas around the same time, seemed to leave him increasingly disgusted by the willingness of some "patriots" to spread dubious narratives beneficial to the Russians just out of hatred for the Zelenskyy government. While he continued to criticize the government for perceived missteps, he acknowledged that it was making actual strides in national defense issues, while the opposition was growing increasingly toxic and delusional. But it seems like few people expected that Zelenskyy's team would offer him actual positions, or that he'd accept.

Trilateral Contact Group (TCG)

There seems to be a lot of confusion around Arestovych's precise government titles in general. Articles often refer to him as spokesperson of the Ukrainian delegation to the TCG, but in fact, in the words of the official document, on October 28, 2020, he was appointed advisor of information policy by Leonid Kravchuk, first president and head of the Ukrainian delegation. While his role resembled that of a spokesperson from the outside, this seems another one of those advisor positions that's more influential than the title suggests.

The background info as I understand it: The Trilateral Contact Group was the main venue of negotiations between Russia and Ukraine (mediated by the OSCE) over the Minsk-2 agreements, which had established a ceasefire and laid out a series of steps toward peace. Signed effectively at gunpoint by Poroshenko, while Ukrainian troops were in danger of encirclement, Minsk-2 was unfavorable, hastily written, and had ambiguities that needed further negotiation; an interpretation acceptable to Russia would require concessions unacceptable to most Ukrainians, but perceived unwillingness to work with the agreements would discredit Ukraine on the world stage, and meanwhile other subgroups within the TCG could accomplish smaller-scale results like prisoner exchanges and opening checkpoints.

So the meetings and negotiations went on, even as progress was stymied and the TCG was suspected domestically of being a platform for selling out Ukrainian interests. Earlier in the year, Yermak's attempt to push negotiations forward had sparked a scandal (that may have resulted in Podolyak joining the OP, incidentally--Podolyak wrote a snarky op-ed about how Yermak's respectable motives couldn't salvage his clumsy handling of the situation, the public now considers him a "dark demon" who tried to betray the state to Russia, that's what happens when you don't have any good media speakers but your opponents do...and three weeks later Podolyak was made an Advisor to the Head of the OP.) September 2020 ended with another scandal, as Vitold Fokin (who'd been Prime Minister under Kravchuk and was now the first deputy head of the Ukrainian TCG delegation) capped off a string of concerningly Russia-friendly statements at odds with the official Ukrainian position by saying that he didn't see a war between Russia and Ukraine in the Donbas. Even before Fokin's firing, Reznikov (who was deputy head of the Ukrainian delegation to the TCG, before getting appointed Minister of Defense in November 2021) had announced the need for a spokesperson to express a unified position to mass media (which might account for some of the confusion around Arestovych's precise title.)

Around that time, from the sound of Arestovych's account, he'd warmed up enough to the current government, and experienced enough secondhand embarrassment at the Fokin scandal, to offer himself up to prevent a repeat. He was invited to observe at several TCG meetings, alongside other candidates, where he provided enough worthy advice to eventually receive a formal position.

The appointment sparked outrage on the internet. There were those who thought the position was too good for Arestovych, the self-declared lying propagandist who'd said spectacularly rude things about the current government and its supporters. And then there were the ones who'd thought that Arestovych was too good for the position, who now saw him as a treacherous sellout for joining a suspect organization within a suspect government that he'd previously criticized harshly.

Responding to the first group, Kravchuk stated that the decision was made after a month of evaluation, and no one in the delegation objected to Arestovych ultimately being chosen; he had military experience and proven ability to "provide in-depth informational communication of everything related to the war in Donbass," and Kravchuk considered his ability to hold and defend distinctive opinions a feature rather than a bug.

Responding to the second group, Arestovych said that he expected he'd be considered a traitor just for being involved with the TCG, but this work was too important not to do for the sake of the country. He freely admitted that before he joined the TCG delegation, he'd misunderstood about 70% of its aims and policies; if he'd misunderstood so badly despite being a military-trained analyst, what chance did the average person have? Even if Minsk-2 might be fundamentally unworkable, perception management was critical. He needed to show Ukrainians that the negotiations were necessary and not going to betray their interests, while showing the world that Ukraine was working in good faith toward peace, and it was the Russians being unreasonable and obstructive, while the Russians schemed to show the opposite.

So he did the expected work of a press secretary or spokesperson, putting up social media pages for the delegation, making the framework documents available to the public, writing updates, giving interviews and comments, explaining what the TCG was doing (or not doing), debunking Russian claims, defending the need for even a flawed ceasefire. Arestovych's work in the TCG seems to have been somewhat forgotten these days, given the full-scale invasion made it obsolete, but it actually made up a sizeable portion of his media output in those days.

But in addition to that, he personally attended negotiations, he's mentioned something about Kozak reacting to what he said that might mean he could speak at them, and he helped develop the unified position he voiced. Before his appointment, the delegation already seemed to regret its old policy of commenting on events only after the OSCE's statement--this was the initial agreement, but the Russian side had started breaking it, so that their version of events got out first and hijacked the discussion--but Arestovych implemented his new policy with particular aggressiveness. In his words, "in the information space, there is only one mistake - not to be in time. And then, whether they praise you or criticize you, people are already simply serving your narrative, if you managed to voice it. And if you didn’t have time, you “trudge” behind someone else’s narrative." He framed it in military terms, going on the offensive and getting inside the enemy's OODA loop, and reported with pride that by the fifth day of his tenure as advisor, their speed and quality of presentation had forced Putin's press secretary Peskov to personally intervene, and that, where Russian narratives around the TCG had previously dominated the Ukrainian media space, his constructions were starting to show up in Russian statements.

The strategy seemed to also have its hazards. In one incident that might sound familiar, in December 2020, the delegation's Facebook page initially incorrectly reported that a Ukrainian soldier had wandered across enemy lines while intoxicated and died from alcohol or drug intoxication, when it turned out the soldier had in fact been strangled. Arestovych apologized personally the next day, saying that in a technical error, he'd mixed up the version of events from the Russian side and the version to be given to media.

But his work was overall such that Podolyak defended him in the scandal, confirming that it was a technical error and calling him "absolutely competent in what he does." In a later interview, he sharply disagreed with a claim that Arestovych was only good for scandal and hype, crediting him with successfully "imposing his agenda" and rattling his opponents in a field where Russian propagandists had once "absolutely dominated." Importantly, his skills also caught the eye of Yermak.

Office of the President

There's also a lot of confusion over Arestovych's position in the OP. A September 2022 document lists Arestovych as an unpaid freelance adviser to the Office of the President, and Podolyak has stated that this has been his position from the start, and it's a technical error that official sources have called him adviser to the Head of the Office of the President.

Arestovych says he first met Yermak briefly upon his appointment to the TCG (and met Podolyak two weeks later--as the head of the OP's information policy, Podolyak was also in charge of the TCG's, but gave Arestovych basically free rein there). A month later, on December 1, 2020, Yermak appointed him an advisor on "strategic communications in the field of national security and defense".

Yermak's made his attitude toward people who insult the president quite clear, so one imagines that he must've seen considerable need for Arestovych's skills--in his words (according to Arestovych) "Well, you're such an expert on fakes, you've bred so many of them, that no one but you would know how to deal with them." He was Arestovych's direct superior and task-setter in the OP, whom Arestovych worked with daily (in comparison, before the full-scale invasion, Arestovych says he met with Zelenskyy about once a month,) while he worked with Podolyak, a fellow advisor, as more of an equal. While Arestovych has said he kept to a strictly work relationship with his bosses, he quickly made genuine friends with Podolyak--interestingly, a later comment of his suggests that he didn't like him at first, but somehow that turned into meming about them destroying patriotic consciousness together a week into his time at the OP, and let's just say that you have to be really good friends with someone before posting a picture of yourself with a gun and joking about shooting them. He also seemed to work with his old GUR friend Roman Mashovets (deputy head of the OP, in charge of national security and defense as a whole).

Arestovych's communications work encompassed coordinating between the OP and other groups, including the TCG; and between departments in his field on behalf of the OP--he cites helping mediate a conflict between the head of Ukrboronprom and the Minister of Strategic Industries. But naturally it's the public-facing work that people remember. The mysterious friend-of-a-friend Ukrainian officer from that military forum gave an uneasy assessment of Arestovych's new position--take with as many grains of salt as you think you need, but it's certainly intriguing:

Arestovich, perhaps in good faith, found himself in very bad company, and in the most unfortunate place, on public relations. Now whatever he says will be used against him. And any punctures destroy the reputation he has built up over the years. A position that is not to be envied. Time will tell if his decision to go there, albeit at the invitation of people he trusts personally, was justified. P.S.: I do not agree with his assessment of the situation and some personalities so I look at his attempt skeptically.

Because the immediate reaction to Arestovych blogging for the government was a wall of insults, accusations, shaming, threats, and memes of Lyusya the political whore. While everyone from the OP inevitably met with a wave of internet hate, Arestovych happened to have previously been a prominent member of military/volunteer circles alienated by the Zelenskyy administration's early actions (and heavily courted by Poroshenko.) There was an element of personal betrayal to the reaction. A volunteer friend replied to one of his anti-Poroshenko posts with "Lyosh, if you've been kidnapped and tortured, reply in capslock"; a good chunk of his existing following was...considerably less charitable.

The poster observed TV appearances where (in their opinion) Arestovych combined 90% of perfectly sound explaining and analysis with 10% thinly-supported attacks on the opposition. They generally seemed to think that he was destroying his reputation in his circles for the sake of unworthy leadership:

No, everything is fine with him with the level of knowledge and skills, IMHO, they just cut unsolvable tasks for him, and even change them once a week for opposite ones …

(It's worth saying, since this write-up is for English speakers who may only know his content from his obnoxious shitposting, that he comes across quite differently if you actually watch his military/political long-format videos. He is in fact capable of being professional and laying out topics in a clear engaging way and providing measured analysis in his fields of specialty and more subtly steering an argument or provoking thought. This is most of what he does! But people remember the rest of what he does a lot better!)

In countless panels, programs, and interviews, Arestovych informed about--and defended--basically everything the Zelenskyy administration did within quite a broad interpretation of "national security and defense", encompassing everything from international politics to COVID response, sometimes contradicting or downplaying things he'd said before his advisorship. And while he'd had harsh words for political figures in the past, it was never to the extent to which he went Poroshenko delenda est as an advisor. (For what it's worth, Podolyak's blogging was similar--he'd despised Poroshenko from the start, even if he was initially unimpressed by Zelenskyy, but there's a major difference in the consistency and forcefulness of his anti-Poroshenko posts pre- and post-OP.) Arestovych has talked about how he'll subsume his interests to a team's, he would've gained new information in the OP, and he said, recently, that he received some piece of information about Poroshenko before the public did, and "drew conclusions very quickly"--but regardless, it looked rather like selling out to many.

(Interestingly, he actually seemed to go on the attack against the OP's enemies in November 2020, after he was appointed to the TCG but before he was appointed to the OP, to a notably greater extent than his usual level of criticism, for example against Poroshenko and Butusov. One wonders if it was his initiative, or a trial period.)

He didn't help his reputation with his frequent scandalous statements on TV and profanity-filled arguments on social media. He said that the country should be renamed to Rus'-Ukraine, and defended accepting Afghan refugees by saying they were better educated than Ukrainians anyway. His telling a commenter who asked him to write in Ukrainian instead of Russian to go fuck himself (though he says the user was actually a troll that had been hanging around his Facebook for some time wishing death on his family) rose to the level of a parliament vote. He challenged another commenter to fight him at Bankova, only to postpone it indefinitely because it was beneath the dignity of a representative of the country on an international platform, wait until he got kicked out of the government in disgrace first.

The thing is--he's trolling. We know he's trolling. People know he's trolling. A popular theory is that he deliberately made himself into a hate lightning rod, so that enemies waste their media efforts attacking him instead of the rest of the OP. Every time he says something outrageous, social media users joke about the OP needing a diversion; one interviewer remarked to his face that people wound up discussing his statements instead of serious politics, though he denied that he was trying to distract from serious issues. Podolyak offers a slightly more dignified explanation in one of his own interviews:

Yes, Oleksiy often goes for deliberate provocations, draws out the negative, and then calmly, carefully, and subtly works with it. It may sound paradoxical, but I believe that it is Arestovych who cures our society of traditional media hysteria, giving it the opportunity to talk through difficult things like in a psychotherapist's office. And it's very difficult to take on a lot of public hype, to personally conflict with a big machine of the same "powderbots." If we fairly assess Arestovych's work in the medium term, he is definitely a positive character.

So basically: he's trolling, but in a constructive way, with the OP's blessings.

Much of the time, it's hard to figure out exactly what game he's playing. It's been long enough since the original scandals that the context and reactions are tricky to investigate (if the necessary context is even publicly known), but he's made fun of actual "insider" "expert" "analytics" Telegram channels and their abysmal success rate at guessing the OP's motives and strategy, so I won't feel too bad about throwing up my hands here instead of trying to evaluate individual incidents in earnest. On the one hand--he's talked in an older post about deliberately swearing at an interlocutor to test their reaction. He's joked about all the engagement and views he was getting from the porobots. Gordon's called him a swindler to his face live without getting a rise out of him. I don't believe that he was actually getting that mad at all those internet randos. On the other hand--his old post history on a certain august forum demonstrates that he's fully capable of getting that mad at some internet randos. Exactly when and why he started fake scandals, and when he got into real scandals, will probably remain between him and the OP for the foreseeable future. It's just clear that he's playing 5D chess, but also sometimes he eats a piece.

On the other end of the respectability spectrum, as an advisor, he did in fact give actual advice! He's talked about how, while the OP strictly observed "functional zones" when it came to what areas he could discuss, he had some say in the OP's information policy, and could advise on national security and defense, including directly to the president--and some of those meetings belied the claims that Zelenskyy was surrounded by a "warm bath". However, he said in late 2022 that "maybe only 2 or 3 or 5" items of his advice were ever accepted.

First resignation

Arestovych and Yuriy Romanenko, with whom he'd had a falling-out during the 2019 elections due to their support of opposing candidates, seemed to gradually reconcile over the course of 2021. On January 15, 2022, with the threat of Russian military escalation hanging in the air, they streamed together for the first time in years...upon which Arestovych went on an epic rant about his frustrations with the OP--they weren't accomplishing enough, the people meant to change the system were becoming part of it, he feared the country was sleepwalking into disaster. His worst fear was that Russia would invade just the Donbas, so that the rest of the country would be torn between continued apathy and finger-pointing instead of uniting, the world would continue to turn a blind eye, and Ukraine would end up like the proverbial boiled frog.

A commenter later speculated he'd get into trouble over the rant, but Arestovych answered that funnily, some people in the OP actually liked it. Instead, on January 19th, he posted to Facebook that he'd quit. Opening a treason case against Poroshenko, yet failing to detain him when he returned to Ukraine, had been the final straw for him: "I can forgive many things including personal meanness towards me (that's politics, we're all Machiavelli, cynicism, cold-settling and so on). But I can't forgive weakness."

There's a lot of theorizing over whether he had some unstated motive for leaving, and to what extent he actually left. He definitely stopped participating in the TCG; one of his former coworkers was asked about him in an interview, and lamented the fallen standards and loss of communication channel with the OP in his absence. But an anonymous OP source claimed on the day of the resignation that Arestovych didn't actually tell the OP directly or sign the corresponding documents in his ragequit, and he'd since agreed to meet with Yermak. However that meeting went, Arestovych has said he remained in active communication with the OP the whole time after he quit, and certainly, regardless of what he personally believed, he continued the OP policy of downplaying the military threat to the public all the way up to the evening of February 23rd.

But he didn't seem to plan to return to the OP. He'd pledged to go to the front himself if anything happened, and in fact made arrangements with friends before the full-scale invasion. On the morning of February 24th, he was en route to the military commisariat when a call from Yermak came, telling him the OP needed him.

In his words, there were 2000 majors in the AFU, but only one Arestovych. "Chasing a Russian tank is a pleasure, but conducting information policy and fulfilling certain assignments is a duty. And as an officer, I chose duty."

People have naturally called bullshit on that story, but one of the friends he invited actually wrote a post about their plans very early on. He ribbed Arestovych for leaving the others "orphaned", but acknowledged he was in the right place at the OP.

The next (hopefully last) post will get into that wild second advisorship stint and beyond.

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List of Budanov's interviews accessible in English

These are the interviews either in English, with text transcripts (which can be easily MTL'ed) or English subtitles/dubbing. I included the larger works with snippets of his interviews embedded within them that I know of, but I'm sure it's not a remotely comprehensive list of those. Additions and corrections welcome!

2023

April

Vogue.ua https://vogue.ua/article/culture/lifestyle/ya-navit-ne-pam-yatayu-yakiy-ya-buv-u-dovoyennomu-zhitti-interv-yu-z-kirilom-budanovim-51916.html

NV (video is freely available on Youtube, but the transcript is behind a paywall) https://nv.ua/ukr/ukraine/events/koli-zsu-pochne-kontrnastup-droni-vdaryat-po-moskvi-a-ukrajina-peremozhe-budanov-50318366.html

ABC https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbGagkXBmIw

March

The Cipher Brief https://www.thecipherbrief.com/ukraines-military-intelligence-chief-predicts-how-war-will-end

USA Today, conducted mid-February https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2023/03/02/war-top-ukraine-spy-says-russia-out-of-military-tools/11310628002/

February

Forbes.ua https://forbes.ua/war-in-ukraine/rosiya-vzhe-rozpochala-velikiy-nastup-chi-zmozhe-rf-mobilizuvati-shche-500-000-moldativ-koli-zakinchitsya-viyna-velike-intervyu-kirila-budanova-21022023-11881

Pravda https://www.pravda.com.ua/rus/articles/2023/02/23/7390553/

A few snippets of interviews from him are in the Year documentary (Part 1, Part 2)

Le Monde (behind a durable paywall, unfortunately) https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2023/02/22/ukrainian-general-kyrylo-budanov-we-are-approaching-the-end-of-the-war_6016835_4.html

Voice of America https://www.voanews.com/a/ukrainian-intelligence-official-assesses-security-situation-as-war-enters-second-year-/6982740.html

January

In a Polish publication: https://wiadomosci.wp.pl/szef-wywiadu-wojskowego-ukrainy-dostrzegamy-istotne-zmiany-wewnatrz-rosji-6860053735013056a

Washington Post https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/01/31/kyrylo-budanov-ukraine-intelligence-boss-interview/

Radio Svoboda https://www.radiosvoboda.org/a/%D0%B2%D0%B1%D0%B8%D0%B2%D1%81%D1%82%D0%B2%D0%BE-%D0%BA%D1%96%D1%80%D1%94%D1%94%D0%B2%D0%B0/32233661.html

ABC "deeper and deeper" https://abcnews.go.com/International/expect-strikes-deeper-deeper-russia-ukraines-spy-chief/story?id=96127220

2022

December

Liga.net https://www.liga.net/ua/politics/interview/kirill-budanov-letom-2023-go-ya-sovetuyu-poehat-v-otpusk-v-krym

BBC Ukraine https://www.bbc.com/ukrainian/features-64115948

October

(Interview with his wife: https://elle.ua/ru/ludi/interview/sila-ukrainskoy-zhenshchini-marianna-budanova-o-tom-kak-eto--bit-zhenoy-nachalnika-gur-minoboroni-ukraini-kogda-idet-voyna/)

Pravda https://www.pravda.com.ua/rus/articles/2022/10/24/7373160/

Obozrevatel https://war.obozrevatel.com/budanov-dlya-nachala-vyijdem-na-granitsyi-91-go-goda-a-potom-nachnetsya-dolgozhdannoe.htm

The Drive https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/ukraines-intel-chief-on-how-the-war-ends-putins-nuclear-threats-iranian-drones-and-more

June

USA Today (paywalled, here's archived link) https://archive.is/9F0sO

May

Sky News https://news.sky.com/story/ukraine-war-military-intelligence-chief-optimistic-of-russian-defeat-saying-war-will-be-over-by-end-of-year-12612320

Pravda https://www.pravda.com.ua/articles/2022/05/24/7348122/

NV https://english.nv.ua/amp/interview-with-ukraine-s-military-intelligence-chief-budanov-ukraine-news-50239079.html

April

Der Spiegel https://archive.is/B7i1w

CNN https://edition.cnn.com/videos/tv/2022/04/08/amanpour-ukraine-defense-intelligence-kyrylo-budanov.cnn

March

Coffee or Die https://coffeeordie.com/sources-in-kremlin-ukraine-intelligence-chief-interview/

The Nation https://www.thenation.com/article/world/exclusive-ukraines-defense-intelligence-chief-warns-of-real-hell-for-russians/

Radio Svoboda https://www.radiosvoboda.org/a/budemo-zvilnyaty-vsyu-terytoriyu-ukrayiny-budanov/31748773.html

2021

November

Military Times https://www.militarytimes.com/flashpoints/2021/11/20/russia-preparing-to-attack-ukraine-by-late-january-ukraine-defense-intelligence-agency-chief/

September

USCC https://uscc.org.ua/en/kyrylo-budanov-ukrainian-intelligence-is-able-to-conduct-operations-in-any-part-of-the-world-if-necessary/

USA Today article with snippets from Budanov https://archive.is/56EoY

NYT, ditto https://archive.is/mbtMT

2020

August

The very odd Wagnergate damage control "interview" with Arestovych https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mrp6Fj4BHGI

Ukrinform comment https://www.ukrinform.ua/rubric-polytics/3083531-kirilo-budanov-kerivnik-golovnogo-upravlinna-rozvidki-mou.html

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Arestovych's pre-OP military career

Because there’s nine years’ worth of misinformation around Arestovych, and as someone who’s gone through the full “huh he seems interesting” -> “huh he has to be full of shit” -> “no he genuinely did a lot of hardcore things at personal cost and it’s mostly just that he’s weird and obnoxious and politically inconvenient” arc, I feel the need to make a comprehensive post with links and photo evidence from all my digging.

His military career is still a popular angle of attack for people trying to discredit him, given a lot of it sounds wild and a good deal would necessarily be confidential and hard for him to prove, but there's nonetheless some very interesting stuff out there. I plan to follow this post up with another one on his (also heavily misunderstood) work in the OP.

TL;DR: He's largely honest about his personal achievements, he did some bonkers things and there's evidence, people who actually worked closely with him personally seem to have a lot of regard for him--and tbh, he's less of an asshole than most people would become after putting his life on the line repeatedly for his country and getting nine years of unhinged hate for it.

Given my language limitations and those of the intended audience, I'll be basically exclusively providing text and image sources that can be easily machine translated, plus some videos with English subs/dubs. Corrections and additions welcome!

According to Arestovych, he met Zaluzhnyy at Odesa Military Academy, they’ve been friends for 28 years, he served under him in the Donbas in 2018-2019, and he really loves cuddling with him. As with most of his stories, this is not as improbable as it might sound. I feel like that's an apt note to start this on.

Some people like to claim he “only” has a military translator diploma from Odesa Military Academy as a way to discredit his military background. But here's him front and center in a group photo with an honor guard sash, and he explained in a 2011 forum post from an account that was by that point linked to his real identity that he graduated with a civil bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering and a military specialty in mechanized combat, and the translator diploma was in addition to that, traditionally received by military and intel officers. (Yes, he transcribed his entire courseload from his diploma to win a forum argument, if anything he's mellowed out with age.)

People also like to insinuate that he didn't really work for the GUR back in the '00s, there's no evidence for it (never mind that naturally if he worked for military intel a lot of information would be classified). But I've found a certificate of distinction from the GUR dated to 2003. Budanov, when asked about whether Arestovych worked in the GUR in a recent interview, answered "as far as I remember, yes."

Which might seem a bit vague, but they have an interesting relationship of their own. Arestovych left the GUR before Budanov started working there, but he's claimed that he'd known Budanov since before 2014 through GUR connections, and that they worked together in 2018 while he was serving in the army. In support of this, there's this..."interview" from August 2020, right after Wagnergate and the firing of the previous head of the GUR, when Budanov was the young and then-little-known newly appointed head of the GUR and Arestovych was "just" an infamous milblogger, not yet working for the OP. Ostensibly, it's the head of the GUR taking the unprecedented step of interviewing with a notable blogger and commentator to dispel rumors around the PR mess on his hands, but if you actually watch...it's a very odd video. They seem to know each other better than they're letting on, it's more of a creative collaboration to control the narrative than an actual interview, and it's very interesting that Budanov would pick Arestovych to do this with in the first place--Budanov gave interviews only rarely before the full-scale invasion, and Arestovych already had something of a reputation. Some hidden currents there.

Anyway, there's not much else in the way of public surviving evidence from all the way back then, but Arestovych has talked about going to Britain as a lieutenant on exchange, gathering intel for Ukraine's involvement in the Iraq War, and going to the conference with Dugin as part of his intel work (which convinced him in 2005 that Russia had revanchist designs on Ukraine, but his superiors wouldn't take him seriously.) [Edit 4/21/23: I'd seen hints before, but he confirms in this interview that one of his military specialties was "information counteraction", shaping the public opinion to a given objective. Which sounds an awful lot like the work he'll do later on.]

Arestovych quit the GUR in 2005, he says due to conflict with higher-ups, and spent the better part of the next decade bouncing around civilian life. One interesting interlude: in 2008 he was involved in unofficial preparations for the defense of Crimea against Russian invasion. Maidan was when he first became a public media figure (and almost immediately attracted a hatedom and Russian spy accusations, some things never change.) I've posted a bit about what I've found about that period here and here, but for the purposes of this post I'll move on to the outbreak of war in the Donbas.

On the one hand, Arestovych started volunteering almost immediately. He was already in Kramatorsk in April 2014, and he did a lot of work collecting donations and delivering supplies to the frontlines, especially comms equipment. He was awarded two medals around this time, for his work at Sloviansk and Kramatorsk, and he's talked a bit about his adventures (including nearly getting shot up by his own side twice) in this post and its associated comments. He founded the People's Reservist program to train fighters to supplement the dire state of the Ukrainian army at the time--he worked with a lot of notable volunteers at this time, including the combat medic Tayra, who's talked about training in his program, taught combat medicine for it, and remains friendly with him now.

On the other hand, he also gained a decent amount of fame as a prolific military and political commentator, both on social media and on various TV channels and media publications--including the one Podolyak was editor-in-chief of at the time, interestingly, although there's no sign they ever met before the OP. (It's worth noting that Arestovych makes a point of calling himself a military commentator rather than a military expert--in his words he dislikes the term "expert", he doesn't call himself that, and tries to correct other people if they use the term, but he can't be correcting everyone.) After the initial years of the Donbas war, he was pretty open that he'd been waging information war, trying to maintain morale and fight enemy narratives. And he seemed to take some pride in doing more good as a smooth-talking soft-skills pretty hipster popular with housewives than what gruff manly "proper military men" could manage. He's been called out on his fake news, especially after entering politics, and his defense is that everyone else used "black PR" too but only he admits it, and that unlike a good deal of the domestic intelligentsia he did it for the country instead of for someone else's money. (And the OP wanted him precisely because of the fake news, but that's something I want to save for the next post.)

But his chronic problem is that because his life story is so batshit, and because he's a weirdo self-confessed lying propagandist with really obvious neurodivergent vibes, people tend to assume the worst about him personally. The Russian spy and provocateur accusations seem to follow him no matter how many times he's done genuinely valuable and dangerous work for the cause--he generally just makes fun of the accusations, up to and including his old Facebook description being "swindler and FSB agent", but he's still new enough to them in May 2014 to sound actually hurt.

And people really like to accuse him of lying about his own accomplishments and credentials. His actual philosophy, in his words, is something like "boasting in front of a dead lion is worthy of all contempt, but boasting in front of a lion you killed is worthy of all respect." He'll dramatize, but the main evidence that he's outright made up any of his own exploits is lack of evidence, and when it's actual Russian policy to seek leverage on important officials and hunt out the social networks of potential resistance, he has very good reason these days to, say, not to give away the names of people he fought with even nearly a decade ago unless the connection is already public. He's been dragged to hell and back for getting goaded into saying he didn't like to talk about his missions publicly but he's made "33 combat outings" and has seven awards, in what he apparently thought was an off-camera conversation with a reporter in 2020 that got edited into the main interview, but I really think he's being honest. The one witness he's named for some of them is Tayra (with her permission), who posted in 2014 about being in Mariupol with him and others from the People's Reservist program, around the same time he posted about making four outings near Mariupol spotting enemy positions with a drone, in the context of soliciting donations for more drones. And I've seen another source for him having fought as a volunteer in 2015 that I'll get to below, discussing his stint in the actual army in the ATO September 2018-September 2019.

In a way he really didn't help the speculation around his service by deciding to hide that he was in the army that entire year, keeping up a stream of social media posts and comments to news sites as always, and then going "surprise! guess where I've been!" when it was over. To be fair to him, this might not just have been for the sake of trolling--there's a 2015 interview where he says that his enemies have tried to get him called up to the front (where, it's implied, they could get him killed), only he's a specialist of a type that can't get called up except in the case of full-scale war. Which sounds wild, but--he was a significant enough figure during Maidan that he had SBU trying to dig up dirt on him, other activists and volunteers were mysteriously ending up dead those years, and he was then vocally hostile to various forces in power. So he might've had actual reason for secrecy--although he was also having a great time trolling his audience. Someone notices he's been posting fewer videos than usual? He's just taking a break! Someone asks if he's planning to serve in the army once it's been reformed? Oh no, he's far too much of a delicate flower!

He started out as a captain, serving as assistant chief of intelligence to the 72nd Mechanized Brigade and performing recon, before getting promoted to major three months later, and apparently serving in the General Staff at some point. In response to Butusov accusing him of lying about his service and rank after he got a government position, he posted his seven awards and documentation, which include three medals dated to 2019, and another dated to November 2018, for the minefield incident, which is a story worth expanding on.

This is the original account of the incident by the brigade commander: a trained group sweeping for snipers in front of their positions hit a landmine that killed two and wounded two, and they evacuated with the help of a reserve group. Only the killed are named in the article, but it says that everyone in the group received an award, and the date lines up with that on Arestovych's certificate. He's talked about the incident a few times himself: he escaped the mine explosion with only slight injuries and made four trips to help evacuate, including one where he got separated from the others and wandered into his own side's minefield, in a position exposed to enemy fire, and he was so exhausted and past caring that he just walked straight through the minefield. And, miraculously, made it out alive. Upon which he went back again to bring back more equipment.

In a way, further confirmation of his involvement is the fact that, unlike Butusov, who insinuated Arestovych never really served on the front, Serhiy Kryvonos, a general and Poroshenko-era appointee whom Zelenskyy fired from the NSDC the same month that Arestovych became an advisor to the OP, insinuated that Arestovych was on the front where he deliberately led his team into the mine. Kryvonos had lengthy and ongoing beef with the Zelenskyy team, but he might have even older beef with Arestovych--one interesting circumstantial item is that Arestovych was at Kramatorsk Airport in 2014 while Kryvonos was commander, and has since criticized the leadership he saw there.

Aside from Arestovych's own response to the accusation, pointing out the holes in the story, there's another poster on the same military forum that Arestovych used to frequent who claims to be a Ukrainian officer who knows someone who knows him--although they're anonymous, they have a five-figure post count and the other posters aren't calling bullshit on them in that much earnest. According to them (translated in DeepL to make it slightly more comprehensible), awards don't correspond well to what someone's actually done in the military, and Arestovych shouldn't have been on the front when he could've been doing military analysis like he was trained for, but he really was at work on the frontlines and did the things he said he did.

Though the best evidence for his military career in general is that most of the people he's working with in the government and the higher echelons of the military would have access to his military records and the power to do background checks--and the press is free to make inquiries too, for that matter. Even if they can't obtain the details of his work, when he made an offhand quip last year that people took to mean he'd been promoted to colonel, journalists had no problem obtaining a document from the MoD signed by Reznikov confirming that he hadn't been. The fact that they can't manage anything for the rest of his service and awards besides insinuations is a pretty strong sign.

So that gives some idea of his extremely wild and extremely formidable resume coming into the OP. They hired him for a reason, despite the many rude things he'd said about them in the past. He's someone with, uh, dramatic flaws, but also a lot of genuinely heroic virtues and accomplishments, and I suspect that there's a lot more that we don't know about. For all he has a reputation as a narcissistic blabbermouth, he seems quite responsible about other people's secrets, and doesn't give away as many of his own as people think--more than once, he's embraced the accusations instead of laying all his cards out on the table.

More on that next time, hopefully: Arestovych's work in the TCG, the OP, and how there are no ex-advisors.

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Day 374 Feygin livestream

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00:52 How many interviews have you managed to give this year? What an unexpected question! You know that I love mathematics very much. I'm not calculating how many interviews. How many will be needed until the end of the war, that many I will give. It's important to talk about what is happening, what we are experiencing, what emotions we are experiencing. People should see emotions in the interview. It seems to me that in any interview it's important to clearly show what about you want to speak, that is show facts and materials and then give emotion so that a person would feel what you feel. And third, draw conclusions that must be present in the information space.

2:00 Tell me honestly, are you not tired? (Sighs.) It's a difficult question. I always think that my fatigue compared to what is happening on the frontline, compared to what people who have lost their homes are experiencing, displaced people, 14 million… My fatigue can be compared to the fatigue of a child who has lost their pink elephant somehwere, or a pink plush toy and never sees it. You see, a child who has lost everything, his family, his environment, where he lived, he left for somewhere, he has to start over from scratch, make friends, but parents have lost their jobs and he doesn't cry.

4:42 What helps you do your work further?

8:09 You spoke about heroes in books, at what moment the hero starts, has it always been there or did this feeling came to you on February 24? You are born with it. It's just a question whether you will have the opportunity to manifest it. I remember the first day of the war, first, second, third. I called many people then, some had their phones turned off, some hid, but there were people who picked up the phone and took on themselves a lot more functions than they had to.

12:22 Where were you on the 24th of February? Well, at home, at 4:30. I live a little outside of the city, and it was difficult to get here because people traveled out of the city in a westerly direction. By 7:30 I was already in the office.

19:07 references 'the legendary book' by Francis Fukuyama, might be "The End of History and the Last Man": It would probably be interesting for him now to write a book "The Return of History".

25:11 What is your role within this historical process? Moderation. My role in this regard is just to explain the war, explain why this war must develop correctly, why we still have to go through each stage despite the heavy price we pay, what needs to be done at this stage of war in order to get positive further bonuses that will allow us to properly finalize the war. Besides that, my task is still try to unanimously lead the needs of Ukraine in the external market, in the domestic market, try to answer difficult questions, try to understand these questions in advance and accordingly, help the president of the country to understand and lead the discussion on different panels. Because during the information era, if you are silent, you have lost. If you are silent and do not explain the motives of your actions, you have lost.

28:28 If we return to those people who turned off their phones on February 24, how did you decide that you would be in your place until the end? I have no choice. I have a memory of my parents, I have a family, I have an understanding that children cannot look at their last name if dad refused to take responsibility at a difficult moment. I think that the word is good but if you say the words you must act accordingly. If you want your child who is looking at you to believe that you are what you tell him, you have to be like this.

From the first hour I called many people and many on the very first day decided to take up arms and go fight. If you are not ready to take responsibility, it means that you are not ready to be responsible for your family, your home, your country. That is, you will always be a fugitive, a cowardly fugitive who will say, there's nothing that I could have done. You have to live in a way that after you are gone your children would understand who you were. He wipes his cheek, I can't tell if he's crying.

32:29 He asks for permission to interrupt: Classical Russian culture is in the past. It is not used in Russia right now. Russia voluntarily abandoned Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Chekhov because they don't understand it, they didn't consume it. Because if they had consumed it, like a person who comes to the theatre, reads a book, listens to music, Russia would be different.

35:38 Mykhailo, it is obvious from your rhetoric that you're a statesman. But if you look at your biography it says that you were a journalist for a long time who worked in opposition publications. How did you make this decision for yourself? Why did you decide to go where you are now? Professional journalism involves deep understanding of topic, understanding of what and how it works, why it should work this way and what mistakes can be corrected if you clearly state them, if you clearly draw attention to them. Professional journalism allows the system to mature, the state to become more objective, more transparent, more effective. And it was very important for me that, I explain how I ended up in this place, the formation of another type of state began in Ukraine. Ukraine, unfortunately, for a long time did not believe that it was absolutely and fundamentally different from Russia.

So when the frame of another type of state started to form I also wanted to take a part in the moderation of these processes of creating a transparent state. The motive is simple, very simple. I want my family to live in a country that is comfortable for maximum living, that guarantees security, guarantees the possibility of career growth, guarantees the possibility of obtaining a quality education, guarantees fair relations in all areas of social, economic, political life, that is integrated into a common European space that allows you to travel to other countries and so on. There is no point in thinking about money or career if you build it strategically wrong.

So you came to change the system from inside? Who changes systems? Who makes them the way they are? Specific people do it. There's a legendary phrase with which you need to fall asleep and wake up, Не боги горшки обжигают (it is not gods who make pots). Take it and do it. That is, everything is actually much simpler than we imagine, take it, come and do it. You can do it, just do it, only understand what you're doing, and do not love yourself in the process.

I came here not to be public. It's the war that makes you public, because sometimes you need to take on other functions that you would not want to perform in peacetime. And I'm not the only one who took these functions upon myself. Systems will be arranged differently because you specifically came to make a specific mechanism within this system, or a part of the mechanism. You can correct it. It does not mean specifically me, any person if he understands his role, function and place can do it.

42:58 I can't help but ask you about your friendship, if you can call it friendship, with Oleksiy Arestovych, does it interfere with work and how you divide the workspace and the space of human communication? Interesting question. In general, I have a detached attitude towards personal relations. I believe that there are personal relationships, they are important, they are important to me but there are functional relationships that are a priority in terms of the situation that we are in. For me there is a rule, that is, a person should be effective in his place, especially if he's public, he has to be twice as effective, and accordingly there are big requirements for what and how you do in this or that place.

And here friendship is absolutely not a mark for me to criticise harshly enough often. It will of course not happen in public. Because you understand, we all are not ideal, we make mistakes, we may not understand certain processes to the end or deeply understand. It is necessary to correct it, to discuss it. So for me there is no concept, friend or not, if we are discussing functional things, then I am absolutely neutral towards anyone with whom I work because I believe that it does not matter who and what and how in personal relationships. What matters is the fact that the state must obtain competence from you specifically at your workplace and these are completely different processes.

If I need to discuss something with someone in a friendly way, it will be outside of work as such. But if you are at work performing certain functions, please correct mistakes in time, constantly improve your apparatus of thinking from the point of view of understanding the depth of one or other problem, don't love yourself. I always come back to this because people who are really passionate, charismatic, know how to speak well, they at some moment start to love themselves.

I constantly say, look, there is no I, there is us, there is the state. If there is I, then these are separate private projects, go on, you can sell yourself and so on and so forth. But the state needs not 'Oh how cool I am' but it needs you to wake up every morning and do routine work. In the state there is routine. No publicity, no activity, but routine, that is, operational routine. You have to do it because questions always come back in a circle and you have to decide these questions again all the time. It does not happen that you already learned to solve these problems so they should be solved by somebody else.

46:28 A question about your workplace, if you allow. Please excuse me if this is a question that's too personal (he smiles), you often go on air from this office, and you have a lot of books around. Can you tell what kind of books you have and what your workspace is like? Well, here I have a round table at which important discussions are held, here I have a fairly large amount of papers, after all, we have not yet digitalised everything, certain things come that need to be studied, discussed by people in different ministries, departments, they come so that I understand how much we are in one information space, how much we understand issues the same way. The office of the president is a moderation centre first after all, we must understand how the state institutions are really synchronised in terms of understanding a particular task, how they need to be solved.

Of course I have books, the last one on the desk is a multi-volume book about Hryhorii Skovoroda. I periodically have to read important texts, fundamental texts after all, but as a rule I have been using books for a long time in digital form which I buy and use on my iPad because it is much more convenient to just walk around with one little book and be able to read the creative thoughts of the whole world.

Yes, we are here almost all the time, I mean that there are a lot of meetings, interviews to give. Well, I have already somehow used to this, I think it's an important place.

48:07 Is this the amount of information with which you work every day? There is more information every day, not everything is on paper, not everything comes in on one day, because a lot of it comes in digital form right now. My favourite ministry, I can even say directly that it is the ministry of digitalisation, one of the most successful in my opinion and meeting the needs of modern ministers is Mr Федоров, a unique manager on a global level, a person who will draw Ukraine into digital era much faster than other countries, who will make it as comfortable as possible for the exchange of documents and information. So Федоров, in my opinion, believe me, is a person who is a perfectionist in terms of performing his functions. He is not only a man in his right place, he's twice of that and I am very glad that in addition to president Zelenskyy we also have ministers who are uniique and with great potential. Федоров is one of them.

49:12 I have a simple question, how do you manage all this? Do you have days off, free time, how much you sleep in a day if it's not a secret. Days off and holidays in principle you can't have. Sometimes I make a pause for an hour or two to read a book. It allows you to switch, by the way, not only some kind of book needed for work but also creative, I mean fictional books, or listen music. Sleep? I have always preferred to sleep very little, 3-5 hours, not more. I do not really need it in terms of rest.

The president is at the workplace all the time, he is constantly in the working mode. He may always require this or that answer to a question, require information, require discussion since he needs to make a decision very quickly. And there are a lot of those. He's an operational president, you know, he not only determines the strategy, he's also an operator who often tries to deeply understand problems. So one needs to be here all the time, update the information in order to be useful as much as possible at your workplace.

51:37 Do you have plans for after the war? What would you like to do when Ukraine wins and when you have the first day off? It's a difficult question. It seems to me that no one can have plans for after the war, but after the war we will have to go through a great internal tragedy, realising how many cool guys paid the highest price for this war. We will have to go to their families, meet them, talk to the children of the dead heroes.

You think about how to conduct effective negotiations. How to effectively explain why Ukraine needs this or that in terms of weapons. Support your people. There's one plan that's very important, Ukraine has to win, Ukraine must endure it, then we will simply walk the streets, meet relatives, meet relatives of those who died, pity each other, cry with each other, talk to each other.

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43:30 In recent months an analysis comes to me about what is happening. I see a significant increase in attempts by Russians to provoke in other direction or another. And they do it correctly from their point of view. We have enough people who know exactly how everything should be, they are experts in everything and they are always against the state as such. It seems to me that there was only one period in this war when everything was practically perfect from the point of view of the fact that everyone sat quietly and worked and listened for the first three months.

After that, gradually when it became clear that Russia left the Kyiv region, after 'Well, we resisted, yes, everything is great', we found out that a lot of people played a fundamentally important role in all this. We simply didn't see it, but they were the the most important. Many people absolutely understood exactly what happened at the beginning, who did what where, and what they did wrong. There are many different negatives, Russians see all this, they look at what triggers the society, what society actively responds to with reposts and likes, what it perceives negatively.

Negativity is generally perceived as very cool. You're such a cool guy and here's someone doing something bad. And you know exactly how it should be done. What on earth is he doing? And Russians start to scale it up. A lot of publicity, a lot of accounts, anonymous accounts, reprints and so on. This is scaling up and this goes on all the time. They take these nuances and throw them into media spaces: the Ukrainian society has doubts that the state is effective. The Ukrainian society has doubts that the state effectively manages military support. There's corruption. They constantly talk about it. The state tolerates corruption, the state gives the official the opportunity to loot. This is an information campaign that Russia leads against us. It is more difficult for us today, that's why I'm addressing things.

50:09 There's always a complaint against you that you speak about everything, you comment everything [I love his reaction, he thinks, thinks, and smirks?, you can hear it]. The question of Ukrainian journalists is, why are there few commentators? You are against me commenting on something? [smiles] I can reduce it. Ask my assistants, they know that I always go: "But can we reduce my presence somewhere in the media?" You cannot take somebody and just make him a speaker. It must be inherent in him, he must be a natural speaker, it sells if he's charismatic, passionate, deep in the subject, ready to discuss, not afraid of difficult questions, constantly studying, because you do not give him a темник (YouTube translates this as 'dungeon'), these are my favourite, well, you don't give him some theses that he will read and after that he'll speak spectacularly. This is not what public discussion should be about. We just have a few of those people, very few.

[A темник in post-Soviet Russia and Ukraine are closed instructions or directives on the coverage of current events in non-state media, which were issued to the heads of these media by the administrations of the presidents of these countries, starting with Boris Yeltsin in Russia and Leonid Kuchma in Ukraine.]

We only have a few effective speakers. We have very passionate people but they are poorly educated, not erudite, they sell only charisma. They speak beautifully but it is very superficial. Or we have people who are very deep in the material and they reflect a lot when they speak because they want to fit a lot of their knowledge into a short period of time and this doesn't work either. This is a very difficult story when you need to be able to speak well and speak structurally, understand what and how to say so that it would be understandable for the audience because you are not talking to yourself in front of the mirror, right, where you are so smart and charming. You are talking to an audience that has a different level of knowledge, and then you have to understand…

You know what's missing? That's my favourite thing in general. People always, if they become speakers, if they become more or less successful, if they become stars, they lack critical attitude towards themselves. They begin to fall in love with themselves.

Does it apply to Arestovych? (Sighs) This applies to anyone, I am generally saying that this happens all the time to many people. It is very difficult to control yourself, it is very difficult to say to yourself, look, you woke up in the morning, all right, I said everything yesterday but today is a war, today people will die and I have to understand that I am at war, I am the same as them, I do my job. I have to talk to people because it is my job. But I don't have to love myself in this work. A person who is fighting today in a trench somewhere in the Bakhmut direction, he does not love himself in this work. He wants to destroy the enemy and he gives everything for this. That's why when you come to speak, you should give, and not take people's love for you.

53:35 A year has passed. Looking back, what are some steps in the information policy that you would now do differently? Of course I would do a lot of things differently. We always look back at what we did and definitely there are things that could have been done better. But I will tell you what you already said. I would have concentrated more on speakers. At first, it should have been possible to conduct psychological training with them, teach them rhetoric, maybe I should have done this more but it was the first days of the war and then you just had to quickly do it yourself. There was no choice. If there were such a choice I would definitely like to train a dozen people who could effectively comment on economy, social issues and not be afraid to talk about it, mobilisation and what else. We still made a mistake in that we should have expanded our presence in Europe not only through president Zelenskyy but also through other politicians of Ukraine.

Do you know when conflicts and compromising evidence [in the sense of spy articles] appear? When there is no professionalism, when you want to attract interest at the expense of the compromising evidence. I am not a supporter of any conflict or intrigue and compromising evidence. It seems to me that much more can be achieved if you just speak frankly about everything, speak professionally, are not afraid to talk. You will get any results.

56:36 The government speaks to Ukrainians like children. (Podolyak sighs again) I believe that it is necessary to speak harshly, to speak frankly, not to be afraid but on the other hand, it's psychologically difficult for people. Not everyone will understand your frankness, not everyone. A lot of people will speculate on your frankness, will provoke again. When you just take some fiction and start using emotional images, this breaks the state as such because you cannot respond to insults, there are no facts there.