The Russian state media has been ordered to cancel any mentions of Roman Abramovich from their coverage of peace negotiations, it was claimed today.
The move to write the oligarch out of TV and news agency reports comes after evidence that he had been “poisoned” with a chemical war agent. The revelation on blanking Abramovich - for years seen as having links to Vladimir Putin, 69, and sanctioned by Britain and the EU over the war, triggering the attempted sale of Chelsea FC - come from Russia ’s leading woman opposition politician Ksenia Sobchak, also a prominent TV and web journalist .
The compliant state media in Russia are often issued orders from the Kremlin about what they can and cannot report. “The pro-Kremlin media were forbidden to mention the role of businessman Roman Abramovich in the negotiations between Russia and Ukraine,” said Sobchak's Telegram channel.
“This information was confirmed to our editorial office on condition of anonymity by representatives of Moskva-24, TASS and another major pro-government telegram channel.” One of the sources said that on March 30, the following order came from the authorities: 'We no longer mention that Abramovich is participating in the negotiations.’"
Naming of the tycoon, 55, evidently stopped on state media outlets around 1pm Moscow time on Tuesday. Abramovich - whose maternal grandparents were from Kyiv - was involved in yesterday's talks in Istanbul to end the war. In Western reports, Abramovich has been portrayed as a key figure in the peace negotiations, able to build bridges, even if there is a suspicion that he was seeking to preserve his sanctions-hot fortune
The Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky pleaded with the US not to sanction him due to his intermediary role. Until now, the Russians have said he is not part of their official delegation but is involved in negotiations with Kyiv. He is said to have met both Putin and Zelensky personally in his shuttle missions.
Ostorozhno Novosti reported: “The ban on mentioning the billionaire in the context of negotiations between Russia and Ukraine is confirmed by the fact that there was not a single mention of Abramovich's name in news agencies after 13:00 on March 29. In addition, the evening news broadcasts on Channel 1 and Rossiya 1 [the main state controlled channels], where the negotiations were the main topic, did not say a word about Abramovich either.”
Putin recently hit out at “cancel culture” in the West - but appears to have cancelled his own ally Abramovich, unless this is a sophisticated game of double bluff. Reports today suggested that Abramovich and other negotiators were poisoned in early March on a trip to Kyiv. Experts have said this was World War One chemical warfare agent Chloropicrin or a low dosage of Novichok.
The Chelsea owner required hospital treatment in Istanbul after flying to Turkey from the talks in Ukraine. One theory for the alleged poisoning is that hardliners close to Vladimir Putin wanted to disrupt peace moves and prolong the war. However, the motive remains murky and unclear.
Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov said: “This is part of the information panic, part of the information sabotage, information war. These reports [of poisoning] are not true … it is necessary to strongly filter the flow of information.” Russian political analyst Konstantin Kalachev made the extraordinary suggestion that the poisoning may have been an attempt by Abramovich to gain sympathy in Britain where his interests have been damaged by sanctions.
"Abramovich is a flexible, sane and, of course, cunning person,” he said. “I even expressed the opinion that he staged the recent alleged poisoning in Kyiv himself. It appeared on the front pages of British newspapers, he began to look as if he had suffered from “hawks” in Vladimir Putin's circle..”
The negotiators who suffered medical problems had reportedly only eaten chocolate and drunk water. "This could be someone [in the Kremlin] who thinks he [Abramovich] has betrayed them by trying to pursue peace,” one source was quoted as saying. Sobchak, 40, is a former presidential election candidate, coming fourth in 2018, in a poll widely seen as rigged in Putin’s favour. Sobchak has known Putin since she was a child, and he attended her baptism.
Her late father Anatoli Sobchak was Putin’s law professor in Leningrad, and his mentor. Later, after Putin quit as a KGB spy, Anatoli Sobchak appointed him as his deputy as mayor of Leningrad, soon to be renamed as St Petersburg. Putin subsequently smuggled Anatoly Sobchak out of Russia to get medical treatment in the West.
Ksennia Sobchak - one of Russia’s best known faces - stood against Putin in the 2018 election, but only after a mysterious private conversation with him. Her mother Lyudmila Narusova, a senator, launched a scathing attack on Putin’s war in Ukraine. Narusova accused Putin of “shameless lies” in state TV war coverage. She accused him of failing to arrange the return home of bodies of slain soldiers which, she alleged, were gnawed by stray dogs.
