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Wow, is that true? No, of course not.

Firstly, in Ukraine, even under martial law, there is freedom of speech, and there is no and cannot be any criminal liability for criticism of the president. Therefore, the accusation that Lira or someone else was “jailed for criticizing Zelensky” is an outright manipulation.

Secondly, Gonzalo Lira is accused not of “criticizing Zelensky,” but of justifying Russian aggression against Ukraine (Article 436-2 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine). The investigation found that Lira:

● publicly justified the Russian attack by the fact that a neo-Nazi regime had allegedly been established in Ukraine;

● denied the facts of Russian missile strikes on Ukrainian cities, massacres of civilian Ukrainians by Russian invaders in Bucha and other cities;

● in spring 2022, Lira personally filmed the Ukrainian military, tried to show their faces, insulted the soldiers. He published the video on his pages on YouTube, Telegram, and Twitter.

Thirdly, Gonzalo Lira is currently in custody only because he violated the terms of his bail and tried to escape Ukrainian justice. The blogger was supposed to be under house arrest in Kharkiv, but he was detained in another part of Ukraine: in Zakarpattia Oblast, where Lira tried to cross the border with Hungary.

In addition, Lira tried to spy on American journalists covering the war in Ukraine and publish their addresses. This put U.S. citizens at risk, as hundreds of crimes of the Russian military against journalists were recorded in Ukraine: shelling, murders, kidnappings. The first foreign journalist to die in the full-scale war was American Brent Renaud. The Russian military shot him on March 13, 2022, in the occupied Irpin, Kyiv Oblast.

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