Belarus man who acted as Ukrainian for Russian TV: I was not paid

Minsker Vital Yurchanka has contacted Nasha Niva and confirmed that he was passed off as a Ukrainian ‘disappointed at Maidan’ on First Channel.  Well-known blogger Ilya Varlamau reported the lie at first. “Kiril Chubenko” shown in the video was Belarusian Vital Yurchanka, a BSU graduate who was not connected with Euromaidan in Kiev in 2013, the blogger announced.

“Euromaidan has not given anything to me. Look where we are. We should have predicted the future. Now we are freezing, the energy is expensive and nobody knows when it will end. How do we survive in winter? How can we send children to school?” ‘the Ukrainian’ said on First Channel.

What is Yurchanka saying now? "The young man kept saying that he felt ashamed of the situation,” Nasha Niva reported.

"I was an analyst in a Belarusian company that was a mediator between TV channels and cameramen all over the world,” Vital Yurchanka said. “For instance, if an earthquake occurs we need to look for cameramen. The Russian First Channel ordered a video showing a person or a family suffering from the shortage of gas and expensive heating in Krivoi Rog, Ukraine. Such a person was found and the video was sent to us. I had no idea about the content of the video since I did not contact the cameramen in any way. However, it turned out that the sound in the video was very bad and that it was impossible to send it to the client. They took a wrong decision – to shoot the video again using the same text. I do not know if they used the real name of that person.”

Yurchanka was asked to play the part of the person from Krivoi Rog (since he was a newcomer who had been working in the company for 4 months), he said. “I was in some doubt but I went to do it,” the young man said. “I was not brave enough to refuse although I was doubting whether to do it or not. I asked them not to send the video to Moscow after it had been shot. The material had already been sent, they replied. The client was unaware of the situation.”

A lot of his acquaintances saw the video on TV and he heard a lot of unpleasant things from them on that day. He is ‘ashamed of the situation very much’ and would like ‘to apologize to all those who have seen it and to those who haven’t’. He did not get paid for the video, the young man asserts.