Anatoly Shariy


Anatoly Anatolyevich Shariy is an Ukrainian journalist, videoblogger and politician. Ukrainian media commonly refer to him as "pro-Russian" and "anti-Ukrainian", the labels he denies. In June 2019 he founded a party, Party of Shariy, which participated in that year's parliamentary election.
Earlier, Sharij was known primarily for his investigations of the police and other law enforcement agencies during the Yanukovych government. He sought and eventually received asylum in the European Union, thus avoiding prosecution by Ukrainian law enforcement bodies in 2012. He is also a prominent critic of the 2014 Ukrainian revolution and of its aftermath.

Early life and career

Sharij began to engage in journalism in early 2005. Before that, for many years he suffered from compulsive gambling.

Journalism and video blogging

In 2005, he worked at Ukrainian women's glossy magazines Natalie, Edinstvenaya, Polina and at the Ukrainian periodical publication Segodnya and has collaborated with Russian newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets and others.
In December 2006 he wrote the article "Why the Baby Sleeps" about the abuse of babies by professional beggars in Kiev: they sleep because they are sedated by illegal drugs or vodka.
In 2008, Sharij became a permanent author at the online editions of From-UA and Obozrevatel, but since 2009 he worked only with online newspapers.
From 2008 to early 2012, prior to the moment Sharij fled Ukraine, he was the head of the Investigation Department of the website Obozrevatel. In 2008–2011 Sharij also authored a number of publications on organized crime in Ukraine.
In 2012 he was granted asylum in the European Union. He received a permanent residency permit in Lithuania for 5 years. Shariy left Ukraine because of two criminal prosecutions. One involved the an incident when he shot at a man from a gun with rubber bullets at a McDonald's restaurant. According to Shariy he did this after the man attacked his wife. In addition, in October 2011 Shariy was charged with a second criminal case when he was accused of fabricating an attack upon himself.
From 2014 onwards, Shariy focused on producing video blogs for his YouTube channel, which, among other things carries out debunking misinformation and propaganda in Ukrainian media. He also frequently criticizes mainly Ukrainian publications related to the events in Ukraine after Euromaidan, as well as the current Ukrainian government.
In May 2018 Shariy posted a series of videos which reported anti-Semitic and other racist posts by Ukrainian consul in Hamburg Vasyl Marushinets in his Facebook page. Ukrainian officials tried to distance themselves from Marushinets claiming that they did not know anything about his views. Sharij proved that this cannot be true, because a number of posts of this type were "liked" by Ukrainian diplomats, and that Marushinets posted his views not only in the privacy of Facebook, but in open forums as well. The subsequent scandal have led to recall of Marushinets "for disciplinary proceedings", and on May 30, 2018, he was fired. In December 2019 he was restored citing violations of the formal procedure and was paid the losses of about $9,000.
Shariy is among the 48 authors of the 2018 book of memoirs Oles Buzina. Prophet and Martyr, banned in Ukraine.

Awards and reception

In 2009, Sharij won the Yousmi Web-Journalism Award for "Best Story ".
Journalist Vladimir Posner commented on Sharij's work, saying that Sharij was one of those who had the right to be called a journalist, because, unlike many others, Sharij is calling a spade a spade. "He allowed himself to write and speak the truth about Ukraine. He once ended up making a run of it and now is forced to hide from the authorities of this extremely democratic country"
In April 2016 Shariy was named laureate of the Russia-based International Literary-Media Oles Buzina Contest.
On November 16, 2017, in a rating of the personalities by number of readers in the Ukrainian segments of Facebook and Twitter, Sharij got the 12th place with the aggregate audience of 511,000 people.
On March 18, 2019, the company Brand Analytics published its ratings of Russophone YouTube-bloggers for February 2019. In terms of viewer engagement rate, where Sharij's vlog holds the 1st place, who collected about 3 million likes and 430,000 comments. In terms of audience, with 1.8 million subscribers he was on the 38th place. The company notices that political topics usually attracts a small fraction of YouTube viewers. In summer 2019 Sharij was downgraded to the 2nd place in the engagement rate category, beaten by vlogger Mamix.

Political views of Shariy

Accusations of Shariy's anti-Ukrainism

Ukrainian media routinely describes Sharij as a pro-Russian or anti-Ukrainian propagandist; see e.g., the Ukrainian News Agency and others. Shariy responded to these accusations by declaring that last years he did not like Vladimir Putin and that he would not call to vote for him. In response in 2015 Sharij announced a reward of 1,000 Euro to anybody who demonstrates a piece of pro-Russian or anti-Ukrainian propaganda in his posts. During the 2019 Parliamentary Elections he increased the bounty to 5,000 Euro. Yury Melnik of Lviv National University explains that it is close to impossible to find his quotations in support of his pro-Russianess. However he writes that this conclusion may be drawn from the one-sideness of Sharij's criticism: he criticizes "pro-Ukrainian and pro-European forces in Ukraine and opposition forces in Russia", while he seldom comments on the actions of the Russian state.

Accusations of Shariy's pro-Russian propaganda

, citing several examples, argues that many of his expressed views match those of Russian propaganda and that the latter frequently cites Shariy.

Shariy's position on War in Donbass

An article of cites Shariy's youtube videos where he refers to the War in Donbass as "internal conflict" and "civil war", while not denying the presence of Russian military in the area.

Attitude towards homosexuality

Anatoly Shariy belonged to the Organizing Committee of the movement "Love Against Homosexuality". In that position Shariy declared: “The danger is that sometimes skinheads want to join the movement, movement has nothing to do with that… They should sit and be happy that they are not getting killed. From their side should be respect; on my part there is nothing to respect them for, sick people.” According to him the ultimate goal of Love Against Homosexuality is the following: “ homosexual people stay in their apartments and won’t come out to streets, to mass media and won’t propagate their life style,” “we demand criminal liability for propaganda of homosexualism.”
In the article "Blue Rust. Dictatorship of Sodomites" Shariy wrote: “In Iran, after the Islamic revolution of 1979 over 4000 of lesbians and homosexuals have been sentenced to death. The clerical regime has also executed many women for adulterate sex. I suppose the situation with prostitution, pedophilia, and rape in Iran is hundreds of times better than in our extremely cultured and civilized country.”

Controversies

Shariy vs. Feygin

In 2017 Russian lawyer Mark Feygin accused Shariy of pedophilia both in social networks and traditional media several times. It particular, in July 2017 during a live broadcast of the show "My Truth" on the "Moscow Talking" radio channel, Feygin stated "He is under investigation for pedophilia". Sharij sued him for defamation, and eventually, after Feygin's appeal, won the case. On 24 April 2018 the Moscow Chamber of Lawyers stripped Mark Feygin of his attorney status. He has been allowed to reinstate it after a period of one year by passing a bar exam or by successfully appealing the Chamber's decision. The ruling was based on Feygin's "inappropriate statements" made towards Anatoly Shariy's lawyer Stalina Gurevich and Shariy himself. The court agreed with the plaintiff that Mark Feygin used foul language via his Twitter account to address a lawyer colleague and her client. See Mark Feygin#Anatoly Shariy lawsuit for more details.

Registration of Shariy as parliamentary election candidate

While Shariy's political party Party of Shariy was registered to take part in the 2019 Ukrainian parliamentary election, according to the Ukrainian law, Shariy himself could take part in the elections, because the 5 years leading up to the election he did not live in Ukraine. Nevertheless, on 2 July 2019, the Central Election Commission registered Shariy's candidate running for parliament according to a June 30 decision of the Supreme Court. On the next day, 3 July 2019, this decision was reverted. In an interview to the Ukrainian TV channel Shariy explained his actions in the event. When his registration was rejected for the first time due to the 5-year residency criterion, he contested the decision on the grounds that there was no legal evidence of his absence, because the Ukrainian border guard had no data about his border crossing. Accepting this argument, the Supreme Court instructed the CEC to accept the registration. However the next day CEC was ordered to revert this decision based on an additional evidence which in Shariy's opinion has no legal standing. He presented this controversy as a test for the absence of the rule of law in Ukraine, comparing it with the United States, where a case may be thrown out of the court on formal grounds.

Shariy vs. Detector Media

In 2017 Shariy sued Detector Media for an article where he was called "рупор русского мира" claiming this to be false information which degrades his honor, dignity and business reputation. This claim was denied by the court and by the appellate court, because no convincing evidence was presented of the said degradation, in particular, why "Russian World" is something bad.

Remarks about inhabitants of Western Ukraine

In 2014 published a video in which he made some controversial statements about some inhabitants of Western Ukraine:
Shariy later apologized for the video and said that he was talking only about certain individuals.