After the publication on Babel of a text about the conflict surrounding the Defense Procurement Agency (DPA), unknown individuals contacted the editorial office. They introduced themselves as the Agencyʼs communications unit and asked to make corrections to the text due to "inaccuracies and manipulative statements regarding the activities of the Defense Procurement Agencyʼs supervisory board".
In particular, it was about the meeting of the Supervisory Board of the Agency on January 21, 2025, at which four members of the board voted to extend the contract with the head of the Agency Maryna Bezrukova. The author or authors of the letter emphasized that the decision of the Supervisory Board was legitimate — this fact, in their opinion, was not articulated clearly enough
As evidence, the letter attached a copy of the meeting minutes, which had already been published by the media, with a request not to make them public. The letters were sent to Babelʼs corporate email and to the editor-in-chiefʼs personal email address [email protected].
After the first letter, we contacted the Agency, whose representatives we had spoken with during the preparation of the material. They confirmed to us that they had nothing to do with this message. The correspondence with the pseudo-communicators ended after we asked them to introduce themselves.
"If you donʼt need to understand the situation and correct the information so that it is accurate and not manipulative, then we will leave the conversation at that. If you want to understand, we have written a solution for you in the message above," their last message said.
- In January 2025, the editorial staff of Espresso stated that they were offered money to remove the column “Expensive rarity: why the Defense Ministry Agency is buying anti-tank mines from the Second World War”, in which the author wrote about the DPA contract for the purchase of M6A2 anti-tank mines worth over €200 million. Then Detector Media contacted the Defense Procurement Agency for comment, where they emphasized that they had nothing to do with the attempt to remove the publication from the site.
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