Taras Nykyforchuk is a 39-year-old blogger and lawyer from Odesa.
He started his career as a blogger with advice on the border between ethics and law. For example, about how you can avoid paying for utility services and not returning loans or collect compensation from a pedestrian who was hit by your car. At first, Nykyforchuk was not interested in politics — political topics began to appear only in 2015. For instance, he satirized the "successes of Yatsenyukʼs government" and talked about the futility of the prosecutorʼs office and the police.
In October 2019, Nykyforchuk received a silver button from YouTube — his channel already had 100 000 subscribers.
During the pandemic, Nykyforchuk was an ardent anti-vaccinator.
Despite the fact that he also suffered from COVID and was treated in a hospital, in his videos he actively campaigned not to get vaccinated.
"I havenʼt been vaccinated and — for Godʼs sake — Iʼm not going to! I want to live longer. If you donʼt get vaccinated, you will have at least some chance," said the blogger, while denying the information about the high mortality from the disease.
The argument was simple — during the two weeks he spent in the hospital, "no one died in his ward".
After the full-scale invasion, Nykyforchuk shifted the focus of his blog: the main enemy of Ukrainians is not the Russians, but the Ukrainian government.
He calls all decisions and initiatives of officials "shocking", "harsh" and "terrible". Parliament is a body that no one needs, and half of the ministries need to be disbanded, because their sole purpose is to steal money. According to Nykyforchuk, it is the Ukrainian authorities, who do not want peace.
"That is, Putin says that he is ready to hold [peace] negotiations [...] and that even a representative from our Ukrainian side signed this document," the blogger repeats Putinʼs version almost verbatim.
The blogger does not mention that the head of the Ukrainian negotiation group Davyd Arakhamiya called this information a Russian fake.
Nykyforchuk sympathizes and justifies pro-Russian politicians Artem Dmytruk and Oleksandr Dubinskyi.
Nykyforchuk conducted a complimentary interview with Dmytruk, who illegally left Ukraine on August 24, 2024 and whom the SBI suspects of attacking a law enforcement officer. He did not ask the MP a single question about the substance of the accusations and devoted the entire conversation to Dmytrukʼs complaints about the lawlessness of the Ukrainian authorities, threats from President Zelensky, and attempts by the special services.
In one of the issues, the blogger mentions another former "Servant of the People" MP Oleksandr Dubinskyi, who is in custody. He is suspected of treason, corruption and organization of the scheme of illegal departure of men abroad.
"Itʼs not just that me and Vovchyk personally do not see any evidence that he is guilty, that he is some kind of spy. [...] But when a person is beaten, they are actually tortured," says the blogger, recalling Dubinskyiʼs complaints about beatings in the pretrial detention center.
After that, he mentions the story of how, in August 2023, a policeman in Dnipro shot dead a driver who tried to flee from the police and then attacked law enforcement officers. On the basis of these two cases, Nykyforchuk makes an unequivocal conclusion:
"The state is clearly turning into some kind of police one. To be honest, I wouldnʼt want to live there."
Vovchyk, whom the lawyer refers to in many videos, is a soft toy with which Nykyforchuk discusses major news.
And we donʼt know how to comment on it.
Expert Vovchyk (on the left in the photo) is the constant Tarasʼ co-host.
Nykyforchuk constantly criticizes and accuses the TRC employees, calling them "brutalized".
Instead of analyzing real cases, when they really break the law, he invents facts. For example, he says that they [the TRC employees] "have nothing to be ashamed of: they shoot [into] a crowd of people." He does not provide evidence of his words, referring to the fact that videos where such cases are recorded are blocked by YouTube.
The blogger justifies corruption in MSEC and those men who illegally flee Ukraine.
"The state put people in such a position that there was nothing left for them to save their lives. Just buy yourself a certificate for dollars, go abroad, provide for yourself and your family and live, as they say, in some normal country. Where is a personʼs life worth something," explains Taras.
Nykyforchuk urges not to join the Armed Forces of Ukraine, because there are only two options — to die or become crippled.
"Neither the first nor the second is better. It is better to save ourselves, and thereby give the opportunity for the continuation of our Ukrainian nation," he assures.
In June 2022, the blogger initiated a petition to lift the ban on men leaving Ukraine. It received 26 000 votes. The president responded to the petition — the ban is legal and will remain in effect until the end of martial law.
A blogger gives private online advice on how to avoid mobilization. The price is two thousand hryvnias.
Babel purchased such a consultation. We asked our former journalist — now a military man of the Armed Forces — to speak with a lawyer. The service was paid for on a card issued to an unknown woman, the number was sent by Nykyforchuk.
At the paid consultation, Nykyforchuk does not give any exclusive advice regarding the rules of communication with representatives of the TRCs and actually denies what he repeats in all his videos.
For example, he says that he personally has not heard anything about violence in the TRCs.
"I donʼt know about the fact that there will be some kind of torture and beating there... I havenʼt heard much about it, that this would happen. Something happens to someone there, we see it from our mass media. But if someone directly told me that he was caught, brought to the TRCs and started to play games there, you canʼt be afraid of that," he says at the consultation.
The main "life hacks" for those who do not want to join the army have been known for a long time: ignore summonses, do not sign anything and run away.
In general, Nykyforchukʼs rhetoric at a private consultation is fundamentally different. He speaks calmly, does not frighten with invented stories, and all this in Ukrainian, which he does not use in videos. Vovchyk was not present at our consultation.
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