When Graham Phillips first moved from London to Ukraine, the Nottingham-born civil servant set up a personal blog that mixed reviews of brothels with observations of everyday life in Kyiv. A decade later, pro-Kremlin YouTuber has been accused in parliament of potential war crimes after interviewing a British counterpart captured by the Russian military.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson told lawmakers he was concerned about Phillips’ “propaganda messages” featuring Aidan Aslin, a British citizen who has spent the past four years in Ukraine and served in the country’s armed forces.
Aslin local MP Robert Jenrick went further, saying Phillips’ video showed his voter “handcuffed, physically injured and interviewed under duress for propaganda purposes.” He said it was a violation of the Geneva Conventions for the Treatment of Prisoners of War and that “interviewer Graham Phillips is at risk of prosecution for war crimes”.
Aslin was captured by Russian forces while defending the besieged city of Mariupol, although it remains unclear how he was eventually interviewed by Phillips. The two men are from Nottinghamshire: Aslin, 28, is from Newark-on-Trent, just a short drive from Phillips’ hometown. Still, a conflict was needed on the other side of Europe to unite them – albeit from different countries.
As Aslin moved to Ukraine, met a local woman and joined the country’s armed forces, Phillips took a very different path and has long been a preferred mouthpiece for pro-Russian breakaway governments in the Donbas region.
He received medals from the Russian state for his reports and adhered to the Russian line, suggesting in recent weeks that Ukraine was ruled by the Nazis and that the massacre of Ukrainians in Bucha had been staged.
Phillips insists his work is self-funded and regularly raises donations from his 264,000 YouTube subscribers, but he also makes money from YouTube ads paid for by major Western companies. On Wednesday morning, people trying to watch Phillips’ interview with Aslin, which could violate the Geneva Conventions, were greeted with paid commercials starring Pierce Morgan, who spoke about his upcoming TalkTV show and Müller yogurt promotions. .
YouTube has so far refused to download Philips’ videos, despite calls from politicians to remove the channel.
His rise from an obscure Briton to a figure of national political interest was unlikely. According to an interview with BuzzFeed News in 2014, Phillips first went to Ukraine when he traveled as a guest fan to a football match in England. At the age of 30, he left his job at the now defunct government’s Central Information Office and moved full-time to the country, where he rediscovered himself as a journalist.
When Russia invaded Crimea in 2014, Phillips was drawn to the country’s pro-Moscow separatist groups in the east. His prolific self-recorded YouTube videos were relatively new at the time and delighted Russia, with the Kremlin-backed news channel RT briefly using him as a freelance journalist – although he never got a full-time job at the magazine. His detention by the Ukrainian government on the outskirts of Mariupol gained him notoriety, but he soon slipped out of the public eye as Western interest in the conflict waned.
His uploads became rare, often focusing on visits to the Crimea, and he attracted only a few thousand views. In one video, he boasts that he is the only Western journalist to attend a tour of Russia’s legendary Black Sea Fleet and take a small boat to see the power of the flagship Moscow. This flagship has since sunk and appears to have been hit by Ukrainian missiles.
Phillips was in the United Kingdom during the pandemic, filming protests against Black Lives Matter in central London. As early as February, he uploaded a video in central London opposite the Houses of Parliament. The level of the scaffolding of Elizabeth’s tower suggests that it was recorded at the same time, which means that he was in Britain when the Russian invasion of Ukraine began.
He subsequently managed to return to Russian-held areas of Ukraine, despite several airlines flying to the region, becoming one of the few Westerners to shoot videos of the occupied territory with Russian forces. How he ended up in a room interviewing Aslin remains unclear – although this gave him the profile he always seemed to crave.
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