Ukraine’s Security Service has filed new charges against Yevhen Muraiev, a former MP whom British intelligence identified in 2022 as one of the Kremlin’s candidates to head a Russian puppet government in Ukraine.
Ukraine’s Security Service announced on May 11 that investigators had collected new evidence of Muraiev’s subversive activities and served him with an additional notice of suspicion — this time for justifying, recognising as lawful, denying, and glorifying Russia’s armed aggression against Ukraine. He is already wanted on charges of high treason and incitement of national enmity and hatred filed in July 2023. The combined charges carry a sentence of up to 15 years in prison with confiscation of property.
Muraiev is currently abroad, believed to be in China, where he was located in January 2025 – his first confirmed public appearance after nearly three years of silence since fleeing Ukraine in May 2022.
The Media Empire and the British Warning
Muraiev was a member of the Verkhovna Rada between 2012 and 2019, representing the pro-Kremlin Opposition Bloc. He later founded the Nashi party and became the owner of Nash TV, a channel that, according to the SBU investigation, he “extensively used to disseminate Kremlin narratives in the Ukrainian media space” – manipulating public opinion in the interests of the Russian Federation.
Nash TV was sanctioned by Ukraine’s National Security and Defence Council in February 2022 and subsequently banned — the fourth pro-Russian television channel shut down in Ukraine in the space of a year, following ZIK, 112, and NewsOne, all linked to pro-Kremlin figures. The channel had been filling the space vacated by those earlier closures, featuring the same guests and messaging.
The timing of the sanctions was notable. In January 2022, the UK Foreign Office publicly identified Muraiev as among the candidates the Kremlin was considering to lead a pro-Russian puppet government in Ukraine following a planned invasion. The warning — unusually specific for a public intelligence disclosure — placed Muraiev in a category that went well beyond a domestic media proprietor operating in a grey zone. It described him as an asset in a prospective occupation scenario.
Muraiev denied the allegation, calling it “absurd”, and noted that Russia had imposed its own sanctions on him since 2018 — which he attributed to a falling out with another pro-Kremlin figure rather than any genuine distance from Moscow.
Propaganda From Abroad
Ukraine’s invasion did not end Muraiev’s activities. According to the SBU’s new charges, he continued spreading pro-Kremlin propaganda after February 2022 while hiding abroad. In a January 2025 interview published from Beijing – his first in nearly three years – he called Russia’s full-scale armed aggression against Ukraine an “internal civil conflict”, parroted Kremlin narratives blaming President Zelenskyy for the invasion, called on Ukrainian citizens to lay down their arms, and justified Russia’s temporary seizure of Ukrainian territory.
A linguistic analysis commissioned by the SBU confirmed the subversive character of the statements. The new summons was served in absentia.
A Template for Kremlin Media Capture
The Muraiev case illustrates a model that predates the full-scale invasion and has been documented across multiple European countries: the use of domestic media figures — politicians, businesspeople, and former officials — as vehicles for Kremlin narratives, operating within the legal frameworks of their host countries while serving foreign information objectives.
In Ukraine’s case, the model ran through a chain of linked channels: NewsOne, ZIK, and 112 under Viktor Medvedchuk and Nash TV under Muraiev — each banned in sequence as Ukrainian authorities moved to close the domestic information corridors through which Moscow had been operating for years. The Kyiv Post noted at the time that Nash had effectively taken over the position vacated by the Medvedchuk channels after their closure in 2021.
What distinguishes Muraiev from a purely domestic case is the British government’s 2022 assessment: the media ownership was not simply a business or even a political project but part of a scenario in which Muraiev would have had an institutional role in a Kremlin-installed administration. The SBU’s ongoing investigation is, in that context, as much about accountability for a completed influence operation as it is about future deterrence.
