Renowned Russian political strategist and author of Kremlin media guidelines dies

Gleb Pavlovsky, a Russian political strategist and a native of Odesa who propagated the Kremlin's ideology in Ukraine, dies at the age of 72.

Source: Vedomosti, the Russian newspaper; Nastoyashee vremya [Current Time]; Meduza, a Latvia-based Russian media outlet; Vaznye Istorii [Important Stories], an independent Russian investigative reporting media outlet

Details: Pavlovsky is the founder of the Foundation for Effective Politics. He was known as a key Kremlin political strategist during the first terms of President Vladimir Putin. His foundation developed Putin's first election campaign.

In the 2000s, Moscow bet on the rise of the pro-Russian fifth column in Ukraine and on economic expansion. Particular hopes were associated with the victory of Viktor Yanukovych in the presidential elections in the winter of 2004.

Putin demanded from Leonid Kuchma, the then president of Ukraine, that he ensure the election of Yanukovych by any means.

Russian political strategists headed by Pavlovsky and, as can be assumed, brigades of state security personnel, were sent to Kyiv.

Yushchenko [a Ukrainian politician, soon to become the third president of Ukraine and a rival of Yanukovych in the 2004 election – ed.] probably got a large dose of dioxin at dinner. But the efforts of the Kremlin were unsuccessful. Yanukovych lost the elections, and mass protests thwarted attempts to falsify their results.

In 2005, it was announced on the air of Channel 5 about the transfer to the Prosecutor General's Office of Ukraine of a tape with a recording of a telephone conversation in which employees of the Russian special services allegedly say that the idea to poison Yushchenko belonged to Pavlovsky.

Pavlovsky himself then rejected the accusations. "This is a rather petty lie perpetrated by a TV channel that operates in the mode of propaganda and counter-propaganda," he said then.

Pavlovsky also admitted that he and his colleague Marat Gelman invented the "temniki" ["theme lists," the directives that outline the issues to be covered in news reports and provide instructions on how these issues are to be treated - ed.] in the years 2003-2004. This is how he once reacted to the news that Viktor Medvedchuk is suing the Tyzhden [Week] newspaper, which called him "an ideologue of the dungeons." "Why should we sue when Marat Gelman and I came up with the "temniki" [and… some others who won't defend their authorship now]," the political technologist declared.

During the 2002 parliamentary elections, the Foundation for Effective Politics worked with the Social Democratic Party of Ukraine and Medvedchuk, "serving the interests of the Kremlin".

In addition, immediately after Putin's speech at the 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest, Russian propaganda began a campaign of intimidation against Ukraine. In particular, Russkyi Zhurnal [Russian Magazine], supervised by Pavlovsky, published a war plan against Ukraine called "Operation 'Mechanical Orange".

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