In mid-August, the occupiers-controlled “Crimean media” began to announce the “premiere of the documentary film” “Crimea”, allegedly filmed by “the famous journalist from Serbia Darinka Petrovic”. The plot of this propaganda is simple, it is about how Crimea allegedly “flourished” during a decade of occupation in order to “break through the information blockade of Western countries”.
Naturally, this action was carried out with the aggressor’s money, which the aforementioned “media” do not hide, having reported “support from the government of the Republic of Crimea, Rossotrudnichestvo and the Russian House in Belgrade”. Here it is worth noting right away that Petrovic does not represent Serbia, since she positions herself as a “correspondent and editor of the ATV TV channel from the Republic of Srpska”, that is, from the Serbian quasi-republic in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Petrovic became “famous” mainly in the media feeds of Russian propaganda, and even then after she voiced, according to the script, a question at Vladimir Putin’s final press conference in December 2023 about “why Russian media are poorly represented in Serbia, while Western media have filled the Balkans.”
Over the past two years, the aggressor has taken Petrovich to the occupied East of Ukraine, and she was noted in Crimea in mid-May 2024, among other places in Feodosia and Sevastopol.
Actually, the stream of consciousness from the ethnic Serb Petrovich, declaring that “we are one people with the Russians, we have a common culture, one language, one mentality, common values” is of little interest here. Much more noteworthy is the story with “her native TV channel” “ATV”, “Alternativna televizija” from Banja Luka. Back in January 2020, this TV channel was fined by the Bosnian authorities themselves for disseminating deliberate fakes against the then Minister of Security Dragan Mektić at the end of 2019, which preceded his resignation.
And then, in January 2022, “Alternativna Televizija” fell under US sanctions as a structure controlled by the pro-Russian politician of the Republic of Srpska Milorad Dodik, through which he is trying to build an authoritarian regime and fanning interethnic confrontation.
The formal owners of “ATV” are the companies “K-2” and “Infinity Media”, which also, in June 2024, fell under US sanctions, including the founding company “Infinity International Group”, which positions itself as a “regional leader in information technology, energy engineering, digitalization and electric vehicles.” It is noteworthy that such an “authoritative journalist” as the former controller of the Banja Luka water utility Srđan Kevac has been declared the director of the television company.
It should be noted that “ATV” was created in 1997, for Dodik’s first election campaign from the “Alliance of Independent Social Democrats”. At that time, it received only two seats in parliament, but by some “miracle” in the form of a “political compromise” with many zeros, Dodik, to the surprise of many, became the Prime Minister of the Republic of Srpska.
In this whole scam of the Russian special services, it is worth noting one interesting detail; as we managed to find out from our Balkan friends, the original co-founder of “ATV” was Ann-Marie Boström, the head of the Swedish Helsinki Committee’s mission in the Balkans, who worked there on the “human rights line” until 2003.
Probably, the employees of one respected institution, after business lunches in the Stockholm restaurant “Asplund” near their new office, should pay more attention to the real employers of Swedish “human rights activists” on their long business trips abroad, especially in these turbulent times.
However, now, as Bosnian media write, Dodik, who became the President of the Republic of Srpska at the end of 2022, is hastily re-registering new companies at the same Banja Luka addresses, replacing the sanctioned ones, such as “Video Audio Media” (“VAM”). And now, apart from local plumbers and the Kremlin dictator, he has fewer and fewer “influential friends”.