3.07 "A Dolboyob, But Ours!"

However, let's go back to Rybar.

Let me introduce this hero properly, because he isn't some random blogger who wandered into the wrong country.

Mikhail Zvinchuk, you see, is a military translator, an Arabist who served in Syria and Iraq in the mid-2010s, and then ran the Foreign Language Internet Projects Department at the Defense Ministry's press service.

The department of Igor Konashenkov, the man who spent the first years of this war reading out how many Ukrainian aircraft Russia had shot down that day, and, uh, well, that's a number that eventually exceeded the size of Ukrainian Air Force several times over.

In 2018, Zvinchuk co-founded Rybar.

A side note, I actually discovered that, uh, if I type those names, the names, proper names in Cyrillic, then I can read them better.

Who'd knew? Well, upgrades for the show.

But carrying on.

In December of 2022, Putin put him on the Kremlin working group on mobilization.

The channel has spent the war publishing maps, analysis, and under a tag called Targets, coordinates of Ukrainian positions and infrastructure, occasionally boasting that the army used them.

The paperwork that follows a man like that around Europe is thick.

The EU has sanctioned him, Britain has sanctioned him, and the network.

And in October 2024, the United States State Department offered up to ten million dollars for information on the people running Rybar's network over operations aimed at the American presidential election.

Montenegro, I'll remind you, has been a NATO member since 2017 and wants to be in the EU by 2028.

Why was he there? Two reasons, according to Rybar.

It's, uh, Rybar himself.

First, a documentary about how European integration is ruining a small Balkan country.

Specifically, the visa regime Montenegro introduced for Russians on the 1st of November to match EU rules.

Secondly, filming at the Cetinje Monastery, the seat of the Serbian Orthodox Metropolitan in Montenegro and the single most polit- politically explosive building in the country, where the enthronement of a metropolitan in 2021, uh, well, yeah, that was, um, you know, came attached with burning tires and tear gas.

For which, Rybar says proudly, they had submitted an official request.

So, a sanctioned former Defense Ministry propagandist travels into a NATO country with his wife, a film crew, and according to the Montenegrin paper, Vijesti, um, drones and complex digital equipment to film a story about how the country's European path is a mistake at the most se- at the most sensitive religious site in the Balkans, having filed a formal request to the authorities telling ex- him exactly where, you know, tell- telling authorities where and when he'll, he'll be.

And then he publishes a post mocking the border guard who let him in.

I mean, you, you think I'm joking when I speak about three brain cells, but I'm, I'm really not.

See, around seven in the morning on, on Thursday the 9th, police and the National Security Agency detained Zvinchuk in Risan, along with his wife, Valeriya, who is Rybar's creative director, and, uh, three c- three of his colleagues, too.

Prime Minister Miloj- Milojko Spajić, sorry, uh, those words are a bit difficult to pronounce, posted on X that he wouldn't discuss what belongs to the security services, but the message was clear.