Kyiv (Ukraine). It was a typical sultry summer day when Serhii (born 1995) entered the Kyiv headquarters of the Liberal Democratic League of Ukraine. Around 42 days had passed since his release from illegal detention in the city of Odesa. He was late to the meeting with LDLU, relating to the launch of a new podcast series, owing to a force majeure situation on the way from a criminal court almost 500 km away from the Ukrainian capital. Nevertheless, Serhii was in high spirits and optimistic as always. even though he was accompanied by a state bodyguard to prevent assassination attempts on the young activist by pro-Russian agents, which wouldn’t be the first.
“I have never been sufficiently outspoken with him,” said Darka Hirna – a well-known TV host from Suspilne (the Public Broadcasting Company of Ukraine, like BBC in the UK or NHK in Japan) – a few minutes before Serhii walked in the LDLU office.
In an hour Serhii would admit that he had been watching the Suspilne TV marathon with Darka, who had been covering the rise of the pro-democracy youth movement demanding justice to Sternenko, during his one and a half months detention in an Odesa prison. “I know her,” said Serhii to his cellmate.
Ironically, LDLU invited Darka to host a 2-hour biography episode of the Kyiv Podcast Hub, a new media project of the organization, about Sternenko. It was an aspiration to be the first to fully cover Serhii’s bio and bring to the close the question “Who is Serhii Sternenko?”
We have succeeded.
For those who have never heard about Sternenko, it might beg the question as to the importance of producing a special programme covering Serhii’s story. The answer is clear: we had to shed light on how a 26-year-old student became the focus of the Kremlin’s propaganda.
In a short online search, one could easily find English headlines like “Neo-Nazi Sternenko”, “Far-Right Paramilitary Group Leader”, or even “Sternenko, a Murderer of Odesa”. In addition to all of this, he was accused of being fascist by several international communists and Trotskyists organizations.
Such claims and references are fake.
The Ukrainian civil society is aware of such nonsense and propaganda. At the same time, the international community is deprived of the opportunity to form its vision of the situation, which is primarily due to a lack of English content.
The LDLU podcast series about Sternenko aimed to provide first-hand information about the events taking place at the beginning of 2021 and the respective background.
The journey starts in 1995 in the small village of Sadove in the Odesa region, located not far away from Moldova, where Serhii was born. Over the following years, he would be an average provincial boy, dealing with a family’s vegetable garden, food market, and handling younger brothers. At the age of 9, Serhii, as the majority of kids born in post-Soviet Ukraine, faced the events of the Orange revolution (2004-2005). During the visit to the Kyiv Maidan with his parents, Serhii realized his passion for politics.
The Orange revolution has sharpened Serhii’s pro-democracy views and built up his freedom-loving spirit. “There were only two kids in the class standing against Yanukovych: me and one more fellow,” Serhii told Darka during their discussion about pro-Yanukovych views in the Southern parts of the country.
At the end of middle school, Serhii used to intentionally speak surzhyk, a sociolect of Ukrainian and Russian languages, and was especially inspired by the Ukrainian history lessons about the national fight for freedom. He later moved to Odesa to become a law school student. The prevailing political indifference of Odesa citizens during the first years of Yanukovych’s regime had sufficiently influenced the life of Sternenko: he switched to the Russian language and started a very typical apolitical college life.
From 2010 to 2013 Serhii worked as a social media manager for the Kremlin-controlled platform “Vkontakte”, currently blocked in Ukraine, performed in the college theater, and was engaged in other creative outlets. Prior to the Revolution of Dignity, he had not been thinking seriously about certain political ideas. In the meantime, however, he shared the general ideas of democracy and Ukrainian integration with the European Union.
“When Azarov (Yanukovych’s prime minister) announced Ukraine’s withdrawal from signing the Association Agreement with the EU, I was shocked”, – said Serhii while discussing the main trigger of the Ukrainian “Winter on Fire”.
Nevertheless, he joined the Revolution of Dignity in Odesa only in January 2014, together with a small group of local youngsters willing to protect the European direction of Ukraine. Later he went to Kyiv, the center of the revolution, and after the victory over the dictatorship regime returned to Odesa.
At the age of 18, Serhii witnessed the most dramatic events of the Ukrainian Independence renewal. Whereas the Kyiv saga had finished with a tragedy of more than 100 freedom fighters killed and the overthrow of Yanukovych’s dictatorship, the fight in Odesa had just begun.
In March 2014, Russian military forces annexed the Crimean peninsula of Ukraine and apparently planned to proceed with 7 other regions counting on a blitzkrieg. Putin presumably sought to take over the Donetsk and Luhansk regions at first and then conquer the regions of Kharkiv, Zaporizhzhia, Kherson, Mykolaiv, and Odesa. The Russian invaders succeeded in obtaining control in parts of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions. Other parts of the country were strong enough to resist the aggression.
A real chance for the Kremlin’s advance was in Odesa, which shares a border with Transnistria – a breakaway territory of Moldova backed by Russia. The latter did its best to try.
With a group of freedom-minded young individuals in Odesa, Sternenko joined a very new patriotic movement “Right Sector”, which was among the leading protest members during the Revolution of Dignity in Kyiv. This step had only one aim – to resist Russian aggression. There were no talks about the organisation’s ideology in 2014. The “Right Sector” was considered to be a heroic movement and had at that time the support of many pro-Ukrainian and pro-European people.
In a short time Sternenko became a leader of the “Right Sector” in Odesa, standing up against pro-Russian provocations in the region. His activity was not about the “fancy” civil society sector. Instead, he was focused on the street protests and fighting against Kremlin-minded thugs. Although dangerous and risky, that was necessary in the times without a functioning government.
Serhii was active in Odesa’s “Right Sector” until 2017 and left the movement at the age of 21. Among the main reasons was the apparent discrepancy between the movement’s political development and Serhii’s evolving outlook.
After a 3-year period with the “Right Sector”, Sternenko became an independent anti-corruption activist, with a long list of enemies among Kremlin agents and members of the local mafia. In the chain of these events, he met journalist Natalia Usatenko, now his girlfriend, who had strongly impacted Serhii’s future.
From 2017 to 2018 Serhii and Natalia had experienced at least three murder attempts. Sternenko’s neck was severely injured after the second attack and his left hand after the third one. As of summer 2021, both are still not fully recovered and Serhii requires rehabilitation.
When his hand was wounded by a killer, the local healthcare system refused to provide first aid following the order from Odesa mayor Trukhanov, an alleged pro-Russian mafia boss. In the rush, Serhii and Natalia fled from Odesa to Kyiv to secure life and health and to turn to a new page.
We began the second episode of the podcast series talking about one of Kyiv’s hospitals, where Serhii’s life was saved with the help of, among others, a former acting Minister of Healthcare of Ukraine and prominent liberal Ulana Suprun. After an urgent surgery, Sternenko was visited by a number of well-known freedom-fighters, including a leader of a youth street protest art movement, Serhii Filimonov (main star of the upcoming Oleh Sentsov’s movie “Rhino”, which will be presented at the Venice Film Festival 2021) and a passionate anti-corruption campaigner Kateryna Handziuk, who was de-facto killed by pro-establishment thugs in 2018.
A circle of Kyiv activists openly welcomed Sternenko and his girlfriend Natalia and were ready to help them with day-to-day matters.
In the capital, Sternenko continued his anti-corruption activities. In parallel, he was developing a YouTube-blogging idea that he had in mind since 2013 (as of 2021, YouTube is the main source of income for Sternenko and allows him to receive at least several thousand euros per month). After a while, Serhii has also altered his style and now appears before the audience in stylish glasses and modern clothes. The transformation is quite contrasting for those who used to see him in the Maidan-style black outfit with a sporty haircut.
Sternenko denies Darka’s claim that he is a hipster. He sees an inner meaning in these external changes. “I have grown up, read books, graduated from law school, and enrolled at the International Relations Institute,” Serhii says. “In fact, the general situation in the country is also different from 2014.”
Currently, Sternenko’s YouTube channel with almost 310k followers is one of the most popular political blogs in Ukraine, especially among the young post-Maidan generation. In fact, the channel may be regarded as an independent media, changing society and countering the Kremlin’s propaganda. This is one of the main factors that does not allow so many pro-Russian politicians to tolerate Ukrainian youth.
The situation gets complicated because of Sternenko’s objectivity towards all Ukrainian political parties. He openly blames Poroshenko or Tymoshenko for their corruption, stands against the ruling “The Servant of the People” party of Zelensky and the “Opposition Platform for Life” – a putinist, anti-EU and anti-liberal party in Ukraine.
This open approach exacerbates hatred among many people. Searching over his social media pages, one could easily see both ugly personal comments and death threats.
“I am sorry for those brainwashed poor people,” – said Serhii about haters from the pro-Poroshenko camp.
Conversely, Sternenko sees his supporters as real people and not just as a fan club. There are representatives of the whole ideological spectrum among them, and their activity includes not only the BTS A.R.M.Y-style support on Facebook or Twitter. This February, when Serhii was imprisoned, over 10 thousand people joined the march in the Kyiv governmental district to demand justice and freedom for Sternenko and other political prisoners (Antonenko, Kuzmenko, Dugar, etc.). Many people were on the streets for freedom and democracy in general. However, the most visible part of the protestors has taken action primarily because of injustice against the young blogger.
The final question by Darka was the most important and touched Sternenko’s ideological views. At the outset, he tried to provide a traditional overview of his vision of patriotism. However, after a clarifying question, he stated clearly.
“I am a right liberal”, Sternenko said. It is worth noting that the term “right liberalism” is commonly used in Ukraine as a synonym to classical liberalism (the Liberal Democratic League of Ukraine also tends to indicate itself as a right-liberal organisation within the national context).
After several years of Russian “Sternenko is a nazi” slogans, this statement is a revelation allowing to end an artificially created discussion about the values Serhii identifies himself with.
We could only welcome Serhii Sternenko to the liberal family, whose strength lies in diversity, dignity, and globalization of freedom as the main value.
If you were to ask my opinion on who Serhii Sternenko is, I would be happy to answer.
A young man with an outstanding destiny.
In the international context, he could be seen as a Ukrainian version of Joshua Wong, who serves for many as a symbol of Hong Kong’s fight for freedom (although speaking Hongkongese, Sternenko seems to be a spiritual brother of Edward Leung or at least Baggio Leung).
Almost blind in one eye from birth, with an injured hand and a permanent pain syndrome in the neck due to the assassination attacks, Serhii became one of the most powerful young individuals in current Ukrainian politics. Old and new elite groups are afraid of his rising impact on civil society. For many, it was unimaginable that Ukrainian youth is able to resist top-level corruption, mobilize their powers in Hong Kong-style movements, and act without “adult” advisers, money, and establishment protection – until the case of Sternenko. It has proved that educated young individuals should stand together and always be ready to defend each other from the tentacles of state corruption.
While Serhii’s name appears on almost every political TV show in Ukraine, both reflecting positive and negative vibes, he just wants to return to reality, work as a lawyer, travel with Natalia across the democratic world, play PlayStation games, and watch the 3rd season of the Netflix series “Mindhunter”.
The regime of Zelensky has brought forward at least 4 criminal cases against Sternenko without any real legal ground. However, to cover this is a task of another article.
The Ukrainian autumn is coming. With it, a new wave of injustice and persecution might follow. We do not know how the regime will act towards Sternenko. But we do know that after a misty autumn of corruption there always comes a freedom-seeking winter on fire.