Germany Labels Journalist 'Criminal' And Seizes Her Bank Accounts For Reporting From Ukraine
They closed her YouTube channel, blocked her PayPal account, and sentenced her to three years in prison without trial for interviewing Ukrainian citizens in the Donbas.
A German journalist living in eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region has been criminally charged by the German government for interviewing Ukrainian citizens and reporting her findings.
Independent reporter, 28-year-old Alina Lipp, moved to the Donbas area six months ago, where she transmits first-hand information to her audience in German, Russian, and English from her telegram channel.
Lipp claims she is only doing what any journalist would do — interviewing citizens and documenting what is happening around her.
The journalist explained she is “doing interviews with people in Donetsk and merely translating them into German.”
“I am simply filming everything I see around,” Lipp added.
She inquired rhetorically “what is it that’s illegal in that, or dangerous?”
The controversy around Lipp began in March when one of her videos explaining the history and the context of the war went viral.
In Lipp’s viral video, she said, “you need to understand that Russia has been asking for eight years that the Minsk agreement be upheld. Ukraine did not adhere to it, nor did they approach the Donbas region in an attempt to come to agreement.”
“Instead, they have been bombing the outskirts of the Donbas region for eight years. They are shooting at civilians, who now also have to live in completely shot-up houses. Very many people have died here,” Lipp continued.
In the video, Lipp alleged that the Donbas citizens who overwhelmingly voted to secede from Ukraine in 2014 had been, “thankful that Russia finally did something”.
Lip added, “Finally, the people here have been liberated from the terror that they’ve been experiencing for the last eight years,” under continuous shelling by the Ukrainian military.
Soon after the video went viral, Lipp’s YouTube channel was closed, her PayPal account was blocked, and the Ukrainian government labeled her a “terrorist”.
Last month, the journalist received a letter from Germany’s prosecutor’s office which states that she now faces three years in prison for supporting Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
This comes after German authorities closed down her bank account and her father’s bank account without warning.
In a recent interview, Lipp explained, “The letter says that, for example, I say in my Telegram channel that the population of Donbas supports the fact that Russia has launched a special operation.”
“I also said that for several years Ukrainians have been killing civilians in the Donbas, and that this is genocide and it turns out to be a crime for Germany, so they took 1,600 euro from my bank account and didn’t even tell me about it.” Lipp said.
According to Lipp, the German government has declared her guilty and she will not be able to defend herself in court.
“At the end of the letter, he says that they are not going to invite me to a hearing because this would ‘disturb the investigations,’ and that is very interesting, so they are charging me, but they do not want to listen to me,” she said in a video posted to her telegram channel.
Despite the charges against her, Alina Lipp plans to continue reporting from Donetsk, which she said is being shelled daily by the Ukrainian armed forces.
THE DOWNLOAD:
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OSCE Reports Reveal Ukraine Started Shelling The Donbas Nine Days Before Russia's 'Special Military Operation': On-the-ground video journalism from an independent reporter named Patrick Lancaster and the OSCE maps clearly show that the Ukrainian side backed by the United States and NATO forces began shelling the independent republics of Donetsk and Luhansk on February 16th, 2022. Read more.
The Ukrainian Billionaire Who Funded Hunter Biden, President Volodymyr Zelensky, And The Neo-Nazi Azov Battalion: The real person who was the benefactor to, and the boss of, Vice President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, at the Ukrainian gas company Burisma Holdings, was Ihor Kolomoysky, who was the same Ukrainian oligarch who funded the presidential campaign of Volodymyr Zelensky, and the neo-Nazi Azov Battalions shooting rockets at the Donbas. Read more.
How Obama And Biden Installed Neo-Nazis In Ukraine: Today’s war cannot be understood without first understanding the U.S. government’s role in Ukraine's Maidan Coup and how Obama and Biden helped neo-Nazi factions overthrow the elected government of Ukraine. Read more.
Inflation, De-dollarization, and Russia's Ultimate Goal for War in Ukraine: The ultimate goal has always been to displace the U.S. at the apex of the global pyramid, and therefore, to end the role of the dollar as the global reserve currency. Read more.
Breaks my heart that the world had spun into this deep of a hole of fake news, propaganda and lies… from one corrupt setting to another in medicine, war, politics, humanity, we are being trained to believe nothing, trust nothing. Untethered to faith, family and our own reality, they hope we will be be easy pickings for their new “liberal world order.” Unfortunately for them, many of us have gotten gotten off the train. Thanks for this article. Fake news is global!
If the last couple of years were a novel, I would not believe a word of it.