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Yevhenij Murayev (centre) in Kharkiv
Photo: VYACHESLAV MADIYEVSKYY / REUTERS
The British Foreign Office has issued an extraordinary warning.
The Russian government is already considering who it could install at the head of a pro-Russian government in Kiev after a possible invasion and occupation of Ukraine, according to the announcement on Saturday evening.
The former Ukrainian MP Yevhenij Murayev is being considered as a possible candidate.
Murayev himself calls the speculation from London "complete nonsense." The news that he was intended as a puppet figure for a Russian occupation of Kiev reached him while he was on vacation by the sea, he told SPIEGEL on the phone. He doesn't want to say which holiday country it is, "but certainly not Russia. I am forbidden from entering the country, as I have been under personal Russian sanctions since 2018. I was declared a threat to Russia's defense capability. And that's why I have a few questions for the British services now.'
Not only Murayev, but also other voices in Ukraine express at least doubts about the London statement.
Why Moscow should consider a man whom it has imposed sanctions as prime minister for an occupation regime is just one of many questions that arise.
Party leader and owner of a news channel
In the pro-Russian camp, Murayev, at 45, belongs to the younger generation.
He comes from Kharkiv, the big city on the Russian border in the east, is head of the small party "Naschi" ("Our") and owner of the news channel "Nasch".
There and on his YouTube channel, he also likes to express his odd political views.
He considers equal rights for homosexuals, genetically modified food, biological research laboratories and compulsory vaccination to be links in a chain - they all served a "systematic genocide" to reduce the world population.
Sanctioned by Moscow
Murayev clearly belongs to the second row of politicians in the pro-Russian camp.
The front row includes the oligarch and Putin confidante Wyktor Medvedchuk, who has been under house arrest for months.
Murayev fell out with him in 2018.
That's probably why Moscow sanctioned him.
"At the time, Russia was trying to consolidate the pro-Russian forces into one party with sanctions," says political scientist Volodymyr Fesenko.
"Those who didn't participate were subject to pressure with sanctions." Murayev had not joined the new party "Opposition Platform - for Life".
In 2019 he no longer came to Parliament.
Murayev therefore has an antagonism with Putin's closest confidant in Ukrainian politics, of all people.
“I have no financial or other direct ties to Russia.
Medvedchuk, on the other hand, showed everyone how he flies to Russia, meets in the Duma or with the President and Prime Minister,” he says.
Murayev himself calls his positions "pro-Ukrainian and centrist," not pro-Russian.
But he is a declared opponent of the current West course.
For him, the Euromaidan revolution is a "coup d'état"; he doesn't like the concentration of Russian troops beyond the Ukrainian borders, but it doesn't pose a threat either.
"Whose rights are violated when troops are assembled on one's own territory?" he asks.
Nationally, no majorities can be won with such positions, in polls Murayev is under 6 percent.
Political scientist Fesenko suspects that the London government could simply have been taken in by misinformation from Moscow's secret services.
"In the pro-Russian opposition there are competing groups trying to trick one another via Moscow."
How the other four names ended up on the UK Foreign Office list is uncertain.
Most prominent among them is Mykola Azarov, 74, Prime Minister of Ukraine under Yanukovych, who fled to Russia in 2014.
Murayev says he helped him.
"I don't know the others personally," Murayev says of the other people on the list.
They are Andriy Klyuyev, Yanukovych's former chief of staff, as well as politicians Serhiy Arbuzov and Volodymyr Sivkovych.
