Laurence Dollimore
THIS is the moment a Ukrainian journalist’s home in northern Spain was firebombed with molotov cocktails.
The house belonging to Anatoli Sharii and his family in Roda de Bera, in Tarragona, was attacked at around 4.45am on Monday morning.
Sharii, who moved to Spain three years ago, is a former informant and critic of his country’s wartime leader Volodymyr Zelensky.
His wife and children are not believed to have been injured in the attack, which occured on the quiet Dels Pescadors street.
Sharii has been branded ‘pro-Russian’ back home for regularly uploading anti-Zelensky videos on his YouTube channel, which has just shy of 2.5 million subscribers.
Sharii regularly accuses the government of corruption and was reportedly discovered to be living in Spain by neo-Nazi groups two years ago.
Since then he has faced a number of threats and Spain’s justice department has refused Ukraine’s request to have him extradited to face charges of ‘anti-patriotic propaganda’ and ‘high treason’.
The latest attack came after he published, in early October, an investigation into drug trafficking in Ukraine and Europe and cited one of the network’s alleged bosses, Egor Levchenko.
Following the report’s publication, Sharii and his family received new death threats on social media and by phone.
One of the calls, as Sharii explained in a police report to Catalonia’s Mossos d’Esquadra force, threatened to throw a Molotov cocktail at his baby’s window.
On his YouTube account, where the “anti-Nazi” tag appears prominently, Sharii posts videos denouncing alleged cases of corruption by the government of President Vladimir Zelensky. Previously he was also critical of the executives of Petro Poroshenko and Viktor Yanukovych, which has earned him a “pro-Russian” label in the Ukrainian press, which he denies.
