Anti-Ukraine Chorus Seeks to Exploit an American’s Death
Gonzalo Lira was a pro-Putin propagandist. Even so, the questions about his death require transparency.
OVER THE WEEKEND, the segment of American discourse in which Ukraine is routinely depicted as a corrupt and repressive regime decried an alleged new Ukrainian atrocity: the reported death in a Ukrainian prison of YouTuber and social media “influencer” Gonzalo Lira. Vivek Ramaswamy, then still a GOP presidential contender (he dropped out last night) weighed in with a viral tweet:
Elon Musk, who had previously amplified a Tucker Carlson report on Lira being supposedly “tortured in a Ukrainian prison,” responded with one of his notorious one-word statements of concern:
Less sympathetic commenters pointed out that previous reports of Lira’s death at the hands of Ukrainian security services had turned out to be false. But this time, it appears that Lira really is dead: When Newsweek approached the State Department to ask about the report, a spokesperson confirmed “the death of a U.S. citizen in Ukraine” and offered condolences to the family. While the no-name wording is odd—Lira was hardly the only U.S. citizen on Ukrainian soil—the context clearly suggests that the deceased is indeed Lira.
So, who was Gonzalo Lira, and did the Ukrainian government violate his human rights by detaining him?
I DELVED INTO LIRA’S “JOURNALISTIC” OUTPUT in April 2022, when his apparent brief detention by the SBU (the Ukrainian security service) sparked rumors that he had been murdered. The California-born Lira, who was 55 at the time of his death, had started out his career as a fiction writer and independent filmmaker, then started blogging on economics and other subjects and drifted into the “anti-establishment” media as a contributor to the financial blog and conspiracy-theory website Zero Hedge. Around 2017, he reinvented himself as “Coach Red Pill”—a dating and seduction guru with an explicitly and grossly misogynistic slant. (In Coach Red Pill world, “whores” and “damaged women” are always waiting to pounce on a “nice guy” who lets women have the upper hand, and women should be treated “exactly like dogs.”)
Deciding that Ukraine would be a good base for his pickup artist act, Lira moved to Kharkiv. After the Russian invasion in February 2022, Lira—who had previously scoffed at claims of an imminent Russian invasion—reinvented himself yet again as a war pundit, or to be more precise, a pro-Kremlin propagandist. He claimed, in the war’s early months, that “Ukraine military command and control [had] completely broken down due to Russian strikes,” twisted himself into pretzels trying to deny Ukrainian military successes, blamed Russian strikes at civilian targets on Ukrainian missiles, and dismissed atrocities by Russian troops in Bucha and other places as a hoax. He also repeatedly claimed that Ukraine was ruled by a “Nazi” regime. Rather ironically for a supposed anti-Nazi, Lira’s online trail also includes a number of blatantly antisemitic posts; in November 2021, he shared on Telegram a 4chan post arguing that since Jews are constantly vilifying white men and it was white men who defeated Hitler, it follows that either the Holocaust didn’t happen or Jews are so odiously ungrateful to their saviors that “Hitler was right.”
Of course, being an antisemitic, misogynistic creep (or an anti-vaxxer who claims that the COVID-19 vaccine is an experimental bioweapon that causes AIDS and sterility) is not grounds for imprisonment. However, justifying Russian aggression against Ukraine, which Lira consistently did, actually is a crime under Article 463-2 of Ukraine’s criminal code, a wartime statute enacted in early March 2022—and that’s the article under which he was charged. (While there have also been claims that he filmed and shared Ukrainian troop movements and positions, this does not appear to be a part of the charges; a mention of this claim on Lira’s Wikipedia page is sourced to a report on the arrest, around the same time, of an unnamed Ukrainian blogger on such a charge.)
While the statute clearly targets speech, such restrictions are not unusual in wartime, even in democracies—particularly in a country under attack. It’s difficult to imagine even the most liberal democracy allowing free expression for enemy propaganda while defending itself against an invasion. It is also worth noting that after his arrest, Lira was released on bail. He was later detained while attempting to flee to Hungary, where he intended to ask for political asylum; the flight attempt was a violation of the conditions of his bail, and this time he remained in pretrial detention.
And this is where things get tricky. Yes, Americans living in foreign countries are expected to obey those countries’ laws even if those laws are at odds with the rights U.S. citizens enjoy at home. This is especially true in a country defending itself against a war of aggression. But when a foreign national is detained in a country at war for crimes that amount to bad speech (as opposed to espionage, for example), deportation with no right of reentry seems a much more appropriate response than imprisonment. It’s difficult to see what harm would have come to Ukraine from allowing Lira to leave for Hungary, or from deporting him to the United States. His death in detention, easily weaponized by the usual suspects, is much more of a potential liability.
There is no evidence that Lira was tortured in prison, let alone that the Biden administration supported such torture. In a handwritten note Lira’s father shared with the media (undated but written either in late December or early January) he said that his lung-related health problems had started in October and were ignored by prison authorities, resulting in double pneumonia and severe edema; in the same note, however, he said that he was “about to have a procedure to reduce the edema pressure in [the] lungs.” Even so, reliable information on the facts of his death (and his imprisonment) needs to be made available. Likewise, claims by Lira’s father that the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine ignored his pleas for help should be looked into—even if, when Lira was still alive, his complaints about the U.S. State Department’s indifference to his plight came with a predictably racist and homophobic dig at Brittney Griner, the American basketball player released from Russian captivity in December 2022. However vile, Lira was still a U.S. citizen. And while many of his champions have a weak grasp of the facts of the case (Musk, for instance, got community-noted for falsely tweeting that Lira had been in prison for five years), the real facts raise some concerning questions.
Alive, Gonzalo Lira was not a journalistic hero but a grifter and propagandist for a regime that kills and imprisons journalists. Dead, the best way to neutralize his potential martyrdom is full transparency.