A Tayside YouTuber and freelance journalist has returned to Ukraine after previously being branded an “enemy of the state” by the country’s government.
Former Perth High School student Graham Phillips was deported to Poland and banned from Ukraine for three years in 2014.
He was accused of being a “Kremlin propagandist” and supposedly “supporting terrorism” but has always denied this and maintains his reporting is “independent”.
Mr Phillips, who studied at Dundee University, is a strong critic of the current government in Kyiv.
He recently called support for Ukraine following the Russian invasion “virtue signalling” for a “fashionable cause” and compared it to support for Black Lives Matter in 2020.
Investigative reporter Tanya Kozyreva shared the news of Mr Phillips’s return to Ukraine and asked YouTube to consider banning what she described as his “disinformation” channel.
The latest video uploaded to his channel appears to show him inside the country at the Three Sisters monument located at the border with Poland and Belarus.
He previously worked for state-run Russian television channel Russia Today in 2013 and 2014 while living and working in Ukraine, before moving on to covering events in Donbass for the channel as a freelance reporter.
Former Dundee student branded ‘Putin agent’
He now works as a freelance journalist/blogger and regularly posts updates about Eastern European politics on YouTube to his 191,000 subscribers. His videos have garnered nearly 92 million views.
However, he has been accused of posting Russian propaganda and misinformation about the invasion of Ukraine.
Let me introduce you to Graham Phillips, British journalist well known in Ukraine (holding Z bag). He was embedded with pro-Russian separatists and Russian troops in 2014.
And he is back to Ukraine in 2022.
Dear @YouTube consider the ban of his disinformation channel. pic.twitter.com/cQ22wyLWEl
— Tanya Kozyreva (@TanyaKozyreva) March 15, 2022
Mr Phillips previously had a bag thrust over his head and loaded assault rifles pointed at him in 2014 by Ukrainian security forces while covering the Crimea war for Russia Today.
He denied claims he was a “Putin agent” after his phone records were seized by the Ukraine government in 2017.
He said he was “simply an independent journalist”.
The video blogger returned to Crimea that summer and made a film about it called A Brit in Crimea, which was released in 2018.
He was also arrested by armed police after “gatecrashing” the Georgian Embassy in London in 2018.
He was banned for life from Kosovo in 2019 for calling the country’s leaders “war criminals and terrorists”.
Mr Phillips could not be reached for comment.
