For oligarchs, television is not so much a business as a tool of political influence. Yevhenia Kravchuk, deputy head of the Verkhovna Rada committee on humanitarian and information policy, said this in a comment on NV radio, UNIAN reports.

The comment of the People's Deputy from the Servant of the People party refers to Rinat Akhmetov's statement about the ceding in favor of the state of all broadcast and satellite television licenses of channels, certificates of print media in Ukraine and termination of operations of online media.

"This only confirms that when we adopted the law on oligarchs and added the media part to this law, we were right that the oligarchs do not see it as business, but as a tool for political influence. Now they do not have a tool of political influence. Because now there is a state of war, there are no elections, there is no one to put pressure on with their programs or information messages," said Kravchuk.

As she emphasized, television channels have actually turned into a resource that simply takes money. "Even in the best of times, Ukraine's advertising market is too small to support such a large number of nationwide channels. In theory, in the future, when the advertising market recovers, media can become a business. But now there is no advertising market at all. Akhmetov simply does not have the resources to pay for this media asset, which has no political influence. This is a consequence, including of the law on oligarchs," the MP believes.

As Kravchuk emphasized, the state will not control Akhmetov's assets: "It is not about the transfer of any equipment, copyrights, or buildings - only licenses. Which actually means the closure of this media holding. And about online media, pay attention, as it is written - they are simply closed. Because online media doesn't require any licenses, and there's nothing to surrender."

Rinat Akhmetov said yesterday that he decided to give up his media assets, because in the current conditions this business has no chance of becoming profitable. According to the former director of strategic marketing of Media Group Ukraine, media expert Olha Zakharova, MGU, "like any media in Ukraine, striving to work according to market rules, had a long-term strategy, the ultimate goal of which was to make a profit. The circumstances of the war made this plan unrealistic.” According to Olga Zakharova, it makes no sense to leave Akhmetov's media assets in the form in which they were created and developed in order to transform them after the war.

“The monetization of media assets around the world is mainly due to entertainment content, which is not needed during the war, and it is difficult to predict when this demand will recover,” she told Detector Media. “If we add the trends — the impact of innovations on the development of modern media, the individualization of media content consumption, the emergence of new distribution channels and new promising integrated non-media directions of monetization, it becomes clear that the media landscape in Ukraine will change fundamentally after the war. Like many things in Ukraine, our media after the war will not have to be restored, but built from scratch, taking into account the new common European or even global market, new business models.”

According to Roman Golovenko, a lawyer at the Institute of Mass Information, the next step after Akhmetov's statement about transferring media licenses to the state may be their closure, and the statement itself looks more like a violation of the anti-oligarchic law.

Mykhailo Podolyak, adviser to the head of the Office of the President, on the contrary, believes that SCM has set a worthy example of the implementation of the law on deoligarchization.

CEETV has contacted the management and owners of Media Group Ukraine for an official comment on the current situation.