CV NEWS FEED // The father of controversial Chilean-American journalist and YouTuber Gonzalo Lira slammed the Biden administration, claiming that the president is “complicit” in his son’s Ukraine imprisonment.
“Today will mark the seventh full month that [my son has] been arrested in Ukraine,” Gonzalo Lira Sr. said during a Saturday interview on Tucker Carlson’s X (formerly Twitter) show.
“He has not gone into trial,” the father said. “He’s awaiting trial.” He elaborated that his son’s court-appointed defense attorney is a Ukrainian national who does not speak English.
“Insofar as the U.S. embassy, they haven’t done a thing,” Lira Sr. went on to say:
Neither I nor his sister living in the USA have been able to communicate with Gonzalo.
An American citizen by birth is in jail because he was exercising his right of Freedom of Speech.
…The USA government with its silence in the face of this scandalous incident suggests the degree of complicity or at least tacit approval of Gonzalo’s arrest, since nothing else convincedly [sic] explains the conspicuous lack of response.
The younger Lira has been widely described as “pro-Russia” by mainstream news outlets.
According to Breitbart, he was a former YouTube dating coach who “was living in the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv at the time of the [Russian] invasion last year.”
Breitbart explained that the dual citizen of the United States and Chile “began to post videos online giving his on-the-ground perspective of the war, which he attributed to Western antagonism towards Moscow and attempts to expand NATO into Ukraine.”
“The Russian economy is sailing on, sailing on,” Lira claimed in one of his reports which was aired on Carlson’s X show.
“[The] European economy, people are starting to die of hypothermia, in the [United Kingdom (UK)] because they don’t have access to the cheap energy of Russia from before,” the controversial Chilean-American commentator continued as he lit a cigarette. “Everything that the West has thrown at the Russians has boomeranged right back at them. So now [the West] is panicking, and they’re trying to figure a way out of this situation.”
He went on to call the Ukrainian government “bloodthirsty murderers.”
Again from Breitbart:
Apparently, as a result of his public opinions as a citizen journalist, Lira has been arrested multiple times, and his father claims that he has in total spent seven months behind bars without trial. After being released earlier this year, Lira attempted in July to cross the border of Ukraine and seek asylum in Hungary.
However, he was detained and imprisoned yet again.
There has been no claim that Lira was an agent of the Russian government or that he engaged in any criminal activities other than his public comments or the videos he filmed.
The day after Carlson’s interview aired, X owner Elon Musk posted about Lira’s imprisonment.
“An American YouTuber has been imprisoned for 5 years in Ukraine, and allegedly tortured, for making videos,” he wrote. “This is not ok.”
The post received over 100,000 “likes” in less than a day. Musk is known for his promotion of “free speech absolutism.”
X’s user-driven fact-check service, Community Notes, contested the veracity of the information conveyed by both Carlson and Musk, the platform’s owner.
“Gonzalo Lira was arrested in May for justification/denial of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, a crime under Article 436-2 of the Criminal Code, not for ‘criticizing Zelenskyy’,” indicated the Community Notes on Carlson’s post of his interview with the elder Lira.
“He was released on bail but tried to leave the country,” the fact check added. “There is no evidence of torture.”
“Gonzalo Lira was arrested on May 1st and is currently being held in the Kharkiv pretrial detention center,” Community Notes similarly stated under Musk’s post. “His court hearing is scheduled for Dec. 12 and Dec. 21. He has not ‘been imprisoned for 5 years in Ukraine’ nor is there any evidence of him having been tortured.”
Both times, Community Notes cited Yahoo! News and The Daily Beast as sources.
