Where is Gonzalo Lira? Fears for YouTuber missing in Ukraine's Kharkov article

[Evan]

I believe he received a large sum to begin production on the prequel to Acrobat, Counterparts. Both books are quite good if you’re into Jack Reacher-style spy novels. Here’s the cover of that one.

 

[Evan]

Here’s a cap of his IMDB page.

 

[Ina]

Here’s a cap of his IMDB page.

TY again, but please do not get me tempted to start with the IMDB .... pages.

 

[Nević Nenad]

Probably killed shortly when they took him. And probably not by Azov and similar, but some western operatives. Azov and alikes wouldnt resist to torture him and film it. That would be all over the net so far. It is not.

 

[psychegram]

Past pursuits used to be an indication of current professional activities. However things can change and quite dramatically.
When I wrote the message, my intention was to voice my disbelief about the cloud of strange developed recently around Gonzalo Lira. If it were to deal with the normal, he’d be dead and people would understand and go through rage as an over amplified first stage of grief.
Perhaps indeed it is a strt of denial that is being exploited for airtime gain and an increase of cohorts of followers but that would be despicable.
I haven’t seen any of his video reporting before, but the three or four of his most recent accounts starting with his last video from Kiev and following with his videos from Harkov, showed an increasingly tired or sleep and nutrition deprived person who was describing on what he saw and heard in a sort of an ad-hoc basis, perfectly understandable, until he got out of that situation. It never crossed my mind that he could be a reporter. He looked like a very well versed in talking before a camera, with high verbosity but not much clarity as coherence was broken due to the sketchy information and perhaps the incredible tension. So he might have been a video reporter in a ‘previous life’, however he was not speaking in his professional capacity.
Another interesting thing I noticed was his cmentioning of not being able to speak or to understand ?, neither ukrainian nor russian. That is strange when you have a family in Ukraine. Again, I want now to find more about Gonzalo Lira and reconcile the knowns and the unknowns.
You know his past and to his present there is a line.
For me this person is the centre and all possible hypotheses are equally plausible as they form a surrounding circle.
It is a normal type of outlook for anyone, I guess, seeing Gonzalo Lira materializing in Kiev and being given suddenly a constant feed of information, prioritized to appear both urgent and important and then puff he is MIA.
So, if I was outrageously wrong in writing my last scenario, I apologise to Gonzalo Lira, up until I will have enough information to say whether I was right or wrong, which will change my opinion and bring my mental map closer to reality.
Is it OK with you? I somewhat sense upset on your side of the map, which I might have created unintentionally, by presenting a totally dissonant picture when I knew nothing about the bigger picture. To offer my best lie I could be capable of, It never crossed my mind that I could offend anyone else but Gonzalo Lira, when writing my clearly now, outrageous scenario.
I’ll be back with an updated opinion.

Nah I'm not annoyed at you; I do get annoyed by the tendency here to see a conspiracy where there isn't one. Understandable given the nature of the forum, but that makes it all the more important to do reality checks.

So far as his not speaking Russian, that's a very difficult language (I know; I spent some time trying to learn it) and I believe he moved to Ukraine late in life, in his 40s or 50s ... not an optimal time to learn a new language. A lot of westerners have moved to Eastern Europe over the last several years, in order to escape the insane asylum of the West. Ukraine was popular because it was easy to get in to, and one's money went a long way.

Point being, I don't think there's much evidence that Lira was a US agent or something. In fact, everything about him points in the other direction. He was a dissident.

 

[Ina]

Probably killed shortly when they took him. And probably not by Azov and similar, but some western operatives. Azov and alikes wouldnt resist to torture him and film it. That would be all over the net so far. It is not.

What if, he got to Kiev, he stayed in the hotel, started to have his time occupied with videos and being useful by broadcasting information given to him by an English speaking connection, then he followed his contacts (from the American-Ukrainian side of the conflict) to Harkov, where he was put in a 2 star hotel, for an anticipated short stay which might have been extended.The time spent alone had a visible detrimental effect on him, especially on his psyche. Quite normal. The moment he tweeted his fears about being captured he existed the public space. Whether himself, like Shawn Penn, was there to document stuff or consult together with american operatives on tactics within mindless (for normal people) strategies for senior military personnel , was not a public affair, by all means! There are Non-discosure agreements even if you are a business consultant for a paper company, imagine when the business is combat operations and the market is the war. So being private business and meeting the 'team' he had to stop the 'reporting' and start working.
Plausible.

 

[Ina]

Nah I'm not annoyed at you; I do get annoyed by the tendency here to see a conspiracy where there isn't one. Understandable given the nature of the forum, but that makes it all the more important to do reality checks.

So far as his not speaking Russian, that's a very difficult language (I know; I spent some time trying to learn it) and I believe he moved to Ukraine late in life, in his 40s or 50s ... not an optimal time to learn a new language. A lot of westerners have moved to Eastern Europe over the last several years, in order to escape the insane asylum of the West. Ukraine was popular because it was easy to get in to, and one's money went a long way.

Point being, I don't think there's much evidence that Lira was a US agent or something. In fact, everything about him points in the other direction. He was a dissident.

Super! Thank you for telling me.
Russian language is very easy to learn as a foreign language, if you have completed the prerequisite steps.You have to learn visually the Alphabet, and learn the pronunciation of each letter so that when you start reading the words or watch cartoons you also start being fluent in pattern association creating new links for your existing notions. In a week or so if you are persistent you can start reading the newspaper quite correctly even if you have no clue as to what you are saying. Secondly, you need to learn the Grammar Rules (forms and termination of parts of speech for different conjugations or declinations) for Morphology. You might need a year with two hours a week to complete the grammar. Of course you can learn some vocabulary and start forming simple sentences meantime.
After one year you can start learning the Russian language.
Fluency in speech will come after first year of studying the Syntax.
Why this language is difficult it is because once you stop practicing, one starts forgetting in decreasing order up until after 10 years you might eas8ly remember very precise details like masculine nouns terminated in consonant will add the suffix -a when the noun is used in a genitive construction, but it might be very painful to read and or understand spoken Russian.

Is Gonzalo a non CIA operative at present or a 'mission specialist around the military personnel? Does this mean that he has never ever been involved with CIA? No. Maybe his extended experience on the web was being nurtured. One cannot claim but you cannot disclaim either. People can create any image with two slices of lies for a slice of truth, specially when he is paid to do it, and I Ibelieve it is called counterinformation.
So, time will tell.

 

[Evan]

Well Gonzalo’s wife is Ukrainian, that’s why he ended up there. As far as I know he’s just a novelist from Southern California who graduated from Dartmouth in 1995, and moved to Ukraine with his wife and children and got stuck there. As you said time will tell, but it never felt that way to me. As I said before, he grew up a couple of miles from my brother’s childhood home, and reminds me very much of him, and after watching his streams for some time now, he never came off as anything but genuine to me. But one never knows for certain, and people can surprise you.

 

[Evan]

Sorry, but I can’t copy and paste from the RT app, so I screen capped it…

 

[Meg]

Sorry, but I can’t copy and paste from the RT app, so I screen capped it…

Here it is:

My personal journey into the drama-infused existence of Gonzalo Lira began in mid-February 2022, when I appeared as part of a panel discussion organized by Joe Lauria of Consortium News (CN), which included the British writer Alexander Mercouris.

It was just prior to the Russian “special military operation” kicking off in Ukraine. Alexander and I subsequently appeared on several CN-hosted panels to discuss the war in Ukraine, and in conversations following the broadcast he mentioned a fellow he called “Gonzo Lira” and asked if I followed him. I indicated that I did not, and Alexander replied that I should, as “Gonzo” resided in Kharkov, and had some first-hand insights into the conflict that I might find interesting. Alexander asked if he could forward my contact information to Gonzo Lira, and I agreed.

I must admit that I did not follow up on Alexander’s recommendation to follow Gonzo and had forgotten about our conversation about Mr. Lira when, sometime in late March, I was suddenly contacted by the man himself, who asked if I would agree to be interviewed by him for his YouTube channel. I did a quick Google search, and read several items about Gonzalo Lira, AKA Coach Red Pill, including a particularly unflattering article written by Mark Hay of The Daily Beast. I quickly decided that if Gonzo was making The Daily Beast uncomfortable, then I was more than happy to be interviewed by him.

The setup for the interview, which took place on March 30, was informative in its own right. Alexander's colleague Alex Christoforou was providing technical assistance, and because of connectivity issues due to Gonzalo broadcasting from Kharkov (literally a war zone), the YouTube platform could not be accessed, and instead we shifted to Twitter Spaces (a somewhat ironic choice, given my later permanent suspension).

But the most interesting aspect of the pre-interview technical discussions was a to-and-fro between Gonzalo and Mr. Christoforou about Mr. Lira’s safety. Beyond the obvious reality of broadcasting from a city under attack (air-raid sirens were sounding in the background during this time), Gonzalo expressed a clear concern that he was being sought out by the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU). I opined that perhaps broadcasting from Kharkov might not be the wisest decision under these circumstances, a concern echoed by Mr. Christoforou, but this was dismissed by Gonzalo. “I’m taking precautions,” he said, without further elaboration.

The Twitter Spaces session was enjoyable, with Gonzalo asking relevant questions and, in the true spirit of the journalist/interviewer, allowed me to answer without any undue commentary from his end – something so-called “professional” journalists in the mainstream media should do more often. According to Mr. Lira, it was “well received” by his followers.

Gonzo reached out to me again, on April 11, for a follow-up interview on his YouTube channel. This time, Mr. Christoforou was successful in surmounting the technical challenges surrounding Mr. Lira’s geographical realities, and the interview went off without a hitch. When we finished, Gonzo thanked me, and in the subsequent conversation, he relayed his concerns that the authorities in Kiev were not only displeased with what he had to say but were actively looking for him.

Gonzo’s pinned Tweet from March 26, in which he listed the names of eight Ukrainian politicians, journalists, dissidents, and human rights figures who had either been killed, arrested, or gone missing since the war with Russia had broken out, jumped out at me. The idea of having just completed a live-streamed interview lasting more some 77 minutes at a time when the Ukrainian SBU, which undoubtedly possesses considerable cyber skills sufficient to geolocate a lengthy online presence such as the YouTube broadcast we had just finished, bothered me – especially in light of Gonzo’s own self-expressed concerns, and I said as much.

Gonzalo Lira was fatalistic about his future. “I know the risks,” he said. “And I take precautions.”

Gonzo’s last tweet was posted on his account (@realGonzaloLira, 54,400 followers) at 7.07am on April 15, 2022. “New Patrick Lancaster,” he wrote, referring to a US Navy veteran-turned war correspondent who has been actively reporting from the frontlines in the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine. “Must watch.”

“Only the guilty fear judgement,” Gonzo had written in his Twitter bio. “Only liars need stifle the truth.”

Gonzo posted Mr. Lancaster’s report on his Telegram account (over 89,000 subscribers) at 7.16am. The post has more than 130,000 views at the time of writing.
https://www.rt.com/russia/551306-ukraine-negotiator-reported-killed/
“Here I talk about whatever’s on my mind,” Gonzalo noted in his Telegram introduction. “Unvaxed – and if that makes you angry and makes you hope that I die soon, I want you to know that I have no such wish for you.”

No soldier believes that he or she will be shot until the bullet strikes home. And no political dissident or free speech advocate believes he or she will be silenced until the knock comes at their door.

I received a telephone call on Sunday, April 17 from a producer for George Galloway’s The Mother of all Talk Shows (MOAT). Gonzalo Lira was scheduled to appear as a guest, and he had gone missing. George wanted to know if I had heard from Gonzalo. Sadly, I had not.

On the same day, Max Blumenthal and Esha Krishnaswamy, writing for The Grayzone, published an article titled “‘One less traitor’: Zelensky oversees campaign of assassination, kidnapping and torture of political opposition” which, in light of Gonzalo’s disappearance, was not only timely but deeply disturbing.

Citing war-time necessity, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has declared martial law and banned all real opposition parties (the neo-Nazi parties and organizations, however, remained untouched.) “The activities of those politicians aimed at division or collusion will not succeed, but will receive a harsh response,” Zelensky stated.

“As he wiped out his opposition,” Blumenthal and Krishnaswamy wrote, “Zelensky ordered an unprecedented domestic propaganda initiative to nationalize all television news broadcasting and combine all channels into a single 24-hour channel called ‘United News’ to ‘tell the truth about war.’”

The order directing this action was signed on March 18, 2022.

Zelensky, The Greyzone authors noted, had ominously warned that “there would be consequences for collaborators.”

And now Gonzo Lira had gone missing.

On April 19-20, Twitter user @Anabel_Villeroy posted a series of tweets compiling evidence that “Azov SU @botsmanua (i.e., Sergei ‘Boatswain’ Korotkikh) identified Serhiy Velychko, call sign ‘Chilli’, as Gonzalo Lira’s kidnapper.”

Korotkikh is a notorious member of the Azov Battalion who recently posted a video showing his men committing atrocities in Bucha on April 1, 2022.

According to the @Anabel_Villeroy Twitter account, Velychko was the commander of the “Azov Reconnaissance and Sabotage Battalion (a.k.a. KRAKEN unit) in Kharkov.” The tweet contained a number of screenshots from the @botsmanua account (which has since been removed from Twitter) bragging about the capture, possibly even death, of Gonzalo Lira.

Recognizing that this information did not constitute anything remotely resembling verified fact but enraged at the audacity of persons proclaiming to be affiliated with the Azov organization gloating about the death of Mr. Lira, I took to Facebook to give voice to my outrage.

“When Belarusian authorities,” I wrote, “pulled Roman Protasevich, a blogger who had served a combat tour in the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion before working for Radio Free Europe’s Belarus channel out of Prague, off an airplane in May 2021 on charges of inciting political opposition (roughly the equivalent of sedition), the world went crazy, accusing Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko of trampling on free speech. Protasevich is alive and well, living under house arrest while awaiting trial.”

However, when reports emerged that Gonzo Lira, a California-born social media “influencer” who resided in Kharkov, Ukraine, and who published online content critical of the Ukrainian government, was kidnapped, tortured, and murdered by the Kraken Unit, part of the Azov Battalion affiliated with the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU), the West kept silent.

Free speech isn’t a one-way street. To remain silent in the murder of Gonzo Lira is to be complicit in his possible death, and the deaths of all journalists who pursue the truth, even if it runs counter to the mainstream narrative. Critical thinking should not be a death sentence. Unfortunately for Gonzo Lira, it seems it was.

The internet being the internet, my post was immediately cited as my “confirmation” that Gonzalo Lira had, in fact, been kidnapped and murdered by the SBU. I quickly sent out a follow-on post to correct the record.

“A point of clarification,” I wrote, “I have no direct evidence that Gonzalo has been killed. I was clear I was referring to ‘reports emerging’ about his demise. But Gonzo said any disappearance of more than 12 hours should be treated as if something bad had happened to him. It’s been five days. If this had been a New York Times reporter disappearing in Russian-controlled territory, it would be headline news – especially if a Chechen ‘hunter killer’ team had taken credit for his death. But with Gonzo – silence. Which was the whole purpose of the post: To raise awareness about his disappearance.”

There is an increasing outcry from independent media about Mr. Lira’s disappearance, and the Chilean government (Lira was a dual citizen of the US and Chile) has stated that it has been in touch with the “relevant entities” in Ukraine about Gonzalo’s disappearance.

But there is a shocking silence in the mainstream media. One only need recall the justified outcry in 2018 over the disappearance and murder of Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi journalist critical of his government who worked for the Washington Post, to see the double standards. As Mark Crispen Miller, a New York-based academic and media critic, noted in his Substack, “Whatever they think, those of us who still have democratic principles, including a belief that journalists (and that means not just “credentialed” members of the press, but anyone who seeks out, and reports, the news) should not be snatched and killed for what they tell us, must see Gonzalo Lira’s disappearance… as a bad sign for all of us.”
https://www.rt.com/news/554169-nato-cyber-security-drills/
That the US government has not demanded that President Zelensky launch an immediate investigation into the fate of Gonzalo Lira is a travesty. That the mayor of Kharkov, Igor Terekhov, whose approval would be required for any SBU operation targeting Mr. Lira, hasn’t been called out by name by the collective of journalists, American and foreign alike, to account for the actions of Sergey Velichko and the Kraken Unit, is hypocrisy in its highest form – especially given the insistence by these same entities for similar investigations into allegations of the suppression of journalistic free speech in Russia.

“What would things have been like if every security operative,” Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote in his epic work, The Gulag Archipelago, “when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say goodbye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?”

What Solzhenitsyn called “the cursed machine” would have “ground to a halt,” he believed, “if...if...”

But there was no resistance. “We didn’t love freedom enough,” Solzhenitsyn lamented. “And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation. We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”

We can’t ambush those who took Gonzalo Lira in the staircase of his Kharkov apartment. But we can call out Zelensky’s “cursed machine” for the crimes it is committing every day in defense of a perverted vision of Ukrainian nationalism that has mainstreamed the odious ideology of Nazi Germany, giving voice to its hate-filled logic, and empowering its minions to silence the voices of those who, like Gonzalo Lira, dared speak truth to power.

Don’t remain silent in the face of the ongoing collective effort to silence dissent. Become the “ambush in the stairwell.” Otherwise, free speech and the ideas manifested in that concept will die, and there will be no one left with the moral capacity to mourn its loss.

And we will have deserved everything that subsequently transpires.

https://www.rt.com/russia/554289-gonzalo-lira-disappearance-ukraine/

 

[Evan]

Thanks @Meg

 

[Ant22]

I like to think that if he’s dead, he’s still an albatross hung around the necks of his would-be captors. That would also explain the “Gonzalo’s Alive” accounts. Because if he’s dead, they now have left themselves wide open. The world knows who they are and what they’ve done and there’s no escaping that fact.

Sadly, I don’t share your optimism here. A vast majority of the world only knows what the MSM tells them. They haven’t even heard of Gonzalo Lira and most likely never will. For this reason, as well as due to the fact that they have completely bought into the official narrative, his death doesn’t mean anything to them.

And those who do care already know what’s really going on in Ukraine. Lira’s death matters to them but it is often the case they can’t even speak up about it because hardly anyone would listen - or even believe them. Not to mention that supporting Russia these days can have negative consequences for an individual who openly expresses such views.

Sacrificing one’s life like that wasn’t worth it. As much as I personally do appreciate his bravery and reports, he won’t be a martyr whose death will awaken the masses. For most, he will be yet another nameless victim of the war - if that.

Heck, if the MSM reported his death as another victim of the Russian army I bet most people would believe that. The level of ignorance and brainwash of the masses really cannot be underestimated these days.

That’s why I think he should have been much more careful. In times like these, being wise as serpents and gentle as doves is more important than ever. This is a strategy that was lacking in his approach. He underestimated the Ukrainian government’s ability to take him out and although his accounts were certainly a useful source of information and truth about the situation in Ukraine, he didn’t need to pay such a high price for them.

 

[Keit]

That’s why I think he should have been much more careful. In times like these, being wise as serpents and gentle as doves is more important than ever. This is a strategy that was lacking in his approach. He underestimated the Ukrainian government’s ability to take him out and although his accounts were certainly a useful source of information and truth about the situation in Ukraine, he didn’t need to pay such a high price for them.

I agree. And that's why I think we should wait for more information regarding his fate. His past may explain why he chose to remain in the war zone, while totally disregarding his safety. If his efforts to expose nazi crimes were true and with genuine and honorable intent, then it is indeed extremely sad that his possible trait of requiring high drama acted against him. And maybe he did see it as a service or a possible way to redeem certain things. We don't know.

 

[Alana]

Reposting from the Ukrainian thread:

Gonzalo Lira is alive!

_

Apparently he was picked up by the SBU and now has to stay in Kharkov. He has no access to his usual channels, because they confiscated his mobile, etc.

(Hope I am allowed to post link to youtube)

 

[Ina]

Reposting from the Ukrainian thread:

Looks good, well rested, nice beard trim, and surprised about the many people that were making a fuss about him. It was like he was talking from a remote camp using the company's computer and ... time, for something that was out of his scope of work.