On 17 January 2025, TV channel Espreso said that it had received a bribe proposal, according to which it would receive money in exchange for the deletion of an article on arms purchases by an agency of Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense. Espreso refused the offer, the TV channel said in a statement.
The alleged bribe proposal referred to a blog post published on Espreso’s website on January 13. The article discussed a contract by Ukraine’s Defense Procurement Agency for the purchase of hundreds of thousands of M6A2 anti-tank mines, which were allegedly manufactured in 1941, at a price of around €600 per unit. The total contract value was reportedly worth over €200 million.
“The publication caused a significant public reaction and widespread discussion due to the revealed facts regarding the purchase of obsolete weapons at inflated prices. The article also raised the issue of the technical suitability of this ammunition and the efficiency of using budget funds [for such a purchase],” Espreso said in its statement.
According to the TV channel, the offer of financial compensation for the removal of the article was received through intermediaries. The identities of these intermediaries were not revealed.
“The Espreso team remains an independent and unbiased media platform that is not afraid of covering widely discussed topics, regardless of pressure or attempts at influence. [Our] editorial policy excludes any agreements on the removal of published articles,” the media outlet said.
In a comment provided to Ukrainian press freedom monitoring group Detector Media, Ukraine’s Defense Procurement Agency stated that it had nothing to do with the attempt to remove the article.
In its comment, agency representatives said: “Demanding that an independent media outlet remove any publication is completely inconsistent with our information policy and values. Given that there was a great deal of reactions to this article, and that it was widely shared, [such an attempt would be] absolutely absurd, so this looks like another attempt to frame the Agency,” the Defense Procurement Agency press service reported.
The state agency later said that it had itself filed a complaint linked to the incident with unspecified “law enforcement” forces, even if it considered that the original article published by Espreso “contained a large number of false information and manipulative assumptions”. The Defense Procurement Agency also repeated its claims on the fact that the attempt to bribe Espreso was itself an attempt to “discredit” the state institution.
Ukrainian police or other law enforcement agencies were not known to have reacted to the incident.