Gonzalo Lira: end of a story

Requiem for a War victim

On April 15 2022, I wrote a plea to start making a fuss when Chilean-American Gonzalo Lira was missing (here and here, if you want a quick refresher on him). He was a businessman who worked in Ukraine, and who was giving his analysis and news from within Ukraine after the war broke out, often critical of the Ukrainian regime. 7 days later he resurfaced, and claimed he had been detained by the SBU (Ukrainian intelligence and security agency), ‘for questioning’.

Rumors about AZOV involvement, in line with death threats he had received, made the worst a real possibility. A few days later, American trans ‘journalist’, embedded with Azov units, and employed by the Ukrainian authorities as a spokesperson, proudly and happily announced that he was captured by Ukrainian forces.

Luckily, he turned back up soon thereafter, and resumed his reporting from Kharkiv. This time he used a new Youtube Channel, Gonzalo Lira Again, as well as another channel on Rumble, The Roundtable, using a new format in which he held long conversations with several other people.

On May 1^st, 2023 he was arrested again, at gunpoint, by heavily armed Ukrainian secret service members.

This time, he was placed under house arrest, and then moved into prison.

 On July 31^st, he surfaced again, and he said he was let out of prison. He was able to post 3 chilling video’s in which he talked about torture and extortion in Ukrainian prisons, how he was trying to cross the border into Hungary to escape, and he warned that if he did not post a new video soon thereafter, from Hungary, that he would have been recaptured, and that this would mean his impending death.

Then, silence...

On December 9, 2023, Tucker Carlson ran an episode on X about Lira, with a conversation with Lira’s father. He told Tucker how his son was arrested days after he strongly criticized president Biden, and he accused Ukrainians to have acted on American orders. Based on this report, Elon Musk stepped in as well, and replied to Tucker’s episode: “An American citizen is in prison n Ukraine after we sent over a $100 billion? Is there more to this story than simply criticizing Zelensky? If that’s all it is, then we have serious problem here.”
Musk later also retweeted the episode by Carlson, and added: “An American YouTuber has been imprisoned for 5 years in Ukraine, and allegedly tortured, for making videos. This is not ok.”

The Community Note under Elon’s tweet appears to correct Elon Musk, and stated “Gonzalo Lira was arrested on May 1st and is currently being held in the Kharkiv pretrial detention center. 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.”

Musk, in turn, tweeted: “Interesting. This Note is being gamed by state actors. Will be helpful in figuring who they are. Thanks for jumping in the honey pot, guys lmao!”

About a month later, Alex Rubinstein tweeted the following breaking news:

Everything seems to confirm that this time Gonzalo Lira is really dead. May God rest his soul, and comfort his family and loved ones.

Russian foreign minister Lavrov made the following statement at a UN Security Council meeting:

“In the meantime, Western democracies would go on pretending to look away in horror, though actually in silent approval. Just like they are doing now, even after American citizen Gonzalo Lira was tortured to death behind bars by the Security Service of Ukraine for publishing objective articles that were critical of the Zelensky regime. Has anyone in the West, especially in the US (I am referring to officials) said anything about this? No.”

Gerry Nolan wrote a piece contrasting the fate of Lira with that of Paul Whelan for his blog. Where Whelan was an actual spy, caught red-handed, he was treated fairly in prison, with all the medical attention required. Lira, however, was denied such care, and was toyed with, as well as physically tortured.

“Lira's death is more than just a personal tragedy; it's a scathing indictment of the Western rhetoric on democracy and human rights. Here lies a man who, despite his US citizenship, was forsaken by his own country, left to languish in a foreign jail for the 'crime' of seeking truth in a war-torn land.”

And:

“In stark contrast, Whelan's case, with its prompt medical attention and diplomatic lobbying, underscores the double standards in international diplomacy. [...] This scenario reveals the irony of the U.S., which frequently projects human rights abuses onto Russia and brands Putin a dictator, yet ironically overlooks the fact that Whelan, in the heart of Russia, receives fair treatment with his rights upheld.”

And he ends with a valuable warning:

“As we reflect on the tales of Lira and Whelan, we are compelled to question the narratives fed to us. In a world where the truth is often the first casualty of war, their stories urge us to look beyond the smokescreen of diplomatic rhetoric. They challenge us to see the world not as it is portrayed in neatly packaged media soundbites, but as it truly is - complex, multifaceted, and often unjust.”

This is, however, not the end, and in line with Nolan’s last paragraphs, Lira’s case is very complex, multifaceted, and unjust.

When Lira sent out his emergency video during his escape attempt, people such as Scott Ritter stepped in as well. From his background in intelligence, Ritter pointed out several discrepancies in an article on his own website, titled Gonzalo Lira, the SBU, and Information Operations.  

“There is only one logical explanation for this chain of events. Gonzalo Lira was arrested by the SBU for crimes he himself admits gets people arrested, tortured, and murdered. He is released five days later—unharmed—and immediately allowed to resume the exact same activity that led to arrest in the first place, only this time on a computer and email account controlled by the SBU.

This is a classic “catch and release” scenario, with Gonzalo Lira playing the role of “police confidential informant”—someone who provides information in exchange for lenient treatment. There literally is no other plausible explanation for what happened other than this.”

Ritter goes into great detail on how such controlled assets work, citing released/leaked documents from US intelligence sources. He ends repeating several times ‘We are at war’, trying to conclude his analysis of Lira. He then said: “When viewed in this light, Gonzalo Lira is not a simple wayward US citizen with misplaced notions of protected speech in a hostile country which operates outside of the protections afforded by the US Constitution, but rather a collaborator trying to bring harm to our collective embrace of fact-based truth.”

With this final characterization, I strongly disagree. I followed Lira from the beginning of the War, and found his videos very helpful to gain an “outsider insider’s perspective”. He played with fire, and knew it, but must have thought that it wouldn’t end bad for him, that his dual Chilean-US citizenship would protect him, or perhaps he didn’t care, and the thrill of the situation was what drove him forward on this collision course with the extremist elements within the Ukrainian government.

Captured, and broken (everyone breaks, that is a given, and Lira was not a particularly well-trained man when it comes to such tactics), he was put to work for the SBU. God knows what threats they used against him, to make him cooperate. That he cooperated, I think, cannot be denied. Looking back there was a clear difference in the content of his videos. They lost their sharp edge, became a whole lot less useful. I found the Roundtable interviews boring and hard to watch, with very little good information. Was he a ‘collaborator’? In the literal sense of the word, yes. He did collaborate with the Ukrainians. But out of his own free will? I think not. He fell victim to the circumstances, and an apparatus that was very aware of the importance of information war.

His last message to us was this: 'Please don't be indifferent to my fate'. Hinting at a reality beyond what was visible? A coded, softened message, to point at how unfree and shackled he was, even in that moment of illusory freedom, trying to escape to Hungary, regaining his old life back? No matter how I look at Lira, I cannot shake this thought: he was a complex person, in a complex world, trying to do good, regardless of what others said. But it is what they DID, that ultimately got him.

Ignored by the United States, who could have very easily demanded extradition to the US, where he could have received proper treatment, he IS a martyr. And this absolute lack of care by the US government might have been part of the pressure used against Lira, to crack him. He was not just up against the Ukrainians, who only had control over his own life, but also against the US government, who had a much longer reach and power.

A Russian telegram channel wrote what I think is the best eulogy of Gonzalo:

“Gonzalo Lira has died in the Ukrainian prison, according to his father. Very sad. I genuinely liked the man - unlike an absolute majority of Western "pro-Russian" speakers. He stood out in that he was an independent thinker and a true OG of the blogosphere. Even arguing with the man was not boring.

Alas it's hard to say that it wasn't expected. The Ukraine is the land in which death and all kinds of demonic forces reign supreme. Always have been - go read Gogol. Nothing will protect you in this place, not even the US passport. I would advise you to stay away from it, unless you have a death wish and you are properly armed to fend off the evil.

I'm sure that everyone close to him wanted him to leave Kharkov. He knew that the Ukraine was a totalitarian state & an ancient deathmatch map. He decided to wing it and test its limits. Then he was put under house arrest. Yet he was too stubborn to conform and continued to stand tall. Rest in Peace!”

For me, he remains a tragic figure, one who’s voice, and the sarcasm, wit and boundless joy with which he managed to give his analysis and information, I will miss. Someone beholden to the truth, even if unconventional or inconvenient, and even when he got things wrong at times. He played a high-risk game, and ultimately got ensnared into a game way too large for him, and was forced to cooperate with the regime he was so opposed to. Again, who knows who he was trying to protect when he caved in: it certainly wasn’t himself, given his own disregard for his life and well-being. This had only one certain outcome for him: death.

May God rest his soul, and look favorably on the good Lira did, and tried to do.