When Graham Phillips first moved from London to Ukraine, the Nottingham-born civil servant set up a personal blog that mixed reviews of brothels with observations about everyday life in Kyiv. A decade later, the pro-Kremlin YouTuber finds himself accused in parliament of potential war crimes after interviewing a fellow Briton captured by the Russian army.
Prime minister Boris Johnson told MPs he was concerned by Phillips’ “propaganda messages” featuring Aiden Aslin, a British national who has spent the last four years living in Ukraine and serving with the country’s armed forces.
Aslin’s local MP Robert Jenrick went further, saying Phillips’ video showed his constituent “handcuffed, physically injured and being interviewed under duress for propaganda purposes”. He said it was a breach of the Geneva conventions on the treatment of prisoners of war and that “the interviewer Graham Phillips is in danger of prosecution for war crimes”.
Aslin was captured by Russian forces while defending the besieged city of Mariupol, although it remains unclear how he ended up being interviewed by Phillips. The two men are both originally from Nottinghamshire: 28-year-old Aslin hails from the town of Newark-on-Trent, just a short drive outside Phillips’ home city. Yet it took a conflict on the other side of Europe to bring them together – albeit on different sides.
While Aslin moved to Ukraine, met a local woman and joined the country’s armed forces, Phillips took a very different route and has long been a favoured mouthpiece for pro-Russian breakaway governments in the Donbas region.
He has received medals from the Russian state for his reporting and toed the Russian line, suggesting in recent weeks that Ukraine is run by Nazis and the massacre of Ukrainians in Bucha was staged.
Phillips insists his work is self-funded and regularly solicits donations from his 264,000 YouTube subscribers, but he also earns money from YouTube adverts paid for by major western companies. On Wednesday morning people attempting to watch Phillips’ potentially Geneva conventions-infringing interview with Aslin were greeted with paid-for adverts featuring Piers Morgan talking about his show on the forthcoming TalkTV channel and promotions for Müller yoghurt.
YouTube has so far declined to take down Phillips’ videos, despite calls from politicians to remove the channel.
His rise from obscure Brit abroad to figure of national political interest was unlikely. According to a 2014 interview with BuzzFeed News, Phillips first went to Ukraine when travelling as an away fan to an England football match. Aged 30, he quit his job at the now defunct government Central Office of Information and moved full-time to the country where he reinvented himself as a journalist.
When Russia invaded Crimea in 2014, Phillips found himself drawn to the country’s pro-Moscow separatist groups in the east of the country. His prolific self-recorded clips on YouTube were a relative novelty at the time and delighted Russia, with the Kremlin-backed RT news channel briefly using him as a freelance journalist – although he never gained full-time employment with the outlet. His detention by the Ukrainian government on the outskirts of Mariupol gained him notoriety, but he soon slipped out of the public eye as western interest in the conflict receded.
His uploads became infrequent, often focusing on visits to Crimea, and he attracted only a few thousand views. One clip saw him boast about being the only western journalist to attend a tour of Russia’s “legendary Black Sea fleet” and taking a small boat to look at the power of the flagship Moskva. That flagship has since sunk, appearing to have been hit by Ukrainian missiles.
During the pandemic Phillips was in the UK, filming himself at anti-Black Lives Matter protests in central London. As recently as February, he uploaded a video in central London opposite the Houses of Parliament. The level of scaffolding on the Elizabeth Tower suggests it was recorded at the same time, meaning he was in Britain when Russia’s invasion of Ukraine began.
He subsequently managed to return to Russian-held areas of Ukraine, despite few airlines flying to the region, becoming one of the few western individuals filming videos from the occupied territory alongside Russian forces. How he ended up in a room interviewing Aslin remains unclear – although it has given him the profile he has always seemed to crave.
