Oleksii Arestovych

Oleksii Mykolaiovych Arestovych (Олексій Миколайович Арестович; born 3 August 1975) is a former military officer, blogger and columnist.

He was a speaker of the Trilateral Contact Group on Ukraine.

In 1992, he graduated from school No. 178 in Kyiv.

He entered the Faculty of Biology, Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv.

In 1993, Arestovych began to perform in the modern Kyiv studio theatre Black Square Theater, and left school.

According to data that need further confirmation, from 1994 to 2005 he worked in the Chief Directorate of Intelligence of the Ministry of Defence of Ukraine and is a reserve lieutenant colonel.

He started conducting psychological seminars and trainings in 2000.

In 2003, he entered the internet school "Man among People" which was founded by psychologist and astrologer Absalom Podvodny.

In June 2009, he was appointed deputy head of the Prymorskyi District Administration of the Odesa City Council, but he was dismissed after three months at his own request.

He graduated in 2010.

He also studied theology at the Superior Institute of Religious Sciences of St. Thomas Aquinas.

He is an active blogger, with almost 200,000 followers on Facebook and more than 1.2 million (April 2022) on YouTube.

Since 2014, he has been preparing combat units under the People's Reserve program, organizer of a charity fund to provide psychological support to the military in the Anti-terrorist Operation Zone (2014–2017).

From September 2018 to September 2019, he served in the Joint Forces Operation near Kramatorsk in the 72nd Mechanized Brigade as an intelligence officer.

Arestovych was among the top 100 bloggers in Ukraine in a poll published by Fakty ICTV in 2019.

He assisted the Office of the President of Ukraine as a Strategic Communications Adviser from December 2020 to January 2023.

Oleksii Arestovych was born in Dedoplistsqaro, Georgia.

His father was a Belarusian Pole and mother a Russian from Voronezh Oblast, Arestovych spent a significant part of his childhood in Belarus.

On 28 October 2020, Arestovych was appointed by Leonid Kravchuk as Adviser on Information Policy and official speaker of the Ukrainian delegation to the Trilateral Contact Group on Ukraine at the Minsk talks on resolving the war in Donbas.

On 1 December 2020, the Head of the Office of the President of Ukraine Andriy Yermak appointed Oleksiy Arestovych his unpaid adviser on strategic communications in the field of national security and defense.

Kravchuk, the head of the Trilateral Contact Group, noted that Arestovych's candidacy was chosen because of his military experience and the presence of a vision and position on issues that are the subject of the Trilateral Contact Group.

After the start of the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, Arestovych became known for his correct prediction in 2019, that Russia would invade Ukraine between 2022 and 2024.

From the start of the invasion on 24 February 2022, he held daily briefings on the situation, as an adviser to the Head of the Office of the President of Ukraine.

These videos garnered him a significant following.

He also held informal daily conversations covering the invasion on lawyer Mark Feygin's YouTube channel.

On 13 August 2023 Feygin wrote on his Telegram channel that they will no longer hold their talks.

Arestovych is an organizer of psychological seminars and trainings and a charity fund for psychological support to the military.

In August 2022, Arestovych announced that he plans to run for the presidency of Ukraine if Volodymyr Zelenskyy does not run for a second term.

On 14 January 2023, Arestovych made a comment that a Russian Kh-22 missile had destroyed a multi-story residential building in Dnipro after being hit by a Ukrainian air defence counterattack.

On 16 January 2023 Russian President Vladimir Putin's press secretary Dmitry Peskov said Arestovych's 14 January explanation about what happened in Dnipro was plausible and put the blame for the destruction on the Ukrainian side.

Following the outrage regarding Arestovich's comments, he apologized and resigned on 17 January 2023.

In November 2023 Arestovych argued that next Ukrainian elections should be conducted in March 2024 despite the ongoing war in order to legitimize the leadership of the country.

He previously criticized Volodymyr Zelensky and his administration of making inadequate decisions and strategic mistakes during the 2023 Ukrainian counteroffensive.

He later left Ukraine saying that he fears being arrested.

On 17 March 2022, the General Prosecutor's Office of Belarus opened a criminal case against Arestovych, under Part 3 of Article 361 of the Criminal Code of Belarus “for calls for terrorist attacks” at the facilities of the Belarusian Railway.

On 27 July, Arestovych’s pages on social networks were included in the Belarusian list of extremist materials by decision of the Leninsky District Court of Mogilev.

On 11 May 2023, Rosfinmonitoring included Arestovych on the country's list of terrorists and extremists.

On 3 October, Arestovych was put on the wanted list by the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs.

Due to a complaint from People's Deputy of Ukraine Inna Sovsun, an investigation has been opened into Arestovych for comments that allegedly promoted violence against women in a video published on his YouTube channel on 25 September 2023.

On November 16, a second investigation was opened into Arestovych for "knowingly filing a false report of a crime"; Arestovych had previously filed a complaint with Ukraine's State Bureau of Investigation about "incitement to national hatred and enmity on the basis of language" by MP Nataliya Pipa due to her criticism of a teenager singing Russian-language songs in Lviv.