Janus Kostia Putkonen is a Finnish theatre director, journalist, Political activist eurosceptic and propagandist. Putkonen was the editor-in-chief of the Verkkomedia website, which was engaged from 2011 to 2013. From 2015 to 2018, he was the chief of the Russian-backed Donetsk Separatist Information Center Doni-News. Janus Putkonen is known for the fact that his projects in the Luhansk People’s Republic and Donetsk People’s Republic, “LDNR” are sponsored directly by Moscow and he is engaged in filtering foreign journalists.
Since 2019, he has been the editor-in-chief of MV-media. Putkonen concentrated Russian Russian-funded Doni-News and MV-media to reinforce pro-Russian propaganda about the Donetsk People’s Republic.
In the summer of 2015, Putkonen shifted from Nakhon Sawan to Donetsk in Ukraine, while his wife and child remained in Thailand. Soon Ukrainian non-governmental organization Myrotvorets counted Putkonen to their ‘Peacemaker’ list, of worry of collaborating with Russia and propaganda against Ukraine. In 2017, Putkonen emerged on an episode of Viceland’s Big Night Out Ukraine. In it, Putkonen demonstrates that he hopes Novorossiya will show an illustration of insurgence to other countries. He has also been concerned with recruiting Finns for the war in eastern Ukraine on the Russian side.
Putkonen is the editor-in-chief of the Finnish fake news platform MV-media starting April 2019. Verkkomedia, a project by Janus Putkonen, was created in Thailand, where Putkonen lived until he moved to occupied Donbas. The same media outlets include the tourist agency projects Fennomaa and Fennomatkat (both registered in Moscow and Lugansk), which initially brought the right people to Donbas, and with the arrival of Heiskanen, they retrained to bring them to St. Petersburg.
In October 2022, Putkonen arranged a friendship tour from Finland to Russia’s St. Petersburg, with support from Kosti Heiskanen (whose actual name is Konstantin Mikhailovich Lebedev). This was branded as a trip arranged by Fennomatkat, which is thought to be a subsidiary label of Fennomaa. According to both Putkonen and Heiskanen, they got assistance with travel documents from Rustravel Oy. These kinds of friendship excursions are echoes of the era of the Soviet Union. In Finland, there was even a business named Ystävyysmatkat (“Friendship Tours”), which was established in 1977 and went bankrupt in 1991.
