Ingushetia fires TV presenter for joking about republic’s head

The state TV and radio company Magas has sacked Amina Amerkhanova, the presenter of the programme Mountain Life, over a comedy reel  in her Instagram mentioning the head of Ingushetia, Mahmud-Ali Kalimatov.

In the sketch that led to her dismissal, a waitress, played by Amerkhanova, argues with a customer, played by Amerkhanova’s mother, actress Dugarkhan Kodzoeva. Implying that the client can complain to whoever she wants, it won’t make a difference, the waitress says that she will call anyone, before shouting ‘Mahmud-Ali!’.

Kalimatov’s surname is not mentioned in the sketch.

According to the Telegram channels Mash Gor and Fortanga, Amerkhanova was dismissed shortly after the video was published. Mash Gor also reported that Magas had fired her under pressure from the authorities.

OC Media reached out to Amerkhanova for comment, but she did not respond. Amerkhanova also did not share her view of the situation on her social network accounts.

Shamsudin Bokov, director of the Magas TV and radio company, heads the republic’s Union of Journalists. He was previously editor-in-chief of the government newspaper Ingushetia and before that, was press secretary to former Ingush head Yunus-Bek Yevkurov. In 2018, he was Russian President Vladimir Putin’s proxy in the presidential election.

A trend of politically-motivated dismissals

The situation with Amerkhanova is reminiscent of an incident in the 2010s, when Ingush TV presenters Asya Dobrieva and Islam Tsezdoev were fired for joking about Yevkurov.

The pair joked on their Instagram that they had received a bonus of ₽1,000 ($10) for holding a conversation with the head of state. The director of the TV channel Ingushetia, Kureysh Agasiev, did not appreciate the joke and dismissed the presenters. Shortly after, Yevkurov himself learned about the situation, and he intervened, and Dobrieva and Tsesdoev were reinstated.

Cases of illegal dismissals have also been recorded in other republics. Svetlana Kotsoeva, a teacher at an Orthodox gymnasium in Vladikavkaz, was fired by order of the archbishop because she wore the colours of the Ukrainian flag — a yellow skirt and a blue blouse — during a ceremony dedicated to the start of the school year on 4 September 2024. Colleagues came to the teacher’s defence, but Kotsoeva was eventually forced to resign on her own accord.

Prior to that, a tour guide at the Derbent Museum-Reserve in Daghestan was fired in 2022 for telling a story about the city ‘in an outrageous form’ and ‘mocking the history of a great nation’. The tour guide was specifically criticised for giving a tour about the history of Daghestan in an informal way, during which she called Russian Emperor Alexander I ‘Leshka’.

Official statistics reveal a quarter of Ingushetia’s population is unemployed

These are the official figures, but the true numbers could be even higher.

OC MediaElizaveta Chukharova