He had a decades long history of grifting and scamming people. He claimed to have worked for the CIA, was a writer, filmmaker, economics advisor, dating coach, or political commentary. In all cases what he claimed for himself was well above his abilities. He went where he could draw attention to himself.
I looked into his publicly available past when he started getting attention and to me lots of red flags came up. His scam to get attention was to find a audience, like those against aiding Ukraine, and tell them what they wanted to hear in a intellectual sounding manner.
This time he was he was playing a game way above his head when he could be held accountable. The first time he was arrested in 2022, it was for spying for Russia. He gave up a bunch of Russian agents in a plea deal. House arrest and prosecution after the war or deportation. He chose house arrest, got paranoid about Russians killing him. After a welfare check he asked to be voluntarily self deported. Two Ukrainian police escorted him on a train to Poland, IIRC.
For the year he was doing his round table on YouTube, while claiming to be in Kharkiv, he was actually outside of Ukraine, probably most of his time in the Netherlands (he let that slip out in his "debate" on YouTube with Destiny and Lazerpig). To those who figured out he was lying about where he was, that said a lot about how blind his audience was, assuming his audience was not mostly bots.
Then he came back to Ukraine when he could have stayed out. How could he run his livestreams from Kharkiv when he was not in Ukraine? To his followers, who cares about facts like that?
Returning to Ukraine violated the terms of his self deportation. After he was released pending trial, he tried to leave the country across the Hungarian border, and posted a video of it. It was that video where he claimed he was tortured in prison while the guards looked the other way. The way he was allegedly abused was by having a tooth brush rubbed across his eyes. Watching him says this, no surprise to those who know he is a liar, his eyes looked normal.
So Ukraine is going to arrest him, let him get abused in prison in ways that could blind him, release him, and he's going to travel a few hundred miles with sore eyes? True believers, those who want to be told what they want to hear, don't care about the holes in his story.
An aside note. Scott Ritter called out Lira stating he had been turned. Ritter is as much of a verbal con artists as Lira, so I think he called out Lira to protect his credibility. That's what Ritter gets for hanging out with the bottom barrel of internet commentary.
For political commentary, Gonzalo Lira he was like Q and Q anon. To the true believers he was just shy of a messianic figure. To those who know and understand more than what the press reports, he was a loudmouthed nuisance. If they knew of him at all.
