State TV host Vladimir Solovyov used his talk show to comment on leaked messages attributed to journalist Ksenia Sobchak. He tied their alleged contents to a supposed anti-war conspiracy against Russia’s leadership and accused Sobchak and her mother, Senator Lyudmila Narusova, of passing information to Ukraine.
Solovyov devoted about two minutes of the program to the subject, while never naming Sobchak directly. According to the summary of his remarks, he referred to statements by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky saying that there are allegedly people in Vladimir Putin’s inner circle who are ready to end the war, and asked how the Ukrainian side could know that.
“It turned out that one Israeli journalist has close ties with representatives of Zelensky’s inner circle. They talk on the phone, they leak information,”
Solovyov said. He then claimed that “a senator of the Russian Federation and her daughter” had allegedly acted in the interests of “traitors to our motherland, Navalny supporters, and Navalny personally,” supplying, verifying, and servicing information.
The host also questioned what other information might allegedly have been collected and passed on, and suggested that wording about someone in the inner circle could point to a conspiracy. At the same time, he added the caveat that he was drawing these conclusions if the correspondence is authentic.
Ksenia Sobchak, commenting to Meduza on the leak of her correspondence with former head of the Ukrainian presidential office Yermak and censor Novikov, said it was worth asking whether it is ethical at all to discuss “anonymously fabricated screenshots.”