Anatomy of a fake Someone published a speech attributed to Putin’s ‘domestic policy czar,’ but was it to smear him or to test his vision for eastern Ukraine?
On June 12, when Russians celebrated “Russia Day,” the pro-government newspaper Izvestia published an article signed by Sergey Kiriyenko, Vladimir Putin’s first deputy chief of staff and domestic policy czar. The text, titled “Sergey Kiriyenko’s Message on Russia Day,” said that “all Russia will rebuild the Donbas, which has been destroyed by the fascists” at the expense of trillions of taxpayers’ rubles, “even at the cost of a temporary decline in the nation’s living standards.” The article quickly disappeared, and the newspaper later attributed the text itself to hackers. Multiple sources told Meduza special correspondent Andrey Pertsev that they believe Kiriyenko’s rivals at home (including opponents of the invasion of Ukraine) could be responsible for hacking Izvestia (though some wonder if he didn’t engineer the incident himself to speak publicly with plausible deniability).
“Working today on joining new territories to our homeland, I deeply understand like no one else that Mariupol, Melitopol, Berdiansk, Kherson, Simferopol, and Sevastopol aren’t just names,” says a speech published in Izvestia on June 12 and attributed to Sergey Kiriyenko. In the text, the author goes on to advocate referendums on joining Russia in Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia, explaining how these Ukrainian cities belong to “the Russian people’s shared tragedy” of supposed persecution by the government in Kyiv. “There will be no more of that,” reads the speech. “I am ready to guarantee it today, tomorrow, and 10 years from now.”
A source with knowledge of the Kremlin’s domestic policy work told Meduza that the remarks in the speech do, in fact, represent Kiriyenko’s views, but the text itself is uncharacteristic for several reasons. For example, “only the president can make public addresses like this,” said one source. Even on a holiday, speaking to the nation is not Kiriyenko’s role at the Kremlin.
Another source explained that officials in the presidential administration are expected to stay in their respective “spheres,” which is why it is especially odd that the speech attributed to Sergey Kiriyenko mentioned the economic costs of rebuilding the Donbas and international issues like the West’s attempts to impose its “vision of the future” on both Moscow and Beijing. The speech also wandered into sensitive international issues, likening Russia’s occupation of Ukrainian lands to territorial claims by China in Taiwan and Turkey in Cyprus.
Two sources close to the presidential administration and another person with ties to the prime minister’s cabinet told Meduza that they suspect Kiriyenko’s adversaries inside the government likely hired hackers to plant the speech at Izvestia. “His public activity bothers a lot of people,” said one source, adding that not everyone welcomes Kiriyenko’s ambition or access to the president. By tying Putin’s first deputy chief of staff to a speech about matters foreign and domestic, styled on a presidential address, the hoax’s perpetrators possibly hoped to show that Kiriyenko is overstepping his boundaries.
Another source told Meduza that hacking Izvestia might be the work of Russia’s “peace party” — the largely silent political bloc of figures and officials (including some major businesspeople) who oppose the invasion of Ukraine.
One person with ties to the presidential administration also speculated that “Kiriyenko’s own people” at Izvestia may have published the speech with his secret approval: “It’s a summary of his views. On the one hand, it’s obviously fake. On the other hand, it’s planted in the public agenda for evaluation. Everyone who needed to read the article has read the article.”
Whatever the reasons for the hack, Kiriyenko must now contend with the consequences of the article’s publication. “It clearly seems to be fake,” said another source, “but what if [Putin] suddenly starts having doubts and thinks maybe it’s for real?”
Meanwhile, Kremlin Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov told Meduza that Putin has “not seen” the article published at Izvestia in Kiriyenko’s name.
Story by Andrey Pertsev
Abridged translation by Kevin Rothrock