Hackers published private messages they attribute to journalist and media executive Ksenia Sobchak, pointing to supposed ‘agreements’ between her media empire and Russian officials
On July 8, journalist and media executive Ksenia Sobchak announced that hackers had broken into her email account and briefly gained access to her Telegram channels. Around the same time, screenshots showing fragments of her private correspondence appeared in the channels. Sobchak called them fakes and deleted them. The next day, however, the hacker group Black Mirror and the anonymous project VChK-OGPU published even more screenshots of Sobchak’s messages, along with some of her voice messages.
Meduza cannot confirm or deny the authenticity of this material. But we believe we should report on some of the leaked exchanges, because they vividly illustrate the mechanics of power and censorship in today’s Russia.
Caution: This story contains profanity.
Sobchak lost access to Telegram after her email was hacked. She says the leaked messages are fake.
On the afternoon of July 8, the following post appeared in two of Ksenia Sobchak’s Telegram channels, Sobchak and Krovavaya Barynya (spelling and punctuation as in the original):
Today friends sent me a link to some hacker group’s private channel where they posted my correspondence. I have nothing to be ashamed of in my thoughts or actions. If anyone wants to read it, let them. I’ll even publish some “fragments” here from what the hackers call “exposure episodes.”
Attached to the post were screenshots of Telegram messages purportedly written by Sobchak, along with several videos featuring the journalist.
Within minutes, Ostorozhno Novosti — the Telegram news channel Sobchak owns — reported that the Sobchak and Krovavaya Barynya channels had been hacked and that the scammers who broke in were the ones who published the post with the leaked correspondence.
A couple of hours later, Sobchak said she had regained access to the channels: “Honestly, not a great experience. Seems like it’s time to go touch up the gray hair that just came in.” She added that the hackers had “made off with” her channels by breaking into her email, and she dismissed the screenshots of the correspondence — deleted by that point — as fakes.
The screenshots bore a watermark with the web address of the hacker group Black Mirror. The site is a “mirror” of Black Mirror’s Telegram channel, where the group announced that it had obtained Sobchak’s archive from 2015 to 2026 — more than 350 gigabytes — and was ready to sell it.
On July 9, more exchanges and videos, purportedly from the journalist’s archive, appeared on Black Mirror’s Telegram channel. VChK-OGPU, an anonymous project that publishes compromising material on figures tied to the Russian state, also released several voice messages received from the hackers.
What we know about Black Mirror and VChK-OGPU?
Black Mirror has been active since at least 2019. It sells the personal data of people connected to the Russian state. The scheme works like this: the hackers post a fragment of a stolen archive on their Telegram channel and offer to sell the archive in full; once a sale goes through, they say, they immediately delete the data from all their devices. There is no way to verify this.
Black Mirror has put up for sale the data of many Russian officials and businessmen, from Sergei Shoigu to Yevgeny Prigozhin. Asked by journalists about their motives, the hackers said their goals were purely commercial.
In 2025, Telegram blocked the Black Mirror channel for publishing personal data and extortion. That same year, the VChK-OGPU Telegram channel, which published compromising material and insider information about people tied to the Russian state, was blocked on the same grounds. Unlike Black Mirror’s operators, the people behind VChK-OGPU are known: Alexander Shvarev and Alisher Abdullayev, former writers for the news agency Rosbalt.
In the spring of 2026, Black Mirror published the forensic report from the autopsy of Alexei Navalny, including photographs of the politician on a morgue table. The Insider reposted one of the photos. Yulia Navalnaya demanded that the outlet take down the image and never write about her husband again. The Insider apologized for publishing the photo.
The leak includes exchanges with Andriy Yermak (from Volodymyr Zelensky’s office) and Sergei Novikov (from the Kremlin)
If the hackers are to be believed, Ksenia Sobchak and Andriy Yermak, then Volodymyr Zelensky’s chief of staff, exchanged messages and spoke by phone in March 2022, shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine. Yermak called Sobchak smart and said they had many mutual acquaintances. She shared details of how her newsroom was coping after the war began:
For now I’ve left the country with my child. But my mother and husband are still there. The newsroom is relocating and will work from here. Unfortunately, we have no bank accounts or citizenship here, so we’re figuring things out. In the next few days, we’ll finish moving the newsroom and decide what to do. For now, we’re publishing verified information and trying to fulfill our professional duty honestly. But honestly, I’m in a terrible state. And the conditions are, too.
Where Sobchak was at the time and where she planned to move her newsroom is unclear from the exchange. But other messages, which the hackers dated to February and March 2022, indicate that the journalist traveled to Israel at the start of the full-scale war. In April 2022, it was reported that she had obtained Israeli citizenship. Sobchak now says she never wanted to leave Russia, even though she had the means to do so.
Her correspondence with Sergei Novikov — the head of the Presidential Administration’s public projects department, who became the chief censor of Russian culture after the war began — is dated July 2024. The exchange reads:
Sobchak: Sergei, good evening — is it all right if I call you for a second about a cultural initiative?
Novikov: Ksenia, good evening! Better to write here — I can’t talk right now.
Sobchak: I’ve found sponsor money to put on a music festival in Onega. There’s a list of artists we’ve already had preliminary conversations with. The idea is to support the Russian provinces — we made a film about these places, hence the choice of venue. Could I send you my vision for it, so you could help with the approvals and advise whether the artists and the program are all suitable?
Novikov: Ksenia, since I’ve already been reproached in the past for supposedly signing off on certain actions of yours, I’ll answer simply: “no” :)
Sobchak: Honestly, I have no idea what reproaches you’re talking about. I’ve never cited any approvals from you to anyone — on the contrary, I worried that we’d lost touch, and I’d very much like to restore contact… I came up with a project that I think is useful for our country, and I’m trying to show my commitment this way. Can you just advise me, then, on what I should do? It seems important to me to stay in contact with someone so I can take the right steps. What should I do?
What Novikov answered is unclear from the leaked materials.
Also: excuses for the Ilya Remeslo interview, and news about the gasoline crisis
Sobchak has her own media company, which includes the YouTube channel Ostorozhno Sobchak (4.15 million subscribers) and a network of Telegram channels: the news channels Ostorozhno Novosti (1.6 million subscribers) and Ostorozhno Moskva (385,000), the lifestyle channel Sobchak (372,000), and her personal channel, Krovavaya Barynya (1.14 million).
Like other players in the market, Sobchak appears to be tightly wired into Russia’s system of media censorship. According to the leaked material, she corresponded with Vladimir Tabak, the head of the propaganda outfit ANO Dialog, and with Alexei Nemeryuk, the head of Moscow’s Department of Trade and Services, about how her media projects respond to the news agenda.
Judging by the correspondence, Vladimir Tabak and his superiors in the Kremlin were deeply angered by an interview Sobchak did with Ilya Remeslo — a pro-government blogger who unexpectedly came out against Vladimir Putin and subsequently ended up in a psychiatric hospital. Here is how Sobchak and Tabak discussed it:
Sobchak: Well, seriously, I really am at fault. And I understand that. I sincerely believe an asshole like that, with those talking points, is useful to SVK right now. But of course I could be wrong, because no one will admit it outright. So there you have it.
Tabak: I want you to live with the feeling that I might not forgive you.
Sobchak: That’s how I live (
Tabak: I don’t know if I can talk to you the way I used to (
And here is Sobchak complaining about censorship of the coverage of Moscow’s gasoline crisis. Judging by her use of “Lyosh” — a familiar form of Alexei — she appears to be addressing the complaint to Alexei Nemeryuk, whose department oversees the capital’s fuel market.
We’ve already been through this once. We put up a post about a Moscow gas station. Moscow sent a rebuttal. We sent our journalist to the station. And then, on tape, there’s an account of how the city simply called the station and said: “Take down the sign saying there’s no gas.” Even though the sign had been there before — and we’d shown it. […] Now it’s the same story. We post something — we have all the videos, all the evidence — and they write: “That’s not true.” […] Look, there is a problem with gas; we said from the start that we can’t not write about it. […] What are we supposed to do? We’d be happy not to write about it… And they’re talking to us now as if we had an agreement about this. But our agreements are different ones, and we’re honoring them.
Meanwhile, they’re now dictating every little thing to us — this is allowed, that isn’t. We can’t work like that either, Lyosh. […] We’re ready to do anything within the framework of agreements we can actually honor, but we can’t just post fakes in the channel. Let’s meet again and discuss this. We have signed documents, and we’re holding up our end, but in return we get no exclusives, none of the promised stories we put in writing, and we wait three days for answers.
And fights over how Sobchak’s channels covered the biggest drone attack on Moscow
On June 18, Moscow was hit by the biggest Ukrainian drone attack since the start of the war. Among the damaged sites were the Moscow Oil Refinery and the Sadovod shopping center.
The leaked correspondence shows that Sobchak received complaints from the Kremlin over how the Ostorozhno Moskva Telegram channel covered the attack. Black Mirror published a voice message recorded, it claims, for Vladimir Tabak — what the conversation is about is unclear from the excerpt, though VChK-OGPU maintains it concerns the June 18 attack. As with Nemeryuk, Sobchak refers in the recording to certain “agreements” between herself and the authorities.
I’ll get all the documents ready now. But look at this objectively. Sorry, I got emotional too, but you know me: when there’s a screw-up, I’m always ready to own it, like with Remeslo. But that’s not the situation here. We have… there’s some smoke, a fire, but I’ll send you 100 links right now that are just like it… It’s just that when you’re getting fucked, you’d like to know what for. […] I’ve been sitting in the newsroom all morning, [combing] through all the channels — there was nothing like this; it’s some kind of bullshit. I want to know what exactly the complaint is and to talk it over. […] What exactly violates which agreements. We have them all, and we’re honoring all of them.
The hackers also published an exchange purportedly between Sobchak and Sergei Titov, the editor-in-chief of her news outlets. Judging by the screenshots, it also concerned the June 18 attack on Moscow and took place several days later. Sobchak was demanding that Titov produce a report on how the attack had been covered.
Sobchak: I’m still waiting for the document and your read on the situation. But honestly, I’m fucking sick of getting grief from you at exactly the moment when everything’s fine. I’ll bring in a director above you if you keep fucking me over. […] I expect a detailed document within the hour, in the format I sent.
Titov: I’ll write it all up. But I really am offering you an easy out, as I have many times before — say you have an unmanageable idiot on your hands and fire me. That would defuse their anger.
Sobchak: Seryozh, for fuck’s sake, can you not stir up more shit? I’m not going to become a “foreign agent” because of you and your constant fucking stunts.
Titov: Your whole country is on fire — I can’t not write the truth. And I’m not going to lie.
Sobchak: For fuck’s sake, why? Why do you keep throwing the people who cover your ass under the bus? […]
Titov: I already want to hang myself as it is, because we write nothing about the gas (except the official line), nothing about people being snatched off the streets in Penza. And nobody told me not to — I just don’t post it, so as not to piss anyone off.
Sobchak: Nobody’s asking you to lie.
Titov: Writing that there’s gas everywhere and everything’s great — that’s lying. We get 122453465746547563 complaints every hour saying there’s no fucking gas anywhere. And we don’t post them.
Sobchak: But you’re breaking the law, and you’ll end up in prison — seriously, I’m fucking sick of this shit. Why can’t you get subscribers any other way? […] Why is shit the only thing you ever care about?
Titov: Read the document and the cover note, and you’ll be ready. We haven’t done anything criminal.
What's in the document?
“Key takes:
— Neither this time nor before has Ostorozhno Novosti published the moment of impact, the burning refinery, air defenses at work, or any footage of military or strategic sites. That decision was made even before the publication ban, and Ostorozhno Novosti has often run tamer imagery than state media.
— Ninety percent of that day’s posts were “smoke in the sky” — no geolocation, no indication of the area, same as always. The newsroom judged that it could work within those limits, since it had been fine before to post a smoke-filled sky or a drone in flight.
— The claim that Ostorozhno Novosti covered the story more aggressively than anyone else is false. Footage of the strikes, the refinery, and Sadovod burning (the market itself, not just smoke) ran on Ridovka, Belorussky Silovik, military bloggers (Romanov, for example), and city pages like Moskvach, an account with three million subscribers.
— The newsroom deliberately published one percent of what it had at that moment. Journalists had hundreds of videos from the scene, footage of strikes on the refinery, and the infamous “lid” (which we would never have posted) — and it deliberately used none of it.
— Nearly every post carries official information; the posts base their data on Sobyanin, Solovyov, and agency press services.
— The rules keep changing. If you can, tell us now. Can’t post smoke? Noted. Can’t post the sky at all? Okay. Can’t post a drone in flight with no location? We’ll remember.”
Titov: On the fuel — we have thousands of reports from across the country that it’s fucked. […] Posting happy talk is suicide, and I won’t do it. We’ve switched to the official line on this topic, but writing that everything’s fucking great when everything’s shit — that’s Soviet media.
Black Mirror also published a memo on how the Ostorozhno Moskva Telegram channel covered the June 18 attack on Moscow — possibly the very report Sobchak demanded from Titov. The memo stresses that every post about the attack was based on official sources and that the images did not show the strikes’ aftermath, unlike other pro-government Telegram channels, which “extensively published triggering video content showing fires and heavy smoke in Moscow.” Black Mirror claims Sobchak used memos like this more than once to account for her outlets’ work to the Presidential Administration and Moscow City Hall.
And discussions of the criminal case against Sobchak’s commercial director
In 2022, Kirill Sukhanov, the commercial director of Sobchak’s media company, was detained along with Arian Romanovsky (Kuzmin), a former editor-in-chief of Tatler, and Tamerlan Bigayev, a former journalist at the pro-Kremlin outlet Life. They were accused of extorting money from Sergei Chemezov, the head of Rostec and a friend of Putin’s.
Sobchak’s home was searched in connection with Sukhanov’s arrest. She then left Russia but soon returned and apologized to Chemezov. She was never charged, but in 2024, Sukhanov, Romanovsky, and Bigayev were sentenced to prison terms of five to seven and a half years. Sobchak called the sentences “extraordinarily unjust” and said she had honored all the “agreements” meant to soften the punishment.
The leaked correspondence shows that she cleared the text of her apology with Chemezov’s representatives and used a lawyer to relay messages to Sukhanov about what she was doing to secure his release. Here is an excerpt from one of those messages:
Everything came down to Ch. Yesterday I met with the woman he provided as a contact… I passed along a letter that should move him and show that I’m ready to do anything to resolve this. […] We’re explaining that we’re asking for leniency and that this is a matter of people’s lives. I hope he answers. But at this stage, it’s clear that without his call… nothing will be resolved. All our energy right now is going into getting through to him that this is a matter of fate. Fingers crossed.
And here is an excerpt from another:
Right now, I’m doing everything I can to get you out of prison. You have to understand how this system works: nobody can simply release everyone and apologize anymore, because then the people who started this lawlessness would have problems of their own. Changing the pretrial restrictions at the appeal on November 14, 2022, won’t happen — the judges won’t risk their robes.
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Cover photo: Getty Images