A team of well known Kremlin supported “pranksters” recently published audio of a call with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
The two “comedians,” Vladimir Kuznetsov and Alexei Stolyarov, who are known as “Vovan and Lexus,” have been crank-calling Kremlin critics over the past years. The duo and their calls are given considerable airtime on Russian state-controlled television. Their conversations with unsuspecting targets, including international leaders, are often published out of context with unflattering images that give a negative impression of their targets, which in effect discredits them.
The BBC’s monitoring group characterizes the duo “as a Kremlin media tool” – part of its foreign information warfare tool kit. Russian activist-lawyer, Mark Feygin, “accused the pair of working for the Kremlin and the Russian security services.” Others believe that the Russian intelligence services are, at the very least, helping the duo.
In the call with the Canadian Prime Minister, recorded in January 2020 but released on November 23, 2020, the two Russian actors disguise themselves as the Swedish environmental activist Greta Thunberg, who asks provocative questions about US President Donald Trump and urges Trudeau to pull Canada out of NATO – a primary foreign policy goal of the Putin regime.
While the Canadian Prime Minister seemed to believe he was talking to the Swedish activist, his answers to the questions from the Russian crank callers are in no way controversial.
The call was broadly reported in Russian state media including RT, with the likely aim of discrediting Justin Trudeau and his government. The timing coincides with heightened uncertainty about the pandemic and may be intended to fuel polarization.
The YouTube video has been viewed nearly 100,000 times and has been shared to 6 million Facebook users through the RT Facebook page and 3 million Twitter users through repeated RT posts.
In 2015, the “Vova and Lexus” crank-called Elton John, who is an outspoken critic of Vladimir Putin’s draconian anti-gay legislation.
According to BBC, in 2017 reports about the crank-calls were featured at least 400 times in Russian national media.
In 2016, the Russian pair told Shaun Walker of the Guardian that they would never discredit the Putin regime: “We wouldn’t prank Putin. We don’t want to harm our country. We don’t want unrest here; we don’t want to do anything that would help the enemies of Russia.”
Vova and Lexus at Russia’s state media Sputnik Photo: Euromaidan Press
More information here from Euromaidan Press about “Vova and Lexus”
