Did Russian State TV Anchor Secretly Mock Putin on Telegram? What We Know

With Russia's military campaign in Ukraine causing more anger and frustration than celebration among the pro-Putin elites and state TV show hosts, cracks are appearing in Putin's seemingly unshakeable base.

Olga Skabeyeva, the host of the primetime news and politics chat show 60 Minut ("60 Minutes"), has been one of the most vocal proponents of Moscow's "special military operation" in Ukraine, and a staunch ally of Russia's President Vladimir Putin.

But a look into the metadata of the files uploaded to Skabeyeva's personal Telegram channel revealed something unexpected: A number of file names appeared to mock the Russian president, including with derogatory nicknames and references to madness.

On November 15, 2022, at 11:59 GMT, a popular social and political commentator on Russian-language Twitter, @prof_preobr, posted a link to Skabeeva's Telegram post, claiming in the caption that she had used misspelled and mocking terms in file names of videos she published earlier, which featured Putin.

"In Skabeeva's channel the video files featuring Putin have some interesting names. For example, on November 7 a file was uploaded called "putin mobshiza." On November 8, a file called "Puten". And today, a file called 'pynya'" the Twitter user wrote, translated from Russian, archived here.

Another—less prominent—post with a similar claim was shared by a different user three minutes earlier, at 11:56 GMT.

"Мобшиза", pronounced "Mobshiza" appears to be a twist on the popular slang term "Demshiza," or "democracy schizo," a derogatory label used by pro-government commentators to describe the opposition and liberals more broadly. The "mob," in this case, seems to be a reference to "mobilization," which is the topic of Putin's speech in the video.

"Пыня", pronounced "Pynya", is a derogatory nickname, commonly used to reference Putin by Russian opposition activists. "Puten" is a wrong or distorted spelling of the president's surname.

Further posts, including those by Russian opposition politicians and activists such as Lyubov Sobol, an ally of the imprisoned opposition leader Alexei Navalny, and Ksenia Sobchak, a socialite who ran against Putin in 2018, soon followed, drawing even more attention to the apparent mishap.

The original Twitter post references at least three Telegram posts from Skabeyeva that appeared to mock Putin. It is accompanied by screenshots of the file names, which can be seen on Telegram when a user tries to download the file.

A number of users who spotted the file names shared screenshots after retracing the steps of the original poster and shared the results.

Others also noted that the file names appear to have been altered since the initial revelation.

Ukrainian outlets, such as Dialog.ua, which covered the story also saved and published the screenshots of the metadata. Journalists, including Russian outlet Medialeaks and others, also claimed to have been observing files being swiftly renamed for some time after the Twitter post was published.

Newsweek looked through Skabeyeva's Telegram feed and checked the metadata for those files. The videos in question, as of Wednesday, November 16, did not have the derogatory words in file names.

By contrast, many of the videos featuring Western politicians appeared to retain the mocking or facetious nicknames, written in Cyrillic, such as "Зеля" for Zelensky.

While it is feasible that the screenshots of the metadata page could have been doctored to frame the TV host, other posts featured a screengrabbed video of the verification process in real time.

While it would in theory be possible to "fake" the video recording as well, it would be more technically challenging to accomplish.

Furthermore, while the file names no longer reflected those in the original post, Newsweek found that all of the files in question, as well as dozens of other videos posted by Skabeyeva in recent weeks, have been edited [such posts are marked as "edited" on Telegram].

File names now state, respectively, Путин 1, Путин 12 and IMG_2572.

Moreover, while Telegram does not allow you to view the history of post edits, it does have a function that shows the time of edits. The time and date of the last edit is displayed when the cursor hovers over the "Edited" note at the bottom right of a post.

Newsweek looked through the video feed through to September 2022, and found that a large number of edits were done around noon on November 15, 2022, minutes after the posts on Twitter were published.

On the same day, at 16:09 GMT, Skabeyeva appeared to reference the Twitter claims in a reaction post, which said:

"Ukrainian Telegram channels and Israeli citizen Ksenia Sobchak, in an attempt to expose me as a divergent, are spreading some nonsense about me. I will tell you now: don't count on it! I love Russia with all my soul. And even more," she wrote.

The separate pieces of evidence are not conclusive on their own, but the combination of archived photo and video grabs of the metadata, along with the edits timings, suggests that something was edited shortly after the claims emerged.

Some have also theorized that the channel's administrator may have been responsible, pointing out that standard and automatically generated file names were replaced with Cyrillic descriptors around the start of autumn.

Skabeyeva has not previously mentioned whether she runs the channel herself or through an intermediary, or whether or not she has an administrator.

Newsweek has reached out to Skabeyeva and 60 Minut for comment.