Both owners of the pro-Kremlin channel Rybar, which specializes in military analytics, have been named. The Bell published two investigations, in which it is reported that one of the owners is IT specialist Denis Shchukin, the second is Mikhail Zvinchuk, ex-press officer of the Ministry of Defense. Until recently, Rybar, with an audience of 1.1 million people, remained the only anonymous Telegram channel among the important sources of information that Western media and military experts do not hesitate to refer to. For example, the Institute for the Study of War refers to "Rybar" 23 times in one of the reports.
The publication managed to find Schukin in the old small chat “Rybarnaya No. 1”, created for communication between active subscribers of the channel and its authors. In the chat, he calls himself one of the admins of the Rybar channel and cites various facts about his life that coincided with those found out by the publication, having discovered data about 44-year-old Moscow programmer Denis Valerievich Shchukin. His place of birth according to his passport is the village of Ovstug, Bryansk region. He lived and studied in elementary school in the city of Dimitrov (now Mirnograd) in the Donetsk region in Ukraine, which coincides with Shchukin's stories in the chat.
He studied at the Kyrgyz National University, in 2001 he received Russian citizenship instead of citizenship of the Federal Republic of Germany (until 2020, in order to obtain Russian citizenship, it was necessary to renounce citizenship of other countries). In 2002-2008, Shchukin worked as a translator in the direction of "microelectronics using technical and medical vocabulary" at the State Unitary Enterprise "NIITAP" (Research Institute of Technology and Automation of Production).
In August 2008, Shchukin was detained and prosecuted under two articles – 273.1 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (“Creation, distribution and use of malicious software”) and 146.2 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (“Violation of copyright and related rights”), writes The Bell. The case file states that “being in the apartment where the office of the PC-Service company is located, I installed counterfeit software on the hard drive using a malicious program.” Shchukin did not lose his freedom then, but he lost his job.
The publication also notes that "Denis Schukin" signed articles on self-defense in the collection of the Ministry of Defense and a dozen articles from 2010-2013.
The second probable owner of the channel turned out to be connected with the Ministry of Defense – the publication calls Mikhail Zvinchuk by him. His biography also coincides with the facts that the Rybar administrators revealed in the chat. Zvinchuk studied in Moscow at the Military University of the Ministry of Defense as an Arabic translator. The Bell studied his LiveJournal, where it is reported that the topic of one of his term papers is "Peculiarities of the combat use of NATO allied forces during Operation Unified Protector in Libya."
Zvinchuk worked in the Department of Information and Mass Communications of the Russian Ministry of Defense – at least until August 2017. Then, since 2017, the department in which the second likely owner of Rybar worked was headed by Igor Konashenkov, whose reports on the situation at the front are now considered the official position of the General Staff.
The interlocutor of the publication, who pointed the journalists to Zvinchuk, told how the latter told him that he was running the channel on his own, and then the channel was an objective supplier of information about the Middle East. However, later Zvinchuk began to mention that he was contacted by representatives of RIA FAN (a propaganda information resource owned by Yevgeny Prigozhin, the founder of Wagner PMC). Soon the tone of messages in the channel changed, and a permanent heading "Rybarya" appeared on RIA "FAN".
An employee of Prigozhin's media holding "Patriot" (which includes RIA "FAN"), in a conversation with The Bell, claimed that Prigozhin provided funding to the channel, but in 2021 or 2022 the cooperation ceased.
