On the air of Vladimir Solovyov during the program "Rybar's Analysis" for June 16, there was a glimpse of the presenter's screen. The Telegram messenger window with correspondence was opened on the screen. One of the host’s contacts had a photo and the name of Maxim Lavrinenko, the founder of the Ukrainian Telegram channel Trukha, which publishes a lot of evidence of Russian war crimes in Ukraine.
At the same time, the channel "Rybar" and its recently deanonymized owner Mikhail Zvinchuk, on the contrary, act on the part of Russian propaganda. Zvinchuk is also a former employee of the press service of the Russian Defense Ministry.
The freeze frame shows Lavrinenko writing to Zvinchuk: “Are you sure? They told me they got it." Moreover, the message is one of the last received. Shortly after other Telegram channels drew attention to the situation, a message appeared in Solovyov’s personal channel that “there will be no daily briefing for Rybar today.”
Lavrinenko himself told The Insider that this was shown on purpose. “This is Solovyov’s stuffing,” he commented.
Earlier, The Bell published two investigations, which reported that one of the owners of Rybar is IT specialist Denis Shchukin, the second is Mikhail Zvinchuk, ex-press officer of the Ministry of Defense. 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.
