Hackers claim they discovered correspondence between Russian journalist Sobchak and Yermak in March 2022
The Black Mirror hacker group, together with the VChK-OGPU project, claims to have hacked the personal Telegram account of Russian journalist Ksenia Sobchak and gained access to her private conversations. The published materials include conversations between Sobchak and former head of the Presidential Office Andriy Yermak in March 2022.
Meduza reported this, according to Censor.NET.
Correspondence with Yermak
On 8 July, Ksenia Sobchak publicly complained about a cyberattack on her email and hackers gaining access to her Sobchak and Krovavaya Barynya Telegram channels. She initially attempted to dismiss the first screenshots published by the hackers as fake and deleted them. However, Black Mirror and the VChK-OGPU project released an expanded trove of data the following day, including voice messages.
The chat that attracted the most attention was with a contact saved as "Yermak." The correspondence and recorded calls took place in March 2022, shortly after the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
According to the screenshots, Yermak called Sobchak intelligent and said that "she would be able to think of something," adding that they had many mutual acquaintances.
Sobchak, in turn, gave a detailed account of her hasty departure for Israel and the financial problems she faced after the outbreak of the war:
"For now, I have left the country with my child. But my mother and husband have remained there. The editorial team is relocating and will work from here. Unfortunately, we have neither bank accounts nor citizenship here, so we are dealing with these issues... For now, we are publishing verified information and trying to honestly fulfil our professional duty. But, frankly, things are very difficult. The circumstances are difficult as well," Sobchak wrote to the Ukrainian official.
It is unclear from this conversation where Sobchak was at the time and where she intended to relocate her editorial team. However, other correspondence dated by the hackers to February and March 2022 indicates that the Russian journalist left for Israel at the start of the full-scale war.
Kremlin censorship
The conversations leaked by the hackers also include disputes between Sobchak and Sergei Titov, the managing editor of her news outlets, over their coverage of a Ukrainian drone attack on Moscow. It had allegedly violated the "arrangements" between her and the authorities.
Titov, for his part, acknowledged that, on Sobchak’s instructions, his outlets were already extensively censoring Russia’s domestic news agenda:
"I already feel like hanging myself because my outlets report neither on the gasoline shortage (except for official statements) nor on people being abducted straight off the streets in Penza," the editor complained.
- As a reminder, Ksenia Sobchak is a former Russian television presenter who ran in Russia’s 2018 presidential election. She has never unequivocally condemned the war against Ukraine and openly supported the current Kremlin regime during Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Wagner PMC mutiny. She presents herself as an "opposition journalist."
