Life news stopped broadcasting. Life TV channel has stopped broadcasting

The Life media project of Aram Gabrelyanov stops broadcasting - August 18 is the channel’s last day of operation on cable and satellite television networks. The operators confirmed the channel’s refusal to further cooperate.

To bookmarks

The site’s interlocutor says that the shareholders decided to leave Life from television and develop streaming broadcasting about a month ago. Now the channel's employees have been notified.

The news channel Life (formerly LifeNews) has been broadcasting on the cable television networks Rostelecom, Akado, MTS and ER-Telecom (Dom.ru brand) since the fall of 2013; since the spring of 2014, it has also been broadcast by operators satellite television "Tricolor TV" and "NTV-Plus". Now, on the channel’s frequency, an appeal will be launched to TV viewers asking them to follow the news on the Life website. On August 19, television broadcasting will be completely stopped, he added.

Representatives of Tricolor TV, NTV-Plus and Rostelecom told RBC that they had received a letter to stop broadcasting the channel “due to its closure” from the Media Content company, which owns the license to broadcast Life.

The MTS press service told the site that Life is included in the basic MTS TV package and the company did not receive information from the channel about the cessation of broadcasting. “There were rumors about the closure, but the channel did not confirm them to us,” said an MTS representative.

Part of the TV editorial staff has already been laid off, the rest have been transferred to work with streaming broadcasting on the Life website. The same number, according to him, remained to work on streaming broadcasting on the website and other projects, taking into account the technical staff.

On August 16, the head of the News Media holding, Aram Gabrelyanov, whose structure includes Life, spoke about a new broadcast concept: the channel abandons the production of news stories in favor of streaming main events. At the same time, there is no talk of completely closing the channel, Gabrelyanov argued.

When asked by the site to comment on the information about the cessation of television broadcasting, Gabrelyanov replied that it all depends on whether the partners agree to take the streams on which the channel is focused.

“If they don’t take the streams, then they won’t show Life. If they take it, they will,” he said.

Gabrelyanov also recalled that Life never paid operators for broadcasting. How

https://www.site/2017-08-18/telekanal_life_prekrachaet_rabotu_chto_stalo_s_media_imperiey_arama_gabrelyanova

“It's a dead horse. No need to bet on it"

Life TV channel stops working. What happened to the media empire of Aram Gabrelyanov

Ilya Pitalev/RIA Novosti

Today, August 18, at 17:00 Moscow time, the last original news release aired on the Life TV channel. Friday is also the last working day of the remaining on-air crews on the channel.

The channel's employees themselves learned the details today at a general editorial meeting. “All the broadcast employees were fired. Only four operators remained. The question also arose about the closure of the recently launched SHOT project, in addition, the reduction affected several journalists,” says a source in News Media.

Rumors about the collapse of the media empire of Aram Gabrelyanov, the News Media holding, began to appear in the media about a year ago, just after personnel changes took place in the presidential administration. In October 2016, Vyacheslav Volodin, with whom Gabrelyanov had a good relationship, was replaced as first deputy head of the Russian Presidential Administration by Sergei Kiriyenko, who had served as general director of the state corporation Rosatom since 2005.

Our source close to Gabrelyanov’s holding says that in the new media system that has developed in Russia, “Life (website and TV channel) in the form in which they existed were simply not needed. This is a rather expensive resource, and the problems facing the authorities can be solved in cheaper ways.”

Another source from the media holding is confident that News Media has problems because for a long time Aram Gabrelyanov’s publications fueled, and sometimes even initiated, intra-elite conflicts. “Life killed whoever it wanted and how it wanted: the Ministry of Internal Affairs, governors, ministers, incriminating evidence on a variety of people was published. In a media environment cleared of any manifestation of independence, News Media publications were a lump in the throat for many high-ranking people,” the source said.

There are also those who are sure: nothing terrible is happening, reforms in the News Media holding, in particular on the TV channel, are a natural necessity and a new starting point for the development of the holding. Thus, ex-chief editor of the Life channel Ilya Melekhin says that it was “unpromising to invest in the project, knowing that it will die in 3-4 years.” “It’s better to change the format in advance. Good companies survive when they change format before the market forces them to,” he says.

Artem Zhitenev/RIA Novosti

Let's remember how a graduate of Moscow State University, who began his career at Ulyanovsk Komsomolets, was able to create a media empire in the mid-2000s. And how today it has turned into several appanage principalities.

After working in Ulyanovsk, in 1997 in Moscow, the future Russian media magnate began publishing the newspaper Moskovskie Vedomosti, which almost immediately began to be published in many regions of Russia. Three more years later, in 2000, Gabrelyanov gave the newspaper a new name - “Life”. Already in 2001, he founded the News Media holding, which in ten years turned into a media giant. News Media had newspapers, a TV channel, a website, radio and even comics. The holding immediately took a position loyal to the authorities, which Gabrelyanov openly declared.

According to Lenta.Ru, in 2006, 50% minus one share of News Media was sold to the investment fund UFG Private Equity Fund. In 2008, UFG Private Equity Fund sold its stake in News Media to the National Media Group (NMG) holding, where Aram Gabrelyanov subsequently took up the post of Deputy General Director. He ceased to hold this position in the summer of 2017.

For all 10 years, the media in News Media have lived up to their slogan - “first in breaking news.” Thus, according to Medialogy, in 2014 the Izvestia newspaper, the LifeNews TV channel and the RSN radio station became the first in terms of citation among Russian media. In 2015, LifeNews and RSN retained their leading positions in this ranking, while the Izvestia newspaper dropped to second place, behind Kommersant. And already in 2016, only the Life.ru portal became the leader in citations, Izvestia was second, and RSN dropped out of the ranking altogether. Our source explains that the departure from the leading positions of Izvestia and RSN was due to the fact that all the holding’s resources were thrown into rebooting the Life website and bringing it to the top in terms of citations.

“We have brotherly relations with Kadyrov”

Life's popularity peaked in 2014, when the armed conflict began in southeastern Ukraine. Then literally the whole world followed the progress of the hostilities that unfolded in the Lugansk and Donetsk regions of Ukraine.

In May 2014, Ashot Gabrelyanov (the son of Aram Gabrelyanov, at that time the chief editor of the site) made a statement about the disappearance of two Life News journalists: Oleg Sedyakin and Marat Saichenko, who covered the military events in Ukraine. Both were then detained by the Ukrainian security services because during a search they allegedly found an anti-aircraft missile system. Aram Gabrelyanov does not hide the fact that Life News employees were saved by the head of the Chechen Republic, Ramzan Kadyrov, with whom he has “brotherly relations.” “I didn’t even ask him (Kadyrov - Znak), he called me when the guys were in Ukraine and asked if my guys were there,” the head of NewsMedia said in an interview with blogger Amiran Sardarov. "Do not be scared! I’ll take them,” Gabrelyanov quotes Ramzan Kadyrov. As a result, Kadyrov personally was involved in the rescue of Oleg Sedyakin and Marat Saichenko. At the end of May, both journalists were flown from Ukraine to Grozny and then to Moscow on the personal plane of the head of Chechnya.

According to a source on a website close to News Media, Aram Gabrelyanov’s media became such an influential toy in 2014 that in the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces, where Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu was staying, there were two television screens: “on one they showed “Russia-24” “, and on the other - Life News.”

The triumphant rise of News Media stopped in 2016, when, after changes in the presidential administration, the media map of Russia was redrawn.

How the empire fell apart

The NewsMedia media holding stopped publishing Izvestia in August 2016. Then the management of Izvestia again (as it was until 2011) passed to OJSC Gazeta Izvestia (according to SPARK, owned by CJSC National Media Group and its subsidiary Invest-Media LLC).

In December 2016, the Life Sound radio station began broadcasting on the RSN frequency; in January 2017, it closed. Now the radio version of the Life channel is heard on the free frequency. “People complained that Gabrelyanov had gone crazy,” says the source. — RSN was extremely popular - there were 100 calls on one line at a time. But it was a change of format. After the radio was closed, the workers were not kicked out anywhere. Some were transferred to other departments. In general, there were no offended people, because everyone was paid in full,” the source added.

In September 2016, News Media management held a general meeting with employees of the Russian News Service (according to SPARK, before its closure, the radio was part of NMG). “At the meeting we were told that it was time to change, because the time had come for drastic changes. At first we were told that RSN would receive a double name and become “RSN Life”, and we would accustom people to Life. Then the radio was supposed to completely become Life, but when this would happen was not yet known in September,” the former RSN presenter told the site. According to him, the management of the media holding assured its employees that broadcasting would continue. “So we started working according to a new scheme. Songs that suited the meaning began to be added to serious news stories. In the middle of discussing the topic of reducing demand for foreign tours, they inserted the Leningrad song “I Cry and Cry.” It's already become comical. But Aram Gabrelyanov was pleased. He wanted to rejuvenate the audience,” said the ex-host. He is sure that media tycoon Gabrelyanov simply lost interest in RSN after a while, because “mostly adults listened to the radio.”

Maxim Blinov/RIA Novosti

The Life.ru portal experienced many transformations throughout 2016. It was supposed to become the flagship of News Media, combining Super.ru (formerly Life Showbiz) and Life Sport. However, over time, the team of journalists who filled the Life website with exclusive content moved to work on new projects sponsored by Aram Gabrelyanov, for example Mash (simultaneously published on Telegram, VKontakte and YouTube). Now, materials with links to public pages controlled by Gabrelyanov are increasingly appearing on the Life.ru website. According to Medialogy, the Life.ru website has ceased to be the leader in citations, taking fourth place in the ranking in June 2017 - for the first time in several years.

No less changes were expected for the workers of the Life News TV channel, which in April 2016 changed its name to Life. In May 2016, Andrey Mikheev left the post of editor-in-chief, and his place was taken by Ilya Melekhin (former producing editor of Channel 4 in Yekaterinburg). Before this appointment, he headed Life.78, the Life TV channel in St. Petersburg. It’s just that this TV channel stopped producing news in the summer of 2017. The Life.78 brand has ceased to exist. Now the channel’s production capacity has been transferred to the joint editorial office of Channel Five, Ren TV and Izvestia.

In December 2016, the management of the Life TV channel decided to transform the channel according to the Euronews model. As a result, the presenters and correspondents disappeared from the frame. Almost six months later, in May 2017, the channel’s staff, according to the site’s source, was reduced by a third: editors, correspondents, writers and producers left. Melekhin also left with them, and was replaced by Svetlana Levintas.

On the channel, out of six on-air teams of six people, only two teams of three people remained. Melekhin, in a conversation with the site, noted that “the Life channel could exist comfortably for another 5-7 years. No problem at all. But in the long term, the decade is a dead horse, and there is no need to bet on it. She won't make it to the finish line. Investing in the channel is a waste of money.”

It is interesting that after News Media began to close old and open new projects, the holding carried out an inventory for the first time since its existence. According to the source, all equipment and furniture in the holding were counted, some of which (tables, bedside tables and chairs) were simply transported to the offices of projects controlled by Aram Gabrelyanov. And some furniture and office equipment were simply put up for sale, for example old Apple computers. The source says that the holding's management is preparing to send equipment for mobile live broadcasting - LiveU backpacks - to Israel.

Several principalities

From that moment on, individual projects began to appear in the media environment, which were sponsored by Gabrelyanov, but which were not directly related to the Life brand. “The management scheme at News Media has changed, it has become horizontal. That is, creative managers offered Aram Gabrelyanov the idea of their project, he considered it, then, if he liked it, he sponsored it. As a result, the manager has a personal interest in the development of his project. True, so far none of them have reached self-sufficiency,” explains the source.

Ilya Melekhin told the site that his stream project Black Elepfant Aram Gabrelyanov allocated 30 million rubles. “We should reach self-sufficiency by the end of the year, and we will, I have no doubt. I see the numbers that are coming now. Advertisers are very positive about our format. We really make money,” says Melekhin. According to him, “no one (that is, Gaberelyanov. - Znak) is interfering in the project,” the work is being carried out independently.

Mash- a public page created by Nikita Mogutin, former head of the news service of the Life.ru portal. Now Mash has more than 768 thousand subscribers on the VKontakte social network (one post on average gets from 70 to 180 thousand views), more than a thousand on the YouTube channel, and an audience on Telegram - 32 thousand people (each post on average viewed by 30% to 80% of the audience).

Nikita Mogutin told the site that “working with regular news was a thrill at first, but then I just got tired of it. People are tired of consuming what journalists feed them in traditional media - this is the Soviet canteen.” “We now work directly with those for whom we write, telling them what is interesting to us. Who, excuse me, needs news about Donald Trump’s tweets or UN Security Council meetings?” Mogutin explained to our publication. According to him, Mash “has 23 million monthly reach and almost 70 million views on the VKontakte social network.” And on Telegram, Mash gained 32 thousand subscribers in 3 months. Almost 7 million views per month on Telegram. It’s such a blast.”

LLC "Izyum" is a creative company for the production of native advertising, the idea of which belongs to the ex-deputy editor-in-chief of Life.ru Darina Evtushenko. Perhaps the most successful project of Izyum was the YouTube channel “Druzhko Show”, created in April 2017. Today, almost 3 million people follow Sergei Druzhko’s analysis of Internet trends and memes.

“I don’t do the Friendly Show. I'm being honest. I'm just an investor. I can say that 30 thousand rubles were spent on promoting “Druzhko Show”. Not another ruble. “Yes, a lot of money is invested in content,” said Aram Gabrelyanov in an interview with Amiran Sardarov.

Space- information and analytical agency of the ex-editor of the Life.ru portal Alexander Potapov. According to RNS, after leaving Life.ru, Potapov wanted to create a project to produce content for social networks: games, videos, interactives.

Gigarama— a project to create gigapixel panoramas of Marat Saichenko (after a week of captivity in Ukraine in 2014, Saichenko became the head of the Life operator service). This project can be found on the Internet using the hashtag #gigarama, which leads to the website Life.ru. Gigarama LLC, according to SPARK, is also divided between Gabrelyanov and News Media in a ratio of 3:1.

War correspondent Semyon Pegov (“Man of the Year”, according to News Media in 2014) decided to create a crash project WarGonzo. Judging by the description of the WarGonzo channel on YouTube, Pegov talks about war in his project, studies weapons, and conducts crash tests. VARGONZO LLC is divided between Aram Gabrelyanov, who owns 75% of the company’s shares, and News Media, who owns the remaining 25%, SPARK says.

Ex-deputy editor-in-chief of Life.78 Konstantin Pridybaylo received investments from Aram Gabrelyanov to develop a political show for young people "Black mirror". In an interview with RBC, Pridybaylo said that the first broadcast of the show will air in September; there will be no host in Black Mirror, because anyone can become the author of the show. In Black Mirror LLC, 75% belongs to Aram Gabrelyanov, 25% to News Media.

Former deputy editor-in-chief of Izvestia Anastasia Kashevarova now owns two media outlets: Daily Storm And This is media. According to our sources, Kashevarova’s project was sponsored by Aram Gabrelyanov and Ramzan Kadyrov.

Darina Evtushenko (9%), Nikita Mogutin (10%), Anatoly Suleymanov (15%), Alexander Potapov (15%) created a joint company LLC "Five Public"(a controlling stake of 51% belongs to Aram Gabrelyanov’s partner, Karen Mirzoyan). This company unites VKontakte public pages in different cities of Russia. For example, “Typical Yekaterinburg” and “Typical Chelyabinsk”. Some VKontakte groups are bought out entirely by Five Public shareholders, while others are leased.

“Judging by how actively Aram Ashotovich promoted his new projects at the expense of Life, that is, not entirely his own resource, this looks like some element of the deal,” says journalist Oleg Kashin. — Deals either with the Kovalchuks, who own Life, or with the Kremlin, which over all these years could, without exaggeration, be called the real shareholder of Life. In general, it seems very likely that on the Kremlin’s side, Gabrelyanov’s main counterparty was Vyacheslav Volodin - with his arrival everything blossomed at Life, but with his departure everything died out. Telegram channels and public pages are a different market, with different money and different people. For Gabrelyanov, this is a downshift in any case, but it’s hard to doubt that he will be able to become the leader of this market, he knows how.”

Media analyst Vasily Gatov doesn’t have much faith in the success of new projects: “It’s like a lottery. This is some kind of experimental activity. Sometimes such projects work out.” “As long as Aram Gabrelyanov’s center of business was the newspaper Zhizn, which he knew how to monetize, everything was fine,” says Gatov. — As soon as he began to engage in a business unfamiliar to him: the website and Life channel, in which the key thing is investment assessments, everything changed. Gabrelyanov from the old business culture. He committed a large-scale fraud. In America, he would be in prison, where those who gave him money would put him.”

Why does Gabrelyanov need many new projects with young managers? Gatov believes that either “the managers of Gabrelyanov’s new projects are much smarter than him,” or “Aram Ashotovich himself is simply tired of everything and thus wants to take a break from his work.” According to Gatov, such transformations in News Media are logical: “At first, traditional media try to adapt to the digital format, after some time they realize that there is no investment, then they create incubators like Mash. These are all cheap attempts to try different models of income and communication.” Small projects, according to Gatov, “are good because they do not create a long response either to the audience or to the people who create it. This is temporary. But for an effective shot, the Russian media market must be three times larger.”

“Although Aram Gabrelyanov knows how to realize non-economic opportunities: selling political influence, receiving indirect subsidies from those who want to please the authorities, from the authorities themselves,” recalls Gatov. “We are now witnessing a critical moment in media history, when traditional formats, which include newspapers, radio, television channels, and sites focused on desktop consumption, are balancing on a knife’s edge. The fact is that their future is increasingly less certain due to the growing transfer of money to the Internet. We must understand that all the projects launched by Aram Gabrelyanov, and not only him, in the last 10 years turned out to be incorrectly calculated. That is, we had to count not on growth, but at least on stagnation or even decline.”

“Russian media consumption is at a standstill, like Sevastopol during the Crimean War. You can make a local project that plays in a very narrow market, but scaling it is a mistake. The Russian media market has turned out to be too difficult for Russian entrepreneurs who rely on chance,” the analyst believes.

To bookmarks

The site’s interlocutor says that the shareholders decided to leave Life from television and develop streaming broadcasting about a month ago. Now the channel's employees have been notified.

“If they don’t take the streams, then they won’t show Life. If they take it, they will,” he said.

Gabrelyanov also recalled that Life never paid operators for broadcasting. How

His life was bright, but short. The Life channel, formerly Lifenews, was closed a few days ago, without specifically explaining to the viewer why. Let us remind you what a television project is, which until recently was called one of the most influential media in Russia.

The stormy life of the Life TV channel ended in the first seconds of August 19. The last evening newscast had aired the day before.

“You can now watch Life TV channel news on social networks and on the Life.ru website,” announced the last broadcast.

Life off air

Only four years have passed since the launch. During this time, the channel, which grew out of a tabloid site, managed to change both its name - from LifeNews to Life - and its theme. They started with the usual gossip about stars and everyday dirt, but over time they took up politics and international news. What remained unchanged was the love for sensations and interest in user-generated content. LifeNews was the first in Russia to start paying massively for “hot videos.”

“Become part of our team, our mobile reporters. On the way to work, at home, or while walking, you can always take unique footage,” – advertised the channel.

LifeNews and Ukraine

A young and ambitious channel developed with the beginning of the Kyiv protests and then the war in Ukraine. In pursuit of sensations, methods were not chosen.

Fakes published:
– “The Ukrainian army is only intensifying the shelling of phosphorus mines.”
– “The white dove on the dome of the temple for six months defended the village in the "DPR" from shells."
They helped the separatists.
They gave rise to a lot of Internet memes, in particular about Yarosh’s fireproof “business card”:
- "When searching these cars found a medallion Right sector number 20, as well as business cards of Dmitry Yarosh."

LifeNews was the first to talk about the downing of a Malaysian Boeing over Donbass, still believing that we were talking about a Ukrainian Air Force plane.

“The militia report that they managed to shoot down another transport plane of the Ukrainian Air Force. This happened over the city of Torez,” it said in the report.

LifeNews and scandals

Gradually, the LifeNews brand became synonymous with scandal. Undercover footage, edited interviews.

In pursuit of an exclusive, in 2014, a channel employee tried to bribe a neurosurgeon in order to be the first to learn about the death of Eldar Ryazanov.

A year later, her colleague literally “barked” at Ukrainian journalists.

LifeNews and user video

More than once, the cause of scandals was the channel's strong point - videos sent by viewers. In 2014, LifeNews really wanted to show how roofers painted a star on a Moscow high-rise in the colors of the Ukrainian flag. Paid for video clip 5 thousand dollars, but they couldn’t show it. Author of the video sent the fee for the needs of the Donbass battalion.

This year, oppositionist Alexei Navalny pulled a similar joke on the channel.

“The pro-Kremlin TV channel LifeNews immediately announced a reward of 50 thousand rubles to anyone who sends them a video about Navalny, filmed anywhere in the world. As you understand, my wife Yulia filmed it,” – told Navalny.

They paid for the “sensation,” but less than promised: 10 thousand rubles instead of 50.

Life after death

Life was part of the media empire of Russian entrepreneur Aram Gabrelyanov. In addition to the TV channel, the News Media holding included several Internet sites, a radio station, and business magazines.

According to sources close to the channel, Gabrelyanov’s difficulties are also related to the change of leadership in the administration of the Russian president. The publication Znak reports that with the departure of the first deputy head of the administration, Vyacheslav Volodin, to the post of Speaker of the State Duma, Life began to have problems with financing.

Volodin was closely associated with Gabrelyanov. Life leaked confidential information from law enforcement agencies, and the channel itself was often used for intra-elite conflicts. Now, according to a source in the media holding itself, the channel is considered too expensive and unnecessary in the current Russian media system.

The Life TV channel approached its finale more than modestly. He did not inform about the closure of the audience in advance, but the last story showed material about the favorite children's books of Russians.

Illustration copyright Vyacheslav Prokofyev\tass

The Life TV channel will stop producing content for broadcasting and will switch to live broadcasts on the Internet for emergency reasons, General Director of the News Media holding Aram Gabrelyanov told the BBC Russian Service.

According to media reports, the channel will stop broadcasting from Saturday.

The license holder, the Media Content company, sent a letter to cable and satellite operators to stop broadcasting the Life channel “due to its closure,” RBC reported on Friday.

“Only the website and our projects remain, of course. (TV broadcasting) will be stopped completely. At the frequency, there will be an appeal to TV viewers to follow Life news on the website and on social networks,” a source in the News Media holding, which includes the TV channel, told TASS.

According to the source, the channel cut 90 people working on content for the broadcast. Gabrelyanov told RBC that many of them will move to other projects of the holding.

According to a source of the Znak.com portal in the holding, most of the employees were fired.

“All the broadcast employees were fired. Only four operators remained. It was also decided to abandon the recently launched SHOT project, in addition, the layoff affected several journalists,” a source told Znak.com.

Switch to streams

In a conversation with the BBC Russian Service, Gabrelyanov said that the channel did not have on-air broadcasting as such - it only supplied news content to operators of satellite and cable networks, to which it will now offer “streams,” that is, live broadcasts on emergency occasions.

“We don’t have any contracts. We don’t have on-air broadcasting. For example, Tricolor [satellite television operator Tricolor TV] takes the picture for free. If they don’t want to take our streams, well, they won’t take it. What now do," Gabrelyanov said.

Earlier, the deputy head of the News Media holding, Anatoly Suleymanov, spoke specifically about reducing the channel’s broadcasting.

“In principle, it was said that everything would be reduced a year ago, a year and a half ago. That we would leave broadcasting, we would switch to streaming broadcasting,” he told TASS.

Illustration copyright Artyom Korotayev\tass Image caption Gabrelyanov (left) called the version that the channel was closed on the initiative of the Kremlin “stupidity”

“We have switched to streams. We are starting stream broadcasting, we are preparing for a big stream broadcasting project,” Gabrelyanov answered the question about the closure of the TV channel.

“A stream is, for example, if God forbid there is some kind of terrorist attack, from there we will not give news, not stories, like everyone else does, but a live broadcast.”

“Well, what am I going to explain to you idiots here? They want to make television - let them do it. I have my own niche. I want to occupy my niche, I will occupy it,” Gabrelyanov summed up.

Now on the Life website in the “Stream” section, both editorial materials and video content from third-party producers are broadcast.

Incident with Navalny

Opposition leader Alexei Navalny said on Friday that he sold the Life TV channel a video shot by his wife in which he walks around Rouen, France.

Previously, Life offered 50 thousand rubles for a video about Navalny’s trip.

As Navalny said, after that he decided to “film himself near some recognizable historical landmark” in Rouen. The video was recorded by the politician's wife; through an employee of the Navalny Anti-Corruption Foundation, he was sent to Life.

The video formed the basis of a material on the Life.ru website, published under the title “Michelin Adventures: How Navalny Vacationed in Rouen.” The material said that the politician visited expensive restaurants during his visit to France. There were no such shots on the recording.

The material appeared on the Life.ru website at noon, and a few hours later Navalny released a statement in which he explained how the video appeared, adding that he would spend the 10 thousand rubles received from the channel for his presidential campaign.

Life.ru responded that Navalny “deceived himself,” and the channel’s goal was precisely to prove that Navalny was in France. After Navalny’s departure abroad, which Life.ru wrote about, the head of his headquarters, Leonid Volkov, told RBC that the politician was in Moscow.

“The result was achieved as intended: Navalny admitted that he was in France, specifically in Rouen; he admitted that Leonid Volkov lied, and, most importantly, that FBK employees are so unprofessional that they cannot create a plausible justification for their attempts to sell deliberately false video,” says Life.ru in response to Navalny.