Russian pranksters dupe Canadian lawmakers with faux Navalny act

Canadian lawmakers had been tricked by Russian pranksters claiming to be one in every of opposition chief Alexey Navalny’s key supporters at a closed-door assembly final month.
On April 22, Canada’s cheard testimony from a witness claiming to be Leonid Volkov, chief of workers to the imprisoned critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin, Vice News reported Tuesday. Instead, lawmakers listened to pranksters Vladimir Kuznetsov and Alexei Stolyarov impersonating the Navalny aide for 25 minutes earlier than realizing they’d been tricked.
The committee confirmed the Vice report later Tuesday. Shortly after the assembly started “it became clear that the individual was misrepresenting himself, and the committee promptly suspended — and then terminated — the meeting to investigate further,” the group stated in a press release.
The actual Volkov is scheduled to testify about Navalny’s present state of affairs on Thursday. Kuznetsov and Stolyarov instructed Vice that they plan to add scenes from the April 22 assembly onto their YouTube channel.
Lawmakers within the Netherlands, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia just lately fell for a similar ruse from the duo, who’ve constructed a repute focusing on Western politicians by posing as well-known individuals. The pair additionally satisfied Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s workplace to have a name by claiming to be teenage climate-change activist Greta Thunberg.
Canada’s overseas affairs committee “condemns these repeated attempts aimed at misleading parliamentarians on a very serious situation,” it stated in its assertion, including that Russia’s continued arrests of Navalny sympathizers make it “more determined to be fully and properly briefed on the situation.”