The account's owner, who said he'd prefer to stay anonymous to discourage Russian trolls, said they started the account since there was no good parody of the foreign minister in English and his statements were predictable enough to make his job easy.

There was apparently no warning at all before the suspension, they said, and no surge in trolling activity, prompting them to believe that they weren't the target of a troll campaign. "Before these suspensions happened, their [Ministry of Foreign Affairs] spokeswoman talked about the Lavrov account on Facebook, and Russian media wrote almost 100 articles about it," they said.