Alexei Stolyarov and Vladimir Krasnov, who are famous for phone impersonations, say singer told them call was ‘most wonderful’ he had received

To cynics, it had seemed rather too good to be true: a phone call from Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, to Sir Elton John, singer and LGBT campaigner, about gay rights.

Unfortunately for John, it was, in fact, not true: despite an effusive Instagram post in which he thanked the Russian leader for having reached out to him on the issue, it swiftly became clear that, whoever had called him on Monday night, it had not been Putin.



The Kremlin had already denied all knowledge of the chat. And on Wednesday two famous Russian pranksters stepped forward to claim that they, not the president, had been the foreign voices at the end of the telephone.

“We thought it wasn’t likely that Putin would want to meet with him and call, at least not so quickly,” said Vladimir “Vovan” Krasnov, who said he had impersonated Putin while his co-prankster, Alexei “Lexus” Stolyarov, had posed as the president’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov.

“But it turned out that Elton John was really waiting for this call, and so he immediately believed it really was a conversation with the people who we said we were,” he told told newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda. “He said: ‘Thank you, you’ve made my day. This day and this conversation has been the most wonderful and lovely in my life.’”

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As if to complete John’s embarrassment, the pair announced they would broadcast a recording of the conversation on Wednesday on a popular Russian late-night show. John’s representatives have not commented on speculation of a hoax.

At the root of the saga are comments that the singer made at the weekend, in which he called out Putin about his “ridiculous” attitude towards gay people while lobbying for LGBT rights in Kiev, criticising in particular a Russian law passed in 2013 which bans the spreading of “propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations” among minors.

“I’d love to meet him [Putin], I’d love to sit down and talk to him,” John told the BBC, saying that, though the idea was “probably pie in the sky”, it was nonetheless worth a try. Then, on Monday night, the singer elicited incredulity from some observers when he posted a social media message declaring that Putin had responded to his criticisms by picking up the phone. He was, he said, “looking forward to meeting him [the president] face-to-face to discuss LGBT equality in Russia”.

Alas for John, it was not Putin on the end of the line but Stolyarov and Krasnov, who have prank-called many Russian and Ukrainian celebrities and politicians. Stolyarov, who speaks English well, had played Peskov and pretended to interpret for the two.

When asked about the possibility of a conversation, the real Peskov had told journalists on Tuesday that Putin would be “ready to meet with Elton John among others to give answers to all the questions that he might ask”, but said that the Kremlin had not received any requests from the singer. The Kremlin had reason to question the Instagram post’s authenticity, he added, “especially because it’s not entirely grammatically correct in English. We don’t think that Sir Elton John would have written so ungrammatically.”

Even before the Russian duo went public with their hoax, local media had been speculating that John had become the victim of a prank. Some people online had even identified Krasnov, who is known for fooling politicians with phone calls that he records and posts on his YouTube channel as Vovan222 as the culprit.

Prank-calling public figures and then publishing the recordings has become something of a phenomenon in recent years in Russia. Stolyarov, who is often credited as the father of the genre, has developed a knack for pranking Ukrainian politicians.

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He has been interviewed over the phone on Ukrainian television impersonating Anton Gerashchenko, the outspoken adviser to the interior minister, Arsen Avakov. He played Gerashchenko so well that he spoke to the former Dnipropetrovsk governor Ihor Kolomoisky for more than six hours over several days last year.

Krasnov first came to prominence after the parliamentary elections of 2011, which sparked a huge street protest movement after reports of widespread fraud. Pretending to be then president Dmitry Medvedev’s aide, Arkady Dvorkovich, he convinced the electoral commission head, Vladimir Churov, that Medvedev intended to fire him.

Besides numerous Russian celebrities, his victims have also included the former USSR president Mikhail Gorbachev, Kiev mayor and boxing champion Vitali Klitschko, and Russian sports minister Vitaly Mutko, whom he tricked into apologising for his athletes’ drunken behaviour. Last year, Krasnov reportedly called the Belarusian president, Alexander Lukashenko, pretending to be the son of the ousted Ukrainian leader, Viktor Yanukovych. He was so convincing that the caller on the other end, whose voice sounded like that of Lukashenko, offered asylum.

John’s initial statement that he wished to speak to Putin caused a huge reaction in Russia. The St Petersburg lawmaker Vitaly Milonov, who helped inspire the gay “propaganda” law, told the Guardian that John should not distract Putin with such an “irrelevant topic” and that he was ready to meet the singer to explain Russia’s position. The newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets held an online readers’ poll in which 39% of respondents thought Putin and John should meet, while 22% said such a meeting would harm Putin’s reputation.