The office of Angela Merkel has announced that the former chancellor recently received a phone call from two Russian pranksters posing as Ukrainian ex-President Petro Poroschenko.

Russian pranksters call former German chancellor Merkel

On Monday, the personal office of Angela Merkel revealed that the now-retired leader received a prank call from two infamous Russian tricksters posing as Petro Poroschenko. Poroschenko preceded Volodymyr Zelenskyy as the President of Ukraine from 2014 to 2019.

Speaking to the dpa, Merkel’s spokesperson said that the former chancellor had spoken to the pranksters via a German Foreign Ministry translator on January 12, 2023. Merkel then told the ministry about the “impression that she gained of the caller during the call.” 

Following the interaction, recordings of the call surfaced on the messaging app Telegram. The conversation included Merkel defending her mediation of the Minsk agreement, a peace deal signed by herself, Poroschenko, French President Francois Hollande and Vladimir Putin in 2015. In the call, Merkel also allegedly criticised totalitarianism in Russia’s neighbour Belarus, which according to more recently leaked documents, Putin also intends to “absorb” by 2030.  

Who are the Russian tricksters who phoned Merkel?

Vladimir Kuznetsov and Alexei Stolyarov, who go by the noms de guerre of Vovan and Lexus, are infamous for their prank calls with Russian and international notables.

Back in 2018, then-UK Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson picked up a call from Kuznetsov and Stolyarov, this time posing as Armenian leader Nikol Pashinyan. During the 18-minute-long conversation, the Russian duo propounded that political aides of Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn were being funded by the Kremlin.

In the same year, the head of Ukraine’s Orthodox Church was targeted. This time, the Church’s leader, Epiphanius Dumenko was tricked into thinking he was on the phone line with David McAllister, a German politician and European Parliament lawmaker who on this occasion, was speaking English with a Russian accent.

Since a March 2022 prank call with British Defence Secretary Ben Wallace, Vovan and Lexus have been banned from YouTube and subsequently moved to the Russian video platform Rutube to publish their prank videos.

Thumb image credit: photocosmos1 / Shutterstock.com