The prime minister's ‘unscripted’ primetime

Here's what we know about how Dmitry Medvedev manages journalists' questions at his annual live TV interviews

On Thursday, November 30, Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev will sit down for his tenth annual live interview, this year with reporters from five TV networks. Over the past decade, these exchanges have been rare opportunities for journalists, including representatives from Russia’s independent media, to question one of the key members of the Russian government on live television. There’s one important detail about these interviews, however, that is hidden from viewers: Dmitry Medvedev knows the questions in advance (though his press secretary and some journalists deny it). Meduza explains why the prime minister likely knows more than his spokespeople will admit.

The network TV interviews are an important public outreach platform for Medvedev

The first time Medvedev sat down for one of these live interviews was in late 2008, a few months after the start of his presidential term. For the first several years, the only TV networks invited to these interviews were the government-friendly stations Pervyi Kanal, NTV, and Rossiya, but in 2012 he expanded the group, even including the independent channel Dozhd. Until 2014, then chief editor Mikhail Zygar represented Dozhd, until he was replaced in 2014 with anchor Mikhail Fishman. Several times, TV journalist Marianna Maksimovskaya has represented REN TV.In 2015 and 2016, Elizaveta Osetinskaya and Elmar Murtazayev represented the magazine RBC.

Today in Russia, this format — where a state official sits down with multiple journalists for a live TV interview — is associated directly with Dmitry Medvedev, who started the tradition as president and has continued it as prime minister. As Mikhail Zygar told the radio station Ekho Moskvy in December 2015, journalists welcomed Medvedev’s readiness to answer questions from different media outlets on live television as a sign of his courage and openness.

But Medvedev knows the questions in advance

Natalia Timakova, Medvedev’s press secretary, told Meduza that the journalists participating in these annual interviews meet roughly a week beforehand to “walk through the general scenario.” “We’ll agree to discuss the economy first, then domestic policy, then foreign policy, and we’ll end on some general questions,” Timakova explained.

Mikhail Zygar told Meduza that journalists are actually asked to walk through the interview in greater detail, approximating their questions in advance. “It wasn’t like ‘first there will be a corruption question and then a military question,’” Zygar said, explaining that he once submitted sample questions in a common file ahead of one of Medvedev’s annual TV interviews (Zygar didn’t mention if Timakova attended this walk-through meeting).

Both Timakova and the journalists interviewing Medvedev say the questions are discussed in advance not for censorship purposes, but so they can make time for the interviewers to ask the questions they value most during the 90-minute broadcast. Elizaveta Osetinskaya told Meduza that her questions weren’t submitted for approval, saying, “The discussion about the questions was actually quite productive, and not any kind of censorship.” Elmar Murtazayev confirmed that Medvedev’s press service never tried to veto any questions.

Murtazayev told Meduza that journalists met with Timakova to “agree on themes, not questions,” though he later added that “Timakova saw the questions.” He recalled a time when she asked him to condense a question, so it didn’t eat up too much air time during the interview. Asked about this, Timakova told Meduza that nobody stopped Murtazayev from asking his question. Mikhail Fishman told Meduza that he has discussed the general structure of the interview with Medvedev’s press team, but he said he’s never coordinated the wording of his questions.

Nevertheless, Meduza has reason to believe that Medvedev’s press office got all his questions in advance for at least one of his annual interviews, giving the prime minister the chance to prepare specific answers for his TV appearance.

In August 2014, the hacker group Anonymous International published partial records of emails allegedly belonging to Dmitry Medvedev. In addition to photographs from his travels and work correspondence with state officials and experts, the hackers posted an email apparently forwarded to Medvedev by Timakova on December 3, 2013, about three days before his TV interview that year. (Anonymous International claims that the prime minister used the email address usilyaev@yandex.ru.) The forwarded message, supposedly sent by Medvedev’s deputy press secretary, Ksenia Kaminskaya, contained a file attachment with the questions Medvedev would be asked on television. Titled “Updated Questions,” the document listed which journalists would ask what questions and in what order. Comparing the leaked document to the interview that later took place, there are relatively few differences.

One example

MARYANAM. Maksimovskaya (REN TV): Mr. Medvedev, now let’s talk about how this works… You yourself mentioned the new housing minister. I’m probably not mistaken if I say that it’s housing and communal services that concerns most Russians most of all. Tariffs are rising, while state officials lie shamelessly to the public, claiming that the spike this year was only 6 percent, when it was actually 12 percent. And you recently announced a new initiative to collect advance utilities payments from people citizens to cover non-payments. But the management companies — not individual customers — are responsible for most of these non-payments. So maybe we shouldn’t be putting more on the shoulders of ordinary people, and instead we finally ought to deal with the companies managing Russia’s housing and communal services?

Another example

VADIM Continuing on the theme of the economy.V Takmenyov: That’s also true. Mr. Medvedev, I would like to ask you about something. In the 1970s, when everything seemed to be going well on the oil market, the country’s leaders used this situation to do things like make as many tanks and missiles as possible. Years later, economists (as a rule, leading economists with the benefit of hindsight) said that the USSRSoviet Union’s economy was destroyed in an “arms race.” Today, judging by the money allocated, this race to some extent continues. And we’ve also had the most expensive APEC summit in history, and we’ve got the most expensive Olympics coming up. What else? There’s the FIFA World Cup, for which we need we’ve got to build stadiums dozens of stadiums and so on. What would I call all this? An arms race. All this adds up to an arms race. Do you worry that you and the government could soon be accused of think the government and you in particular might sooner or later be accused of getting tied up in this ruinous “arms race,” and … I can’t say of course “crashing the economy,” but this arms race is affecting Russia’s economy, and all the more so with what about our Minister Ulyukayev promising hard times ahead having said so much already.

The document’s metadata suggests that it was created by Mikhail Zygar on December 3, 2013. Meduza cannot confirm that he was the one who sent this file to Medvedev’s press office. Zygar told Meduza that Medvedev’s team was aware of all the questions in advance, except for some “surprises” from Twitter, referring to questions submitted online from Dozhd viewers, which Zygar asked the prime minister at the end of the interview. But two of the three Twitter questions he asked in the televised interview also appeared in the “Updated Questions” document leaked by Anonymous International: one about the ratification of Article 20 of the UN Convention on Corruption, and another about Medvedev’s presidential ambitions in 2018.

Asked about the leak, Natalia Timakova refused to comment on what she called forged documents, pointing out that the leader of Anonymous International reportedly confessed in court to falsifying the contents of her emails.

Meduza is confident that the leaked correspondence about Medvedev’s 2013 interview is authentic

We have logical and technical reasons to believe “Updated Questions” is the genuine article.

Let’s start with the logical argument. In order to falsify an email with a file attachment containing the exact questions that would be put to Russia’s prime minister in an interview, the hackers from Anonymous International would have needed the following:

• To know that the journalists meet in advance to discuss and confirm the order of questions (the first, admittedly vague reports of such meetings weren’t published until December 2015, after the hackers’ leak); and
• To know that Mikhail Zygar recorded the meeting’s minutes (in the metadata for “Обновленные вопросы.doc,” he is listed as the document’s author).

And now for the technical side. Modern email services use a cryptographic authentication method called DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail), which is designed to prevent forged emails. The technology attaches a digital signature and unique textual string to every email, making it possible to detect outside revisions to any message’s metadata and (or) contents. Even the slightest change to one of these emails would make it impossible to authenticate its DKIM signature.

With the letter allegedly sent to Medvedev, the DKIM signature should guarantee that it wasn’t falsified:

• The email was sent on Tuesday, December 3, 2013, at 6:17:16 p.m. Moscow time
• The subject line was “Fwd: Questions for the Interview”
• The sender was “Natalia Timakova tna.gov@gmail.com”
• The recipient was “usilyaev@yandex.ru”
• The only other contents of the message were an attached Word Document titled “Обновленные вопросы.doc”

In order to forge the DKIM signature of a specific email, you need access to the email service’s encrypted private key. In this case, Anonymous International would have needed to know Gmail’s private key, meaning the group would have needed to hack Google itself.

Earlier this year, in an article where ProPublica used DKIM to authenticate emails sent by Marc Kasowitz, one of Donald Trump’s personal attorneys, journalist Jeremy Merrill explained that even emails that fail DKIM signature tests aren’t necessarily falsified, because “some email servers are a little wonky and make little changes to an email — adding or removing spaces at the end or something like that.” “Seriously — you can’t conclude that it has been tampered with. You just don’t know,” Merrill wrote.

The leaked email containing Medvedev’s interview questions is a file called message-1-11222.eml in an archive titled manatan.rar. The email fails DKIM signature tests, but Meduza discovered that it can be authenticated if you open it up in a text editor and delete a specific space (like the one Merrill said some “wonky servers” add to emails). This offers technical proof that the attachment with interview questions was sent on December 3, 2013, from tna.gov@gmail.com to usilyaev@yandex.ru, and that Anonymous International couldn’t have falsified it in any way.

Medvedev was very, very, very well prepared for that interview

In his 2013 televised interview, Prime Minister Medvedev was miraculously well prepared for almost every question, having memorized a every necessary statistic. NTV’s Vadim Takmenyov asked him about the ban on American families adopting Russian children, highlighting a specific example where only one of 33 Russian children promised to American foster parents ended up being adopted by a Russian family. In his answer, Medvedev said, “You mentioned Petersburg. Thirty-three [children], you said? I’ve also investigated the adoption process there, and now there are only 11 children left. Those are the numbers I have.”

The same question appears in the document leaked by Anonymous International, with the same specific example of the 33 children in St. Petersburg. (Takmenyov refused to speak to Meduza.)

In this context, noteworthy is Medvedev’s reaction to perhaps the only unscripted question in the entire interview: a question from “Dozhd viewer Oleg Kashin” presented by Mikhail Zygar about the fact that former government officials often go on to receive large salaries at state or state-affiliated enterprises. As an example, Zygar cited Vasily Yakemenko, the former head of Russia’s Federal Youth Agency. After Yakemenko stepped down from this position, Kashin said, he found a lucrative job at Sberbank without ever actually going to work.

This question was the only one throughout the interview that seemed to catch Medvedev without a prepared response, and the prime minister even admitted that he didn’t know who was earning how much or where, though he promised to “make inquiries” in this particular situation. Kashin told Meduza that he gave his question to Zygar on the day of the interview.

The unexpected question from Kashin is another good reason to believe the leaked email is genuine. To have successfully falsified the list of questions for Medvedev, the hackers at Anonymous International would have had to know not to include Kashin's question in the Word document because he only gave it to Zygar at the last minute.

To summarize: There’s no use thinking that the journalists participating in Medvedev’s big annual TV interviews will be able to catch the prime minister off guard with some truly unexpected question. Medvedev always knows what’s coming, and possibly even knows exactly how the questions will be worded. For the same reason, don’t be surprised when he’s able to recite exact statistics and facts in response to seemingly any question. And, finally, don’t hold your breath in anticipation that journalists might be able to “lean” on Medvedev with follow-up questions. That’s not how this format works. Nevertheless, the journalists who agree to participate in these interviews don’t consider this process to be censorship, explaining that it’s just what is required to get the opportunity to pose questions to one of the Russian government’s highest ranking officials.

Story by Alexander Borzenko, Denis Dmitriyev, and Evgeny Berg, translation by Kevin Rothrock