Gymnasts for the governor

The blogger suspected the governor of the Moscow region of doing PR on children from Ukraine

On the morning of June 23, a video message from two girls near Moscow appeared on YouTube, asking regional governor Andrei Vorobyov to save their friends from Donetsk. Blogger Ruslan Leviev suspected Vorobyov’s PR in their appeal, and TJournal supplemented his investigation with its own findings.

Updated: TJournal readers pointed out that Nadya’s page, the link to which was given in the article, does not belong to the heroine of the video. Instead, they found another page , which was frozen by the VKontakte administration, but, judging by the archival copy , which really belongs to the girl with the video.

Please, help

At 10 am on June 23, a link to a video message to Andrei Vorobyov was published on the microblog of the young gymnast Sasha Evdokimova. In the tweet, the girl also addressed the governor of the Moscow region and asked him to help with the “rescue” of her friends from Donetsk.

In the video (it was published on behalf of the user Alexander Evdokimov), Sasha and her friend Nadya talk about their friends from Donetsk, who came to competitions in Russia and who suffer from being in their hometown, afraid to go out because of the hostilities. The girls ask Vorobyov to help them get their friends out of there.

Arina from Donetsk

During the appeal, the girls show a photo of Donetsk gymnasts (in the picture they form a “heart”) and a screenshot of correspondence with one of their friends - her name is “Arishka”, and on her avatar there is a fragment from the same “heart” photo.

Ruslan Leviev, studying this story, looked through the list of users that Sasha Evdokimova reads on Twitter, and found only one girl there named Arina. However, this girl recently vacationed in Thailand and, judging by her profile on VKontakte, is actually from Irkutsk.

On VKontakte, Sasha Evdokimova has three Arinas and two Arishas as friends, but they are all from Russia. Her only friend from Donetsk is named Yana.

Leviev uses these circumstances as reasons to doubt the reality of the entire story described. However, TJournal found evidence that the real Arina from Donetsk still exists.

Among Sasha Evdokimova’s friends you can find a friend named Nadya , and among her friends there are four Arinas from Donetsk.

In the profile of one of them - Arina Tkachuk - you can find the same photo of the girls, placed in the shape of a “heart”. TJournal was unable to contact Arina, as her account is closed to messages from outsiders.

TJournal found another girl from Donetsk who published the same photo a day later than Tkachuk - and also Arina , but she does not have direct social connections with the heroines of the video message.

Oddities: an astronaut and a lawyer

But this story, even without “Arina from Irkutsk,” is full of oddities. Ruslan Leviev drew attention to the video after he saw a tweet from cosmonaut Maxim Suraev, who is now on the ISS, in his feed.

Something terrible is happening on Earth. Poor girls https://t.co/kJ1YjNtVpD

— Max Suraev (@Msuraev) June 23, 2014

At the time of writing, Sasha Evdokimova’s tweet has well over 500 retweets. But the main “driver” for her video message was not Suraev, but lawyer Shota Gorgadze. He was the first to retweet the tweet with a link to the video.

Gorgadze, apparently, knows Evdokimova quite well: he was the first person she followed on Twitter, and they are friends on VKontakte and Odnoklassniki. Leviev explains this fact simply: the lawyer, among other things, is the director of the ISKA Rhythmic Gymnastics Center in the Moscow region, where Sasha trains .

However, Gorgadze and Suraev have something in common with the theme of Sasha Evdokimova’s video message. In 2013, when elections for governor of the Moscow region were held, the Russian cosmonaut headed the campaign headquarters of Andrei Vorobyov. And in January 2014, Shota Gorgadze headed the Public Chamber of the Moscow Region.

Another inconsistency in the statement of the notorious Irina Pleshcheva, head of the main department of social communications of the Moscow region. She, announcing a video message from Sasha Evdokimova (I wonder why she didn’t give it to Vorobyov personally?), wrote that the Donetsk girls came to the competition two months ago.

Two months ago the girls came to the Moscow region for competitions http://t.co/Ai7Sb9V4WX using @YouTube #saveArina

— Irina (@Plesheva) June 23, 2014

Leviev studied the results of the Open Championship for the prizes of the President of the ISKA Center, held on May 3-4, and did not find the girl Arina from Donetsk there. TJournal was also unable to find her among the participants in other rhythmic gymnastics competitions near Moscow. Although, perhaps, by “girls” Pleshcheva did not mean specifically the heroine of the video, but her other friends.

What's the result?

TJournal wrote a letter to Shota Gorgadze, but there was no response at the time of publication of the note. Ruslan Leviev believes that the girls, who are noticeably overacting in the video, are simply being used for Vorobyov’s PR. It is possible that this will ultimately turn out to be the case: the Moscow region, which receives hundreds of refugees from Ukraine every day, could use a beautiful story about the “rescue” of young gymnasts. The main thing is that they themselves want to be saved.

Girls, if you are being tortured, do a triple somersault with a flip,
Sultan Suleymanov,
TJournal

#Article #Ukraine #Donetsk #Andrey_Vorobiev #Moscow region #governor_Moscow region #Sasha_Evdokimova #gymnasts #video message_gymnast_Vorobiev