Is it true that Alla Pugacheva’s expensive watch was stolen at Yudashkin’s funeral?

At the beginning of May 2023, blogs and media reported that Alla Pugacheva became a victim of theft when she came to say goodbye to fashion designer Valentin Yudashkin. We decided to check if this is true.

The news of the theft at the funeral began to spread on May 7. As reported, Alla Pugacheva allegedly filed a complaint with the Kuntsevo department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs in connection with the loss of a Hublot wristwatch worth 2 million rubles. The singer’s direct speech was also quoted: “This watch was given to me for my birthday before last by Factor A graduates.” And yesterday, during the funeral of Valentin Yudashkin on Troekurovsky, I noticed that they were missing.” Some media outlets wrote about this: “Express newspaper", "Notebook", "TSN" The news spread widely on Telegram: Pugacheva’s missing watch was reported, in particular, by Telegram channels “Trash⚡️Ukraine"(1.1 million views at the time of publication), "Observer🇷🇺🇺🇦"(225,000), "First patriotic"(218,000), "Tynu40k Goblina (oper.ru)"(214,000), Ateo Breaking (203,000) and Voblya (172,000).

The first post about Pugacheva’s watch appeared on May 7 at 12:40 Moscow time in the Telegram channel “The Empire is very evil" There was a fragment in the text of the message that many Russian Telegram channels and media chose not to quote, but Ukrainian ones, on the contrary, focused on it: “I had almost no contact with anyone. Literally two or three people came up to me, including Dmitry Peskov. He doesn’t know, he says he doesn’t know anything.”

The press secretary of the Russian president, Dmitry Peskov, actually approached Alla Pugacheva at the funeral of fashion designer Valentin Yudashkin. He said hello with the singer and kissed her hand.

This meeting at the funeral drew attention primarily because of the situation in which the singer and her husband Maxim Galkin found themselves after the large-scale invasion of Russian troops in Ukraine. Galkin publicly on the first day of the war condemned actions of Russia, after which she and Pugacheva left the country. Subsequently, he entered the Prosecutor General's Office of the Russian Federation denunciation against Alla Pugacheva with a demand to check whether she is financing the Armed Forces of Ukraine, and in the State Duma of the Russian Federation this initiative welcomed. Maxim Galkin turned on to the list of “foreign agents”.

But in a message from the Telegram channel “The Empire is very evil» Peskov is mentioned in the same paragraph with Hublot watches not by chance. Back in 2015, politician Alexei Navalny and his associates published investigation into a watch worth 37 million rubles, which Peskov wore to his own wedding. Later, the president's press secretary justified that his wife gave him the watch.

Thus, in the very first publication one could notice a satirical subtext. A day after this post, the media turned to the official representative of Alla Pugacheva for comments. That replied: “This story did not exist, Alla Borisovna did not contact the police, nor did she give public comments to anyone; apparently, some unscrupulous media outlets made up her comments (like the whole story as a whole).” After this, the author of the Telegram channel more than once made it clearthat she herself came up with a joke about Pugacheva’s missing watch. In addition, in the channel description indicated in plain text: “Caution, possible fake news and harsh satire. What is written is a work of fiction, all coincidences are accidental.” Satirical posts in this Telegram channel more than once spread in blogs and in the media, but without any irony.

Cover photo: RIA Novosti / Wikimedia Commons

Satirical news

What do our verdicts mean?

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