In February 2024, a voice message went viral on the Internet in which the mother of the deceased politician allegedly calls his widow Julia a vile and low person and says that she despises her for her attitude towards the death of her son. We checked to see if this is a real post.
The video began to spread en masse across Russian Telegram channels, media and other platforms on February 22. Numerous publications claim that Alexei Navalny’s mother, deceased in the colony on February 16, openly accused her daughter-in-law of adultery and other “vile” acts. Authors of some posts thinkthat in this way Lyudmila Navalnaya “buried Yulia Navalnaya’s political career in Russia.”
Posts with this video were published in Telegram channels "Notes from a veteran"(137,000 views at the time of writing this analysis), "Yuri Baranchik"(104,000), Alex Parker Returns (91,000), "Club service" (61,000), "Tsargrad-TV" (37,000), "Yulia Vityazeva"(28,000), etc. Similar messages were widely circulated in Zen, where only one publication The site RuNews24.ru received more than 900,000 views. In addition, such posts are found in “VKontakte", "Odnoklassniki", LiveJournal and on media websites (EADaily, "Notebook").
The viral video (in fact, an audio recording with an alleged speech by Lyudmila Navalnaya and a placeholder picture) lasts almost a minute and a half. Below is the full transcript:
“Dear Yulia Borisovna Abrosimova (maiden name of Yulia Navalnaya - Ed.), now I want to turn to you. You last saw my son in February 2022. You do not have a ban on entry into Russia, not a single criminal case has been opened against you, but you have never come to visit him in two years. In fact, since the spring of 2021, you are not married to my son, you appear publicly in society with other men. It was you who forced him to come to Russia when he had just come out of a coma and was poorly able to assess the situation. You forced all of Alexei's property to be transferred to you. You even disinherited your own son, which is why he won't talk to you. You turned your daughter against your son. It was strange and wild for me to see how you and smile a few hours after Alexei's death, speak on his behalf in Munich. How do you appropriate his voice after his death. You didn’t even take a break for the sake of decency, you didn’t observe mourning. They ran to sell his death. You are a vile and low person. I despise you and forbid you to speculate on the name of my son, my child.”
To begin with, “Verified” tried to find the original source of the message and found the earliest entry in the Telegram channel “Signal"(156,000 views), where she appeared on February 22 at 08:29 Moscow time. This post states that Lyudmila Navalnaya’s appeal was previously published in some media (no links are provided). Let us remind you that Signal has repeatedly posted fakes, including fake ones covers foreign satirical magazines and fake video about Vladimir And Elena Zelensky. In addition, in March 2022, it was from this channel that the disinformation campaign that the Ukrainians falsified a report about the shelling of a maternity hospital in Mariupol. By data “Medusa”, “Important Stories” and The Bell, “Signal” is supervised by blogger Ekaterina Agranovich (Katrusya), who also represents the “network” of channels of media manager Kristina Potupchik, who is close to the Kremlin.
On the morning of February 23, a viral recording was broadcast on the Dozhd TV channel. commented Director of the Anti-Corruption Foundation Ivan Zhdanov: “Yesterday some dirt created by a neural network went onto the Internet. Something there: “An appeal from Navalny’s mother to Yulia Navalnaya.” I think that they [in the Kremlin] will use the same dirty methods, fakes, create something and leak it to Telegram channels.”
“Verified”, in turn, analyzed the viral audio using the service AI or Not, which allows you to determine speech generated by a neural network. According to the results of the audit, Navalny’s mother’s appeal to Yulia Navalnaya was most likely created using artificial intelligence. Some indirect factors also indicate the artificiality of the voice (for example, multiple mechanical interference and distortion are clearly audible in the recording).
In addition, in the week since Navalny's death, his supporters have published two videos of his mother on YouTube. February 20 Lyudmila Navalnaya appealed to Russian President Vladimir Putin demanding that she be allowed to see her son’s body. On February 22 (after the post in Signal), the mother of the oppositionist toldthat the investigators are not giving her the body, insisting on a secret funeral. In both videos, Lyudmila Navalnaya’s voice and intonation are different from those heard in the viral audio. Moreover, both appeals published on the social network X and the widow of the politician Julia. The viral recording, unlike these two, does not have video footage, which, at the very least, raises suspicions.
Thus, the audio distributed in the media and social networks, in which Lyudmila Navalnaya criticizes her daughter-in-law Yulia, was faked using neural networks.
Cover photo: screenshot / social networks
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