At the beginning of May 2025, shortly after the premiere of the film about the President of the Russian Federation, reports spread across the Internet that one of its authors suffered from food poisoning from Kremlin treats, being embarrassed to warn Putin about his lactose intolerance. We have verified the accuracy of this story.

On May 5, blogger Alexander Makashenets on his YouTube channel released analysis of the documentary film “Russia. Kremlin. Putin. 25 years”, filmed by Pavel Zarubin and Saida Medvedeva for the TV channel “Russia 1”. At the time of writing this video gained over 88,000 views. In the video Makashenets speaks: “Meanwhile, the Telegram channel “RT in Russian” reports that Zarubin was poisoned during filming and suffered from vomiting and diarrhea. It turned out that the journalist was lactose intolerant, but he was embarrassed to tell the president about it. The publication “RT in Russian” will not lie, but for some reason the liberal media are silent about this.” At the same time, a screenshot of the corresponding post is shown.

Soon, news of Zarubin’s alleged poisoning spread to other sites. For example, similar publications are found in Facebook And Telegram, where the portal “Kompromat 1” (36,000 views) duplicated a note from your site. On social network X received more than 150,000 views tweet user under the nickname Add your name (@pashamanrus), who wrote: “The level of slavery and sycophancy is Pavel Zarubin, who crap after Putin treated him to kefir, which the reptile serf has an intolerance to.” In addition, similar messages were published by many Russian-language news sites, including “Power", "Consequence", "Rus compromising evidence", RePost, "RuMafia", "Chechnya free.ru", "Glaucus" And "Antimafia" The authors of some notes added that Zarubin was hospitalized soon after filming.

Video: @makashenets (YouTube)

An hour and a half film “Russia. Kremlin. Putin. 25 years" showed aired on the state TV channel “Russia 1” on May 4. “This film is about the president and Russia. A frank conversation with Vladimir Putin about the main and important things for the country over the past 25 years,” reads the synopsis of the film. For this tape, Putin not only gave an interview to Zarubin, but also gave the TV presenter a tour of the Kremlin. For example, the president showed the apartment, personal library, training hall and home church. This shooting took place on the night of March 26-27, 2025 - a quarter of a century before Putin won the presidential elections for the first time elections.

At the beginning of the film, a politician suggested to treat Zarubin, took him to the kitchen and gave him a choice of kefir and fermented baked milk from the refrigerator. The journalist chose the first option. In addition, Putin offered the presenter chocolate, donated by the President of Belarus Alexander Lukashenko, and at the end of the film he gave it to the guest try cranberries with honey.

According to the post from the distributed screenshot, after the treats the interviewer became ill. “Journalist Pavel Zarubin was poisoned while filming a film about Vladimir Putin. According to a source from the AP (Administration of the President of Russia - Ed.), two hours after lunch with the president, the journalist began vomiting and diarrhea. Later, the details of this scandalous situation became known. The journalist suffers from lactose intolerance, but he was embarrassed to tell the president about it. Therefore, when asked by Vladimir Putin whether he would try the signature Kremlin pancakes, he [Zarubin] answered with consent. By this time, the journalist’s condition had stabilized,” says the publication of the Telegram channel “RT on Russian”.

In fact, no reputable media wrote about this story, because this did not happen to the Kremlin journalist. The primary source of the news, indeed, was the Telegram channel “RT in Russian”, but many, apparently, mixed up it with a much larger and state-owned media holding "RT in Russian" In turn, “RT on Russian” publishes only fictitious news, which is directly stated in its description: “Parody, satire on political reality. Only verified fakes. Yes, we screwed up the description (from another satirical channel "and here is my Yandex wallet". - Editor's note.)" In this blog there is a post about the poisoning of Zarubin appeared May 4 at 19:53 Moscow time and received 12,000 views. Apparently, the author made this entry before watching the film itself (premiere took place at 21:00), which is why the post contains a quote about pancakes that was not aired. May 6 in “RT on Russian” published screenshot of a note about Zarubin’s poisoning from the site mentioned above RePost and the signature: “It happens.”

Screenshot of the description from the TGStat service

However, the words of Makashenets in his video, unlike many other publications, could be regarded precisely as a rebroadcast of a joke from RT in Russian. In a conversation with “Verified”, the blogger said (author’s spelling and punctuation preserved):

“Of course, I knew that RT in Russian is a trolling TG channel. My audience is intelligent and they shoot all the jokes, so out of respect for them I don’t say: “THIS IS THERE YOU HAVE TO LAUGH.” Although everything is obvious from the text in the video. There I say: “RT on Russian will not lie, but for some reason the liberal media are silent about this.” I categorically reject accusations of misinformation! It seems to me that it will be extremely OBJECTIVE if descendants remember Paul not by his sad reporting about the clever Putin and a pencil, and according to this post: the parquet journalist Zarubin could not refuse Putin, drank kefir - and shit himself.”

In several replays to the tweet of the above-mentioned social network user X @pashamanrus they also wrote that the news about Zarubin’s poisoning was published by an “analogue” of the satirical publication “Panorama" However, these remarks did not bother the blogger, and in response he asked: “What does this change?” “No “Panorama” will cancel Zarubin’s groveling,” - stated @pashamanrus, whose tweet at the time of writing this analysis continues to gain thousands of views without any clarification about the origin of the information.

Thus, the news that Pavel Zarubin poisoned himself during the filming of a documentary about Vladimir Putin initially appeared in the satirical Telegram channel. Then the post was quoted by blogger Alexander Makashenets, who, according to him, retold the publication as a joke. Subsequently, other users perceived the fable as a real event and continued to distribute it on other sites.

Cover photo: screenshot of the film / “Russia 1”