On September 19, Yulia Kuznetsova’s team wrote that the candidate was “still not home and there is no contact with her”. In the same message, allies stated that after the video clip published the day before, they were even more convinced that Kuznetsova was not safe and recorded the clip under pressure.
The allies named three reasons for their doubts. According to them, the metadata showed the video was recorded at 20:02 and published at 20:58, and in Kuznetsova’s channel the usual clips have a resolution of 400×400 and 30 frames per second, whereas this clip has 384×384 and 10 frames per second.
The team also claims that the downloaded file has a black border and the Telegram logo, while the other clips in the channel have a white border. They believe such a clip could not have been made on an iPhone and that it requires an Android smartphone.
Another argument supporters of Kuznetsova linked to the candidate’s and her husband’s phones: as of 14:00 Moscow time on September 19, they, according to them, were still not online. Earlier, on September 18, the project “Word to Defense” reported, citing Kuznetsova’s mother, that she had “gone away for three days without a phone”.
On the evening of September 18, Kuznetsova herself wrote on Telegram that after a “rather difficult conversation” her husband had to provide her with psychological and medical help. She assured that she would soon return home. Kuznetsova is running for the Greens in the Babushkinsky single-mandate district No. 195 in Moscow; earlier she worked in Boris Nadezhdin’s штаб, and the FBK and Maxim Katz’s team included her in the list of recommended candidates for voting.
In the Greens’ Telegram channel on September 18, they said they had not commented on Kuznetsova’s whereabouts before her own message. The party also said that the right to digital hygiene and a break from the phone is especially important during the emotionally difficult period of an election campaign.
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