The Bell releases the name of the creator of Telegram channel Rybar

The creator of the Telegram channel Rybar is Mikhail Zvinchuk, a 31-year-old translator from Arabic and former member of the Russian Defense Ministry’s press service, says publication the Bell.

After the Bell released the first part of its investigation into Rybar, in which they revealed the identity of one the channel’s creators, a reader who was acquainted with its founder contacted the Bell. The reader shared Zvinchuk’s phone number, and the Bell was able to confirm his identity.

The Bell notes that Zvinchuk’s biography aligns “in all the details” with facts the Rybar creator disclosed about himself during a chat with the channel’s users, in which he used the nickname “RD” and called himself the channel’s owner.

As the Bell revealed, Zvinchuk was born in 1991 in Vladivostok, served in the army, and then studied to become an Arabic translator at the Military University of the Ministry of Defense in Moscow. After graduating, he worked at the Defense Ministry in the department of information and mass communications until at least August 2017, and left “because of difficult working conditions and poor pay.”

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The Bell reached Zvinchuk on Telegram. At first he said they’d “confused him with someone else.” But after The Bell disclosed knowledge of his Rybar chat and his LiveJournal he wrote “Oh God! I’d rather deanonymize than read what I wrote 20 years ago.” However, in further conversations with a correspondent from the Bell, Zvinchuk neither confirmed or denied that he was the creator or writer of Rybar, and he left the correspondent’s last message, which was a direct question on the topic, unread.