Russian phone pranksters who duped Sir Elton John into thinking he was talking to President Putin and chatted to the Duke of Sussex for an hour while pretending to be Greta Thunberg have received a state award.
Media in Russia pictured Vladimir Kuznetsov, 37, and Alexei Stolyarov, 36 — known by their aliases Vovan and Lexus — holding glasses of champagne at a Kremlin ceremony. They have been awarded the Order of Friendship, a decoration given for “strengthening friendship and co-operation between peoples”.
The pair have spent years befuddling and pranking politicians and celebrities — many of them foreign opponents of Putin or from countries whose governments oppose his regime.
In 2015, they managed to place a call to John, 77, who had criticised Russia’s laws banning “gay propaganda”. Stolyarov posed as Putin, whom the singer had expressed a wish to meet.
“I’m extremely honoured that he’s calling me and that I’m speaking to him. It’s a great privilege to be able to speak to one of the most influential people in the whole world,” John told Kuznetsov, believing he was Putin’s press secretary and interpreter, Dmitry Peskov.
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The real Putin did eventually call John, asking him not to be offended by the “harmless” prank.
• David Cameron is target of prank phone call
In 2018, while he was foreign secretary, Boris Johnson spent 18 minutes on the phone with the pranksters, posing as Nikol Pashinyan, the new prime minister of Armenia.
Johnson told them he would “tighten the squeeze on some of the oligarchs who surround Putin”, while admitting that a fair number of Russia’s super-rich were in London. “You throw a stone in Kensington and you’ll hit an oligarch,” he said.
The fake Pashinyan told Johnson, “I like your poetry” –— a reference to a crude limerick written by the former London mayor about Turkey’s President Erdogan.
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The hoaxers said it had been “pretty easy” to place the call to Johnson via Sir Alan Duncan, who at the time was minister of state for Europe and the Americas.
In 2022, Prince Harry allegedly gave Vovan and Lexus his personal email and phone number and rang them back from his mobile. Harry allegedly believed he was talking to the Swedish climate change activist Thunberg and her father.
During the conversations, Harry criticised the US president, Donald Trump, for having “blood on his hands” over climate change, and offered assistance when the pranksters asked him to help move a group of penguins by ship from Belarus to the North Pole. Belarus is landlocked and penguins live in Antarctica, not the Arctic.
Other victims of the Russian duo — who deny working for the Kremlin — include the Harry Potter author JK Rowling, the writer Stephen King, the former US president George W Bush, the Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni and Erdogan.
