The morning of June 19, 2015.
A conversation between Svyazin and Kornilov.
Svyazin: “San, please respond.”
Svyazin: “Aleksandr, please give us a sign!”
“Here,” Kornilov eventually responds.
Svyazin: “San, hello! I have a task.”
Svyazin: “You need to cover three of the five topics we’re about to give you every day.”
Svyazin proceeded to give Kornilov the list of the first five topics. They included further sanctions for Russia, asking for comments on the fate of Greece and the possibility of it leaving the Eurozone, but also Vladimir Putin’s private meetings during the St. Petersburg economic forum.
Kornilov had no choice but to answer laconically: UNDERSTOOD.
By early July, Kornilov couldn’t even choose which three topics of the total five to use. Some of the topics that were still being sent to him in Skype now had the comment “mandatory” added. The latter often included those that showed tensions in the EU or USA: for example, the Greek financial crisis and the refugee crisis. Other mandatory topics concerned the conflict in Ukraine and rebel-held areas backed by Russia.
In addition to Svyazin, orders also came from Liana Minasyan, Yasna Nagdaliyeva and Dmitri Lanin. Minasyan is an employee of Rossiya Segodnya known to the Estonian internal security service as the person responsible for publishing Sputnik in the Baltics. Dmitri Lanin has been to Tallinn to recruit journalists for Sputnik in Estonia – as reported by Eesti Ekspress in 2015.