Espreso.TV journalists’ phone call got forwarded to Russian pranker instead of Anton Herashchenko, MIA advisor

The phone call of the journalists of the TV channel Espreso.TV was redirected to the Russian pranker Aleksey "Lexus" Stoliarov, when they intended to take a comment from Anton Herashchenko, advisor of the Minister of Interior Affairs. The TV channel published the story on this on its website. The Russian propaganda channel LifeNews dedicated a seven-minute story to this affair, with the prankster slandering the Ukrainian government and the television channel and trying to show its incompetence (he claims it was easy to forge the phone number for the journalists, he just gave it to them – as "no one in Ukrainian journalism really verifies information"). Instead of answers to the questions, the prankster was feeding the journalists a lot of nonsense.

The journalists instead claim that they had a correct phone number of Herashchenko's phone that they used before, and the whole act was an elaborated call interception. The channel's comment says that the prankster should be punished for this cyber-crime, yet for this, it is required that Russian police cooperates with Ukrainian, which seems highly unlikely.