The candidate, Yulia Kuznetsova (Kharchenko), who is running in the Babushkinsky single-mandate district No. 195 in Moscow, stopped responding to messages on the evening of September 17, after a meeting with constituents in Sokolniki devoted to internet freedom that drew about 100 people.
A video message appeared on her Telegram channel on the evening of September 18. In the recording, Kuznetsova says a "rather difficult conversation" had taken place the day before, after which her husband had to provide her with psychological and medical help. "I am fine now and will be home soon," she says in the video.
The following day, the candidate's team published a post saying Kuznetsova "is still not home and there is no contact with her," and that she "is not safe and did this under pressure." Her associates cited three arguments.
The first is metadata. The video was recorded at 20:02 and published at 20:58. "What happened to it for 58 minutes?" the campaign asks. According to its data, the clip was edited and cleared during that time.
The second is technical parameters. All video messages on Kuznetsova's channel were shot at a resolution of 400x400 and a frame rate of 30 frames per second. The latest video is 384x384 at 10 frames per second. When downloaded, earlier recordings have a white border, while this one has a black border and the Telegram logo. According to her associates, this indicates it was filmed not on Kuznetsova's iPhone but on an Android smartphone.
The third is that Kuznetsova's and her husband's phones remained offline as of 14:00 Moscow time on September 19. The husband's device briefly appeared online in the morning and was immediately switched off; the day before, the phone was on for several hours, but no one answered hundreds of calls.
"Do we still want to believe that after three months of campaigning and hundreds of thousands of rubles invested, Yulia simply took off and disappeared?" the team's message says.
Kuznetsova is running on the slogan "For Peace." She previously worked on Boris Nadezhdin's campaign staff. The Anti-Corruption Foundation and Maxim Kats's team included her on their list of recommended candidates.
The day after her disappearance, the Slovo Zashchite project, citing the candidate's mother, reported that the young woman "went away for three days without a phone." As a Kuznetsova associate told Mediazona, police suggested he stop the search and showed him a photograph in which she had a "completely empty, renounced gaze."
The campaign searching for the politician announced a Telegram channel of the Moscow branch of the liquidated Civic Initiative party. The Greens party did not pay attention to the suspicious features of the video: it said that "the personal life of every person is inviolable" and wished Kuznetsova a speedy recovery.
Sources disagree: the Greens party interprets Kuznetsova's disappearance as a digital detox and a break from the information flow, while her campaign and associates insist the recording was made under pressure and that the candidate herself is not safe. Police have previously denied that she had disappeared.