IStories Reveal the Wife of Popular Pro-War Telegram Channel Rybar’s Founder

The United States has announced a $10 million reward for information about those behind Rybar, one of the largest pro-war channels with more than 1.3 million subscribers. The U.S. authorities believe that the authors of the channel interfered in the U.S. elections, and the project is sponsored by the Russian state corporation Rostec. The State Department website published nine names of people associated with Rybar. IStories found one of the women — it is Valeria Zvinchuk, the wife of the founder of Rybar and St. Petersburg artist. This is what is known about her.

“I already know how to draw”

The two founders of Rybar in November 2022 were revealed by The Bell publication. Behind the channel are former military interpreter Mikhail Zvinchuk; the publication also identified him as an ex-employee of the Ministry of Defense. In the passport, which Zvinchuk himself showed, his official registration address in Moscow is still listed as Znamenka, 19 — the building of the ministry. The second creator is Moscow programmer Denis Shchukin (he changed his last name to Vulf after the disclosure).

IStories noticed that in 2023 Zvinchuk and Vulf registered in Moscow LLC Rybar. The channel’s trademarks and logos are registered to it; its revenue in 2023 amounted to 18.7 million rubles.

Another co-owner of the company was a certain Valeria Zvinchuk. She is the creative director of the project, according to the US State Department. Valeria, IStories found out, became Zvinchuk’s wife in 2023.

Her maiden name is Pobochaya and she is a 34-year-old artist from St. Petersburg. “I’m a historian by education, I’ve been independently studying graphic design programs since 2010. I never went to art school or any courses. I always said that I have nothing to learn there. I already know how to draw. At the moment I create portraits from photos in various styles,” she reported about herself in 2016 in VK [Russian social network].

The parents of the artist are not famous for anything. Her mother worked in the St. Petersburg’s Vodokanal, her father — in the state-owned Far East and Arctic Development Corporation. He was unable to repay a debt of 3 million rubles to Sovcombank and in 2022 was declared bankrupt, after which he changed his last name.

Valeria Zvinchuk (Pobochaya) was linked to complicated people by a criminal case that was actively investigated in St. Petersburg in 2016.

VAT fraud

As IStories found out, in November 2013 Valeria Zvinchuk became the sole owner and director of the St. Petersburg company Sistema Teplomontazh. The company had all the signs of a nominal company: there were no other employees except Zvinchuk, according to the database of leaks studied by IStories; the address, as the tax authorities noted, was inaccurate. Nevertheless, in 2014-2015, almost 200 million rubles passed through the company (such revenue appears in its financial reports). The company’s documents were seized by investigators in 2016, along with the papers and seals of several other firms, during searches in a criminal case involving a major fraud — the illegal refund of value-added tax (VAT).

The scheme looked like this: the St. Petersburg enterprise Svelen bought scrap non-ferrous metals for processing, after which the products passed through a specially created chain of companies controlled by the organizers of the fraud. The price of the goods was artificially inflated, they were exported abroad, and the organizers were able to recover VAT from the budget.

According to the initial version of the investigation, the criminals stole more than one billion rubles from the state. However, over time, the damage was reduced to 300 million, and in 2018 all the defendants received suspended sentences, the seized property was returned to them (so says the court verdicts). And this is not surprising. The criminal group, which had been operating in St. Petersburg since 2011, was led by complicated people.

The first, Alexei Anokhin — the nephew at the time of Deputy Defense Minister Tatiana Shevtsova, Fontanka found out. Shevtsova came to the Defense Ministry after Anatoly Serdyukov from the Federal Tax Service, where she was his deputy, and was responsible for financial support of the Armed Forces. Serdyukov was defense minister from 2007 to 2012, after which he resigned over a corruption scandal. Shevtsova worked at the ministry until the summer of 2024.

The investigation named Sergei Semenov, the general director of Svelen, as the second organizer of the scheme. Although, as IStories found out, the main owner of the company was Nikolai Semenov (presumably his relative — both of them come from the Dnovsky district of the Pskov Oblast, and Sergei Semenov’s father, Viktor, also worked at Svelen at one time). Nikolai Semenov was an advisor to the head of Rosselkhozbank, Dmitry Patrushev, son of Vladimir Putin’s longtime associate and former FSB director Nikolai Patrushev, from 2012 to 2018.

Valeria Zvinchuk and the other owners of Rybar did not answer questions from IStories about how the artist’s company ended up in the criminal case and whether they are familiar with its main characters. Semenovs also did not comment on the situation. It was not possible to find Anokhin’s contacts.

Budget money, big salaries and other trivia

Rybar’s creative work, for which the artist Zvinchuk (Pobochaya) is responsible, was sometimes paid from the budget. For example, in 2023 the channel released a propaganda comic strip “Once Upon a Time in Avdeevka.”

The plot of the comic is simple: a father of three children is not subject to mobilization, but, despite the entreaties of his wife, goes to war. Gets into the hospital, goes to fight again, and eventually a family with humanitarian aid comes to him at the front. “And these people threatened not to let me go to war... I guess, soon you will come to the positions and go on the attack yourselves,” the comic ends with these words of the father.

“We thought and decided to dedicate the next issue of our comic to the theme of mobilization and volunteerism, choosing the battalion Yugra,” — Rybar reported then.

The choice was not accidental. As IStories found out, this comic was fully paid for from the state budget. The Department of Finance of Yugra through the local TV and radio company paid almost 2 million rubles to Rybar for 29 pages of drawings with identical faces and clumsy lines (the quality of the product can be checked here). The comic strip also included the governor of Yugra — Natalia Komarova, who, according to the story, shows great care for the mobilized.

U.S. authorities believe that Rybar is financed by the state corporation Rostec. IStories found out that Rybar is known and appreciated in the corporation. In November 2023, a large Russian event agency Market Emotion Corporation paid Rybar 250 thousand rubles for Zvinchuk’s performance at a Rostec conference.

IStories also found out the salaries of the owners of Rybar. In April 2023, Mikhail Zvinchuk’s salary in the project amounted to 700 thousand rubles, in May — 500 thousand rubles and 230 thousand in July. His wife Valeria received almost 500 thousand in April, 360 thousand in May and 166 thousand in July. In total, the Zvinchuks received 2.5 million rubles from Rybar in the form of salaries for April–July 2023 (salaries for the other months — and whether they were — could not be found out). Denis Vulf (Shchukin) earned 300 thousand rubles in April at Rybar, about 100 thousand rubles each in May and June, and almost 50 thousand in July.