The head of the Safe Internet League, Yekaterina Mizulina, has filed a complaint with the Interior Ministry against journalist Ksenia Sobchak over an interview with beauty blogger Igor Sinyak that aired on Sobchak’s YouTube channel “Ostorozhno, Sobchak” on June 1.
Mizulina said the interview amounted to “propaganda for the extremist LGBT movement.” “And they deliberately published this demonic stuff on International Children’s Day. Is this a mockery of all the state’s efforts to protect children, or what?” she wrote on her Telegram channel.
Sobchak responded: “Unlike Mizulina, I’m not going to file a complaint against anyone — I’ll just say: our country also has people who dress like Sinyak, and no one is treating them as LGBT,” she wrote, stressing that the “LGBT propaganda law” had not been violated. “There is no propaganda of anything, no calls to action in the video. There is just a conversation with a person. Someone just like us, who simply dresses the way he likes,” Sobchak added.
Vitaly Borodin, another pro-censorship activist who files police reports against liberal-leaning figures, also promised to lodge a complaint against Sobchak — this one with Roskomnadzor, Russia’s federal media regulator. “I believe she should be held accountable,” Borodin wrote.
Igor Sinyak — a native of Ukraine’s Donetsk region — lived and worked in Russia until 2022. He now lives in France. Sinyak has more than 900,000 followers on Instagram alone.
Russia’s law on “LGBT propaganda” has been in force since December 2022. In November 2023, the Supreme Court declared the nonexistent “International LGBT Public Movement” an “extremist organization” and banned it.
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