The buzz around Sir Elton John’s purported phone call with Russian president Vladimir Putin has many of the trappings of a high school rumor mill.
On Tuesday, the British rocker posted a picture of Putin to his Instagram page with a message thanking the Russian president for calling him to discuss gay and lesbian equality in Russia.
“Thank-you to President Vladimir Putin for reaching out and speaking via telephone with me today,” the message read. “I look to forward to meeting with you face-to-face to discuss LGBT equality in Russia.”
John is currently in Ukraine, where he met with President Petro Poroshenko over the weekend to discuss banning gender and LGBT discrimination at workplaces and applying criminal penalties to hate crimes.
In a BBC interview over the weekend, he told correspondent Bridget Kendell that he would like to meet with the Russian president as well.
“At least if I meet him and say, ‘Listen, come on, let’s have a cup of tea, let’s talk about this,’ he might laugh behind my back and then he shuts the door and calls me an absolute idiot but at least I can have a conscience and say I’d tried,” he said.
For a few hours it seemed like John may have gotten his wish—and the chance to voice his disapproval of comments Putin made last year, which implied that gay people targeted children. Putin’s spokesman, however, denied any communication between the two took place.
It turns out, alas, that John was trolled, pranked by two notorious Russian jokesters Alexei “Lexus” Stolyarov and Vladimir “Vovan” Krasnov, famous in Russia for hoax calls to celebrities and politicians.
The pair told Russian paper Komsomolskaya Pravda that they had called the singer on Monday pretending to be Putin and that John was unaware he was being pranked the entire time.
Krasnov impersonated Putin during the call, with Stolyarov, who speaks fluent English, filling in as a dummy interpreter.
“We thought it wasn’t likely that Putin would want to meet with him and call, at least not so quickly,” Krasnov told the Guardian. “But it turned out that Elton John was really waiting for this call, and so he immediately believed it really was a conversation with the people who we said we were. He said: ‘Thank you, you’ve made my day. This day and this conversation has been the most wonderful and lovely in my life.’”
They added that they had planned to broadcast a recording of the entire call on comedian Ivan Urgant’s late-night comedy show on Wednesday.
Thus, in the end, he said/she said turned into nothing more than a rumor and a gag.
