ILIJA GROMOVNIK

The way new intercepted phone calls reached North Macedonia’s social network from Russian VKontakte

On April 18th media reported that four new intercepted phone calls were published on VK. VK is an abbreviation from the original name – VKontakte, which in the Russian language means “InContact”. VK is a Russian online social media and social networking service based in Saint Petersburg.

The primary source of the intercepted phone calls is a VK profile “Ilija Gromovnik”.

The public data on this profile are the following – the profile picture was updated on April 18th (the day when the intercepted phone calls were published), at 1:08 pm; claims that the current city is Skopje, and there are small number of followers.

The first account that tweeted a link to this VK profile on Twitter was Ljupco Palevski:

When Ljupco Palevski tweeted this – at 3:04 PM, he suggested it was an exclusive content. The link itself was shared directly from VK.

The first Facebook account in North Macedonia that posted a link to this VK profile was Трета Политика, at 3:38 PM.

On April 4th this year, on an open event in Prilep, one of these four intercepted conversations was broadcast. Three people were summoned to the police station under a reasonable doubt for a committed criminal offence “unauthorized interception and audio recording”, which is punishable according to article 151, paragraph 2 of the Criminal Code.

This reinforces the fact that Treta Politika were likely the first ones to pick up the recordings, which they initially wrote about on Facebook.

Ljupco Palevski is also a friend on Facebook with an account with the name “Ilija Gromovnik”.

Like the VK account – this Ilija Gromovnik claims to be based in Skopje.

The account appears to have been firstly active in August 2018 – and has since posted material, including anti-NATO propaganda.

The “likes” of this Facebook account feature similar material, and include the Facebook page of the Treta Politika party.

Ilija Gromovnik has also “liked” photos of Palevski on Facebook.

The VK uploader, who may be a different entity to the above Facebook account, also appears to have a YouTube channel created on April 16. A number of audio recordings were released there, and the fact is that there were six audio recordings posted, not four, as previously reported. However, the other two audio recordings were not shared on the VK profile of Ilija Gromovnik.