The world's largest Lady Gaga fan community is run by a guy from Minsk who was jailed for protests. Russians rushed to claim him as their own
The fan project owner's post about his imprisonment for participating in protests against lack of freedom sparked a wave of emotions on social media. Many in the West and Russia perceived it as an example of Russians' fight against the Putin regime. "Nasha Niva" found out who he really is and what he was punished for.
The message appeared on September 22, 2026, on the Gaga Daily Twitter account and has already gathered more than three million views. In it, the project founder explained the reason for his more than two-year absence:
"Sorry for the lack of updates, I was literally in prison. This is Kiryl. If you don't know me, I own Gaga Daily, and every social media post you've seen from 2009-2024 was from me. I never use this account for personal posts, but I feel like I owe you an explanation.
In early 2024, I was arrested in my home country for protesting against the government and sentenced to over two years in prison. During the MAYHEM era, this account was run by my friends Christian and Anthony, who did an incredible job. Now I'm free, I'm safe, and I can't wait to get back to what I love so much.
I am extremely touched and grateful for all the tweets and messages of support you sent me. I love this community so much, and it seems surreal that so many people who don't know each other, whose only connection is something as silly as loving one pop star, can form such a strong bond that lasts for so many years. Let me know if you have questions, and feel free to follow me on IG at @krzzle if you want to stay in touch. When LG8?"
This Gaga Daily account is part of the world's largest fan community for the singer Lady Gaga and was created back in 2009. Today, the project has an official website with a very active forum, a Twitter account with 487 thousand followers, an Instagram profile with 517 thousand subscribers, and a Facebook page with 1.3 million of the singer's fans subscribed.
Lady Gaga has officially recognized this resource as the main platform for her fans. Her phrase is quoted across all the project's social media: "If I want to know what my fans are saying, I go to Gaga Daily."
"The Russian Guy"
Neither in this post nor in his personal Instagram account did the guy specify his country or his full name. It is also impossible to find this information with a simple photo search.
For this reason, the opinion immediately began to dominate on social media, both among the Western English-speaking public and among Russians, that the creator of Gaga Daily was held in a Russian prison.
An additional trigger for the viral discussion was Kiryl's reply to one user. When asked if he had seen the music video for Lady Gaga's new song "Abracadabra", the account owner replied: "I lived in that moment while it was playing on prison radio."
This gave rise to a new wave of memes. Western fans and popular pop culture accounts, such as Pop Hub, began massively writing that the track "Abracadabra" became a hit in Russian prisons. Users were surprised by the fact that pop music was broadcast to prisoners and joked about how inmates in Russia discovered the singer's work through prison radio.
One Western user noted the irony that a stan of Taylor Swift, a 19-year-old Israeli woman, was arrested and spent two months in prison for refusing to join the IDF, while a Gaga stan was arrested for protests in Russia. Others were excited that having spent the last year in a Russian prison, the creator of one of the main fan projects would only now discover the singer's new era.
Even a simple English-language tweet "Gaga Daily Russian???" gathered three thousand likes and was seen by hundreds of thousands of social network users.
Fans also connected the imagined Russian arrest with Lady Gaga's own history, recalling her concert in Moscow in 2012. At that time, Russian authorities threatened the singer with arrest for her words in support of the LGBT community, which added symbolism to the situation in the eyes of the Western audience.
The topic of the arrest was soon picked up by the Russian segment of Twitter, also explaining it in the context of the fight against Vladimir Putin's regime.
The anti-war and opposition blogger under the nickname "Prof. Preobrazhensky" stated as a fact that the owner of the largest Lady Gaga account is a Russian who spent more than two years behind bars for protesting against the regime. True, he later had to correct the error.
"I like that this tweet is going viral today, and at the same time, the one asking why the Russians aren't openly speaking out about the war. Well, think about it," commented the account with the nickname "n-dyaya," gathering thousands of likes.
Many likes and reposts were also collected by a tweet in which Kiryl was called "a Russian guy who did a two-year stint in a penal colony." Its author easily dismissed comments about the Belarusian context, saying he just got the passport wrong, but otherwise it's still a common "harsh Eastern European vibe."
The popular Brazilian account StagePop, without understanding the nuances of the political situation in Eastern Europe, even wrote that Kiryl was arrested in Ukraine.
Who is Kiryl?
Indeed, there are no hints of a Belarusian context left in the guy's personal Instagram profile — it seems they were removed for security reasons.
Only photos from his time studying in Moscow remained — the guy graduated from Moscow State University in 2019 with a master's degree in the Faculty of Foreign Languages and Regional Studies — and unrecognizable locations. On February 24, 2022, a Ukrainian flag appeared on his profile, and on March 1 of the same year, the guy published a photo from a Moscow police van, where he ended up after being detained at an anti-war rally. Everything seemed to confirm the opinion about "the Russian guy."
The confusion was compounded by the fact that the first reports that the Gaga Daily fan community was run by Belarusian Kiryl Nguyen, who had served time for the 2020 protests, were accompanied by photos taken from the websites of Belarusian human rights activists. But they showed a completely different man of Asian appearance than in the krzzle account — it looked as if journalists had confused something.
Only one archived photo from September 13, 2020, hinted at a Belarusian connection, showing a guy with a poster bearing a quote from singer Rihanna "A Rat Is a Rat" and people with white-red-white flags in the background. However, this post was deleted or hidden shortly after journalists from "Zerkalo" managed to notice and describe it.
"Nasha Niva" also found other evidence that Kiryl comes from Belarus. For example, in August 2020, he left words of support under a video address by IT entrepreneur Nikita Mikado, and also entered into a dispute under a post by the Kardash brand. The designers offered to buy T-shirts with logos of striking Belarusian factories, promising to transfer half of the funds to a solidarity fund. The guy criticized their price of 97 Belarusian rubles.
It was possible to accurately determine that Kiryl comes from Minsk thanks to another detail: previously, all his social media profiles were named kirillyen. We assume that the nickname is a combination of the name Kiryl and the final part of the common Vietnamese surname Nguyen (Nguyễn).
In late 2014, he published a photograph of a rainbow from Minsk, which remained on the pages of the Charter-97 portal.
In June 2015, an account with the nickname kirillyen created a topic on a Belarusian animal rights forum. He recounted how his mother found a cat hit by a car near their home and asked for advice on caring for the paralyzed animal. In the correspondence, he noted that he lived 10 minutes from the state veterinary clinic on Hurskaha Street in Minsk. Later he changed this nickname to a new one — kir93 — but traces of the old one remained in replies from other users and in edits he made to his own posts.
The new nickname provides the exact year of birth — 1993. The age and the history with nicknames allowed for the final comparison of the Gaga Daily owner with the lists of Belarusian political prisoners. The guy's full name is Kiryl Kuokavich Nguyen, born on December 8, 1993.
The photograph placed on the pages about political prisoner Kiryl Nguyen on the resources of Belarusian human rights defenders, as far as can be judged, belongs to another Kiryl Nguyen, who also lived in Belarus but was born in 1996 in Hanoi.
As "Viasna" writes, Kiryl was detained in early 2024. On May 10, 2024, Judge Inna Sivets of the Kastrychnitski District Court of Minsk sentenced him under the so-called "people's" article — Part 1 of Art. 342 of the Criminal Code (organization and preparation of actions that grossly violate public order) to 1 year and 6 months in a penal colony.
On March 25, 2025, a second trial took place under the same article for another incident, after which the total term of imprisonment was increased to 2 years and 6 months. Kiryl Nguyen served his sentence in penal colony No. 17 in Shklov and was released in early April 2026.
«Nasha Niva» — the bastion of Belarus
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І ваабшчэ, какая разніца.