Chronicles of a modern witch-hunt: history of public allegations from one of Rutube’s top brass
There was a heated debate last week in the Russian IT community. The headliner was Maxim Ulyanov, the head of a department in Rutube, Russia’s infamous YouTube clone. Maxim publicly accused two people of being “wolves” (a self-designation for people who embellish their CVs adding more experience than they really have, mostly associated with Anton Nazarov’s community). But the real problem wasn’t even that the allegations were false — it was what happened afterward.
Prequel: first blood
This is not the first time the Russian IT community has discussed Maxim and his war with “wolves”. An undisclosed Rutube employee was fired some time ago under odd and disturbing circumstances. As far as we understand, Maxim Ulyanov (the head of Rutube client development) has discovered that the employee in question thanked his mentor in public Telegram channels associated with that community. Big bosses arranged a meeting with that employee immediately and had a heated conversation along the lines of: “We know who you are, sign a voluntary resignation and go away or the consequences would be dire”.
Under pressure, he signed a “voluntary resignation”. Ulyanov has publicly accused that dismissed employee of making up his CV in the corporate chat after his resignation.
But what does the law say?
Based on Article 80 of the Labor Code of the Russian Federation (№197-FZ), termination at the employee’s own initiative (“voluntary resignation”) constitutes a unilateral decision by the employee. The employee must personally submit a written resignation notice and assumes responsibility for compliance with statutory procedures. The employee retains the right to withdraw said resignation notice unilaterally at any point during the fourteen (14) calendar-day notice period prior to its expiration.
Article 5.27 of the Code of Administrative Offenses of the Russian Federation: Where coercion to terminate employment is substantiated, the employer shall incur administrative liability in the form of a monetary penalty.
It’s worth saying that “coercion” can be both physical and psychological.
Let me state that again: contract termination under coercion is a direct violation of the Labor Code of the Russian Federation.
That first episode has shaken the IT community but everybody just calmed down by the end of the day. The only person remembered that on a daily basis was the fired guy: he was later diagnosed with cardiac arrhythmia after the incident. You might think case was closed once and for all, but...
Recently, Maxim has participated as a guest on a podcast. The host of that podcast asked Maxim about that “wolf” incident. His answer sounded conciliatory: “I’ve reconsidered that.”
But everything has its “48 hours later” moment…
“Yappy” has nothing to do with “Rutube”
48 hours after that podcast Maxim posted again on Telegram with yet another “disclosure”.
Were the previous 15 minutes of fame not enough? Is he on a holy quest for purging the unclean from the industry?
A Telegram post called “here we go again” grabs the reader from the start:
He then analyzes the CV in detail. Ulyanov highlights inconsistencies accusing someone else of lying:
- “Infinite video scroll”? We don’t use that wording!
- Next.js? We don’t have it in our toolchain!
- Cypress? We don’t use that!
- GrowthBook? Not in use!
- Effector? We have publicly stated at conferences what tool we prefer!
Maxim has drawn his conclusion in the following manner:
“As you can see that’s bullshit — not real experience”
The reasoning is simple: “I am a department head, I haven’t seen that person on our corporate portal so he is lying”. That Telegram post goes viral: personal information of the alleged “wolf”, his face, accusations of making up the CV. Needless to say, it’s severe reputational damage for a person who is trying to get a job.
The truth revealed
The person in question responded publicly within a few hours. His answers overwhelmed the community.
He has truly worked under the Rutube brand but not at Rutube directly but at Yappy — a short-video platform folded into the Rutube brand back in 2025.
The Yappy dev team was merged with the Rutube dev team that led to layoffs (no surprise, nobody wants two or three people in the same role). That guy in question was laid off with compensation (a standard two-month severance package and “voluntary resignation”).
He put Rutube on his CV for the single simple reason: Yappy doesn’t even exist as a separate entity anymore, moreover, all Yappy open positions had been posted under the “Rutube” brand since 2024.
That said, even potential employees were told that they were going to work for the Rutube brand right from the start.
Yappy archived Python/Go lead developer position
It’s worth saying that Rutube itself does not even exist as a legal entity — it’s called “RUFORM” LLC legally. This is the company that operates Rutube and represents that brand as a legal entity.
This situation is nothing new in IT. Big players own tens and even hundreds of affiliated legal entities. For example, SBER owns more than a hundred subsidiaries. A person could work on SBER products/services and be employed legally in “SberTech” LLC, “SBER AI Technologies” LLC and so on. Same in Yandex — experts work for the Yandex brand and can be employed in “Yandex.Technologies” LLC, “Market Platform” LLC or other subsidiaries. It’s a very common practice among SBER and Yandex alumni to put brand names rather than legal entity names in their CVs and in professional networking profiles.
You’re not in the System, so you must be lying — right?
But Ulyanov did not back down anyway. He updated his post after the new information:
Consider his reasoning a bit: legal entities just merged, organizational structure was completely unclear, people were moving between departments, some were laid off. In that chaos a department leader was unable to find a colleague from a newly added unit on the corporate portal — and boom! What was the conclusion then? That colleague must have been a liar!
Ulyanov deleted personal data after a huge community backlash but he repeatedly defended himself regardless.
The IT community fires back
Aleksey* Kuleshov, a well-known veteran developer who has worked at Intel, Deutsche Bank, Huawei, and Yandex, expressed his point of view publicly:
Kuleshov’s key take:
Deploy’s Ivan Botanov also makes a Telegram channel posting called “Wolfhounds at work”:
Maxim stood his ground: no apologies, the CV was made up, he didn’t make any mistake:
Maxim deletes his posts and goes silent
Someone (presumably Maxim) eventually deleted his posts. Who knows, did Rutube’s PR step in or maybe Maxim rethought everything finally…
But as he stated himself he did not change his point of view and just “got tired of arguments”. That explanation is convenient.
Nothing online disappears completely. Telegram posts have been archived online, screenshots stored in private and public chats. The only public traces are deleted posts and excuses like “I didn’t call him a liar just pointed out that his experience is not described accurately”. We have a classic lose-lose situation, everyone took reputational damage:
- Yappy alumnus as a job seeker
- Maxim Ulyanov as a manager
- Rutube as a place to work
Systemic problem
This is not a personal conflict story. Our beloved industry may have a systemic problem. Ulyanov is not an ordinary blogger next door, he is the head of a big department in a large company.
Maxim’s public posts are a highly subjective opinion of a certain person with some public recognition in the Russian IT community. Without any formal criteria or proof, he decides that a random Internet person is a liar. HR ladies discover that and discard the candidate’s resume immediately. Don’t think they have spare time to do any research on these discussions.
And the victim of public shaming doesn’t have many options to defend themselves, everything they say would be treated as an excuse. But even the best defense won’t erase the initial negative effect. Apologies always sound softer than the initial claim. Not in this case, of course, because we did not see any at all.
Maybe we need to discuss the core of their argument separately for a moment. So, a person could be publicly shamed because they don’t pay enough attention to a legal company name after a merger? Not for falsifying recommendations, not for making up non-existent projects. Not for claiming to be a part of successful projects they were never part of. But only because “Rutube” and “Yappy, a whole subsidiary of Rutube, operated by RUFORM LLC” are two completely different things!
Conclusion: with great power comes great responsibility
This story got a lot of attention because methods exploited by Maxim were far off the scale of the problem.
For those who hold power (job role, community of subscribers, public recognition):
1. Always verify your information before making public claims. A single private email to the HR department would resolve everything in minutes.
2. Do not ever post personal data publicly. Person’s name and surname, photos, CV details — everything exposed can lead to harassment.
3. Know how to acknowledge your mistakes publicly. False public accusations demand public apologies. To delete posts silently is not the same as to apologize publicly in more explicit form.
4. Last but not least: don’t forget to mind your own business trying to catch “wolves”, maybe you are not a good hunter after all. Are you driven by rational logic or purely by your own ego?
Ulyanov finishes his publication asking the following existential question:
“Resume, as an artifact, is dead. What will save us: certification or AI?”
Maxim, maybe neither AI nor certification would be the savior. Maybe we should just start with something more human like doing fact-checking before declaring someone a liar in public.
Because when “absence on the corporate portal” is a crime as harmful as “lie in resume”, when public accusations are formulated without any corporate PR person involved, when silence is meant to be treated as an apology the problem is not in CV quality at all. The problem is people in power who exploit their authority to discredit others ignoring real industry challenges.
Maybe Maxim’s next steps would be asking HR department to fire Rutube board members because he does not know them in person. And let me ask you this, dear readers, what do you think? Do you think Maxim was right?
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* Sorry Andrey, they forced me
