An aspiring MAGA influencer who speaks with an indistinct European accent and specializes in spreading conspiracy theories appears to have close personal ties to Russia — in the form of an FSB officer who fought for the Wagner Group. Elizabeth Lane, who has called America “the cancer of the world,” was virtually unknown just a year ago. However, she has rapidly gained popularity thanks in large part to help from the two most famous right-wing American social media personalities to have traveled to Moscow in recent years: Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens.
Surprisingly, less is known about Elizabeth Lane than about a notable guest she interviewed for her show before deciding to pull the entire episode offline — possibly for fear of exposing a Russian she “loves.” This was Dmitry Valentinovich Grizdak, a Russian Spetsnaz (special forces) operative who, The Insider has discovered, also works for Russia’s Federal Security Service, or FSB, a successor agency to the Soviet KGB.
Grizdak is no run-of-the-mill intelligence officer. From 1998 to 2004, he kept a registered address at Michurinsky Prospekt 25, a Moscow apartment block that happens to be home to two of the FSB assassins responsible for poisoning the late Russian opposition leader, Alexei Navalny.
Grizdak did not respond to The Insider’s request for comment on this story, but after receiving the request he did scrub his Telegram account of all content.
Grizdak was born January 6, 1982 in the city of Sverdlovsk and currently carries a passport bearing the number 4513 /050102. As a Spetsnaz officer, he was attached to Chechen warlord Ramzan Kadyrov’s Akhmat Battalion and later to the Wagner Group, a private military company founded by the late oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin. Between 2014 and 2016, he also made at least four trips to the United States, prompting questions of how a Russian intelligence officer with extensive military training was allowed into the country in the midst of Moscow’s first invasion of Ukraine.
Since Feb. 28, 2022, Grizdak has regularly posted gun-related content to the “GriD Shoot'n'fun” Telegram channel, where he has appeared in selfies with fellow gun enthusiasts including prominent Russian military blogger “Razvedos.”
An Italian blog post from 2017 describing the arrival of Russian mercenaries in Syria features a photograph of Grizdak himself, along with speculation that “the mercenaries are believed to belong to Russia's largest private military company…the Wagner Group.”
Of course, while the photo could have been taken from elsewhere, Grizdak’s phone number was indeed stored by several contacts who used the word Syria (“Сирия”) to contextualize their acquaintance.
Then, between 2020 and 2023, Grizdak began taking near-monthly flights to and from the Chechen capital of Grozny — all while maintaining an address on ul. Kadyrova 38 in the city of Gudermes, the home of the Russian Special Forces University and the site of a major Russian military training center.
As for Lane, the only publicly available biographical details that are even semi-promising come from a June 2024 article published by mythdetector.com, which described her as “an American actress of Georgian origin and UNIFYD TV host” — the online channel of a movement that describes itself as a “worldwide, spiritual faith-based organization that serves humankind through initiatives that seek to enlighten, inspire and unite people across the globe.”
Lane’s personal website offers “Journalism Master Classes Online” at a price of $150 an hour and “Life Coaching” sessions for a comparatively modest $109, but the “Who is Elizabeth Lane?” section provides no concrete information, describing her simply as “one of America's most uncompromising voices in investigative journalism, fearlessly diving into the world of international politics and diplomatic affairs.”
Iza Bendianishvili, the future Elizabeth Lane, was born on November 6, 1991, in the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic — a month and a half before the collapse of the Soviet Union rendered the country the independent Republic of Georgia. Little is known about the next thirty years in the life of Lane/Bendianishvili, but in 2022 and 2023 she travelled to Russia, posting a cartwheeling photograph taken on Red Square to her Instagram page.
The oldest entry on her ElizabethLaneLive Patreon page, an article titled “Globalists Are Targeting Scientists,” was published on February 16, 2024. Over the next three months there were a total of four more posts, ending on May 17 of that year with an edition headlined “CIA's Secret Operations You Need to Know About.” It was only in April of 2025 that Lane’s oldest video on the page, “Dr. Fauci,” appears. That offering was followed up in June with “Blackrock!” Then, starting from November 17, 2025 (“Exposing the Council on Foreign Relations”), she began putting out episodes almost daily right up until April 29, 2026 (“War in Iran & JD Vance”).
Activity on Lane’s YouTube channel (Elizabeth Lane TV) accelerated more or less in tandem with the spike in posts on her Patreon account. Her YouTube debut on September 9, 2025 involved a poorly staged fifteen-minute investigative documentary titled “The Death of Hitler: Truth or Cover-Up?” As the hostess introduces the topic:
“Is it possible that Hitler died in the bunker? Of course. It could be that it's as simple as him shooting himself in the head and dying. But there are many details ,and this is why this show exists. This is why ‘Exposed’ exists: because details that were never answered. This is where we gather all the evidence that we can find and figure out what really happened, right? Did Hitler die in that bunker, or did he survive?”
As of June 10, 2026, that offering had only 1,497 views.
However, Lane’s second post, published on October 9, 2025, has attracted an audience of 314,227. Its title: “Off The Record with Elizabeth Lane: Tucker Carlson Unfiltered.”
For one reason or another, the former Fox News presenter turned online provocateur who marveled over Moscow’s Auchan supermarkets during his visit to interview Putin in 2024 effectively agreed to advertise Lane to his audience of millions — and to do so by going on her show.
In an X comment, Lane claimed the backstory was completely innocuous: Kiriakou, a former CIA officer who went to prison for exposing the identity of an undercover American spy and then went to work for Russian state media outlet Sputnik, put them in touch, and the rest developed organically from there. On May 14, 2026, she wrote:
“Zionists are crashing out. This is why everyone thinks you people are absolutely stupid... A friend of mine, the very well-known John Kiriakou, introduced me to Tucker. John is a great man who went to prison and sacrificed a lot to tell Americans the truth about our government torturing people. When John connected us, I asked Tucker for advice as someone far more experienced and professional in journalism than I was. Then after some time I had the audacity to ask him for an interview, and he agreed. That’s who Tucker is. Unlike a lot of you, who only sit down with know [sic] propagandists because you want something out of it, Tucker sat down with someone relatively unknown simply because he’s genuine like that.”
Whatever Carlson’s actual motivation might have been, Lane’s subsequent 44 episodes tended to attract audiences in the mere quadruple figures — hardly the click count of a super influencer. True, her joint release with Kiriakou on February 18, 2026 — “Skinwalker Ranch, UFOs, USOs and Secret Projects” — brought in 184,800 clicks, but her only truly viral output was a May 14 joint release titled “Candace Owens on Charlie Kirk, The Daily Wire, TPUSA, and Emmanuel Macron” which garnered 834,162 views — a rather modest showing by the standards of Owens herself, but a major record for Lane. For comparison’s sake, Owens’ stream following her return from a well-publicized trip to Moscow brought in well over two million views.
Unlike many of her American acquaintances in the right-wing infotainment space, Lane has conspicuously little to say about Russia, its president, and its ongoing invasion of Ukraine. But there are exceptions.
On December 22, 2022, she released “A very personal episode!” in which she declared: “America is the cancer of the world… And I always say like, most Americans don't understand, Russia is on your side, guys. Russia is doing what you should have done with all your guns, with Second Amendments, like, fight your government, get rid of them, get rid of the cancer. ‘Oh, you're, you're saying that we should use guns and like, are you calling for violence?’ Yeah, I'm actually, I'm calling for violence. How are you going to fight a fucking monster with a stick when that monster is armed with AK-47 or even better, with a fucking tank? So how are you gonna do that? You gonna do it with a stick? Or maybe with your peaceful protests. Yeah, sure, that will work, because that worked so well so far."
In a separate video posted to Rumble three years ago, Lane described Ukraine using language that almost perfectly mirrors Western discourse on Russia (8:45-9:23): “I also speak to some Ukrainians that I know — very, very good friends of mine. People need to know this. We speak through private [chats], let's say WhatsApp. And their answer is, ‘I'm so sorry, Lizzie, I can't speak about this.’ Like, they are so scared — if they are pro-Russian, or if they just want the war to end — that they can't express their opinion. Because they are stuck in Kyiv. They cannot leave — especially guys, they cannot leave. I mean, what is this other than a dictatorship?”
Notably, that conversation featured Mira Terada, a Russian national who in 2021 returned to her homeland after serving a stint in an American prison for money laundering (in connection with a cocaine trafficking scheme). In Moscow, Terada ended up running a Kremlin-backed disinformation operation overseen by none other than Yevgeny Prigozhin, the late patron of Grizdak’s Wagner Group.
Terada’s “Foundation for Battling Injustice” (R-FBI) teamed up with Storm-1516 to run influence operations ahead of Germany’s 2024 parliamentary elections and also published fabricated a seemingly endless stream of “investigations” like this one, which claimed to have “discovered evidence of the existence of a secret scheme for the disposal of bodies of deceased Ukrainian Armed Forces servicemen by processing them into meat products for sale on the domestic market.”
Lane, for her part, does not appear to enjoy anything like the close professional relationship Terada has with the Russian state. Instead, Lane’s ties to the country are more personal. In her "A very personal episode!" video, which was cross-posted to Patreon on April 5, 2023, Lane herself offered up an interesting tangent (1:12:38-1:13:31): “If you noticed, no Russian special ops officer is famous. They are not interested [in it]. I even said to my boyfriend, 'you know, like, hey, people make millions out of this shit.' I said to him, 'like, why do you not try to do this stuff? You could be like a millionaire.' And he was like, 'I did not become a special ops officer to put it out there and say like how awesome I am — look at me, I can kill people.’ This is a job that is not very honorable. He understood so much, that this job carries so much guilt. But this is not how Navy Seals see it. Navy Seals are like 'Look at me, I'm a Navy Seal.' Like they were the most broken people in the world.”
In that episode, she also explained: "So I went to Russia, I met my sources... I talked to a few Russian soldiers, a few special ops officers, and, well, in my time in Russia, I fell in love with one of them, and we started a relationship.”
Lane did not name the aforementioned Dmitry Grizdak as her boyfriend, but he was one of two former special forces officers whom she interviewed as part of a since-deleted podcast episode originally posted to YouTube on April 28, 2023. The other was former Navy SEAL Joseph Schmidt III, who appeared on the podcast as “Jay Smith.” Schmidt also moonlights as a porn star called “Jay Voom” and has appeared in at least 29 adult films alongside his fellow porn star wife. Their filmography includes works such as “Apple Smashing Lap Dance” and “Strippers Come Home Horny from the Club.”
When counter-extremism researcher Ryan Mauro questioned Lane about the unpublished video, she responded with a voice message explaining that its exposure “would put an innocent man’s life in danger in Russia, who did not do anything wrong.” Lane sent Mauro several voice messages, in fact, accusing him of working with CIA and Mossad, while also threatening to complain about him to the FBI.
