Leak reveals more than 500 Westerners who took part in Russian disinfo campaign

Imagine the worst possible line up of dinner party guests. It probably includes some of those exposed this week as Russia’s ‘useful idiots’ in an investigation by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) and Delfi Estonia.

From Politicians to Academics, Hundreds Around the Globe Interviewed and Featured in Notorious Russian Disinformation Campaign

Former American, French, and Spanish intelligence officers, nearly a dozen far-right German politicians, and academics from around the globe: These are some of the hundreds of personalities who have been interviewed and featured on websites associated with the “Doppelgänger” campaign.

OCCRP

While many have had respectable titles at some point, providing them with a very thin veneer of credibility, all were chosen due to their alignment with various Kremlin talking points.

The motley assortment of cranks ranges from a large number of AfD politicians, such as Rainer Rothfuß, who blames Western governments for Russia invading Ukraine, to ‘alien abductees’ like Michael Kameron who blames Western governments for.. er, colluding with a Grey race of extraterrestrials in secret underground bases where they harvest organs.

Together, they took part in “Doppelgänger”, a Russian state-backed disinformation campaign that creates fake news websites imitating real media outlets to push pro-Russian, pro-war messaging. Video interviews with real people across the West played a crucial role.

Recent Reliable News (RRN) was the flagship site of the Doppelgänger project and had stored a large bulk of the interviews that were then being disseminated across multiple cloned fake news sites.

The site has been hacked, however, and is now an expose of itself. A searchable list of the useful idiots is now available here.

Why they were chosen

Martin Laine, who led the investigation for the OCCRP and Delfi, spoke to Baltic Takes. We asked him to what extent those involved should have known they were taking part in a Russian propaganda campaign.

“It was one of my key questions when I started investigating it before summer,” says Laine. “Each case is a little bit different.”

He explains that some were naive, especially among conspiracy theorists who don’t usually get many interview requests. During the investigation, one politician who they contacted said that he would be more careful next time, but ended up taking part in another video for the same campaign a few months later.

Others, however, already participate extensively in Russian propaganda.

What most share in common, explains Laine, is that they already spread pro-Kremlin propaganda, disinformation and conspiracy theories in general, which is why they get picked in the first place as voices useful for the Russian state.

“I did approach around 70 people in good faith giving them an opportunity to distance themselves from this,” says Laine. “Very few used that opportunity. Most just ignored me. If I would find myself in a list like that, I would do anything to distance myself from it.”

While some may have unwittingly taken part in supporting Russian disinformation, they could still reflect on why they are being promoted by an autocratic state waging a genocidal war of aggression and also attacking their own countries and the rules-based international order. They could also share information about how they were approached and convinced to take part, in order to help prevent others from being ensnared in future.

Their failure to do either is damning.

Evasive responses

In a follow-up article, UK-based The Nerve also attempted to contact many of the Brits involved, but received a similarly shy response from many, such as Lembit Öpik and Ben Aris.

Öpik was once a Member of Parliament for the Liberal Democrats, famously left his wife to date younger models, and regularly appeared on popular prime time TV shows in the UK. Voters kicked him out. He lost a massive majority on the night the rest of his party made gains.

His YouTube channel reveals how far he has fallen. This week, Öpik hosted the pro-Russia neo-Nazi Nick Griffin. The tens of views they received was a relative success, considering many of his videos get views in the low single digits. Some videos have just a single viewer.

When asked by the Nerve about his involvement in Doppelgänger, Öpik reportedly made a series of bizarre comments, including seemingly accusing the reporter of working for security services.

Equally evasive is Ben Aris, editor at BNE IntelliNews, the curiously Cyprus-headquartered news outlet where Aris has insisted that Putin is just vilified and that Russia wouldn’t invade Ukraine (just before Russia launched its full scale invasion of Ukraine).

When contacted by the Nerve, Aris claimed that Doppelgänger had only used his public statements from X. When it was pointed out to him that they’d actually found the videos that he recorded specifically for this campaign, Aris stopped responding.

Spare a thought for Mark Galeotti, Contributing Editor at BNE IntelliNews, who now has to spend another of his podcasts defending yet another member of BNE for involvement in Russian disinformation.

Also included in the leak is the perpetually gormless-looking Richard Sakwa, Emiratus Professor at the University of Kent and Honorary Professor at Moscow State University.

Sakwa is the author of ‘The Russia Scare’, a comprehensive debunking of concerns that Russia poses any kind of threat. Inconveniently for Sakwa, Russia launched its full scale invasion of Ukraine just before the book was due to be published, contradicting everything he had written.

Undeterred by his central thesis being bombed to oblivion, he explains in the intro that “the substance of the earlier analysis remains valid, although now framed largely in the past tense” because “events outpaced the empirical analysis and earlier paradigms”.

With such remarkable skills for mental gymnastics and spewing utter nonsense, it’s easy to see why he was picked. Yet few of the useful idiots involved bring any star power or charisma.

A failed campaign

Laine points out that the Doppelgänger campaign is clearly well resourced and extensive, although experts dispute its actual effectiveness beyond box ticking.

Genuine Russia expert Keir Giles suggested that the large volume of Doppelgänger interviews may reflect the incentive of those behind the campaign to prove the value of their work to the Kremlin and keep receiving new grants from the enormous budget set aside for propaganda.

‘Somewhere in Moscow, someone is explaining this website to their boss’, reads a scrolling banner across the now hacked website.

Read the original OCCRP/Delfi investigation here.