Two months before the presidential election, the US government is stepping up its efforts to counter Russian disinformation operations on its territory. Operations that are much more sophisticated than in 2016, richly funded and traceable to the Kremlin, according to official documents.
Sanctions, seizure of online domains, accusations, but above all detailed communication to counter this undertaking: the American authorities outlined, on Wednesday 4 September, the contours of the online war, largely clandestine, that Russia would have declared to influence the opinions of foreign public authorities.
Two Russian citizens, Kostiantyn Kalashnikov, 31, and Elena Afanasieva, 27, have been charged in New York with conspiracy to commit money laundering and violating foreign agent laws. According to the courts, which have access to their communications, these two employees of the RT channel – the regime’s propaganda tool abroad – organised from Moscow, using pseudonyms and front companies, a clever funding circuit of the order of ten million dollars, to broadcast content in the United States.
To do this, they signed an agreement with a platform located in Tennessee, which received regular transfers (thirty in total, between October 2023 and August 2024), in particular from the United Arab Emirates and Turkey.
Posing as a victim
According to the summary of the case released by the Department of Justice, the company has distributed nearly 2,000 videos, by November 2023, across all available media (TikTok, Instagram, X, and YouTube). On YouTube, they have garnered 16 million views. These videos are said to deal with numerous topics related to current American affairs (inflation, immigration) and foreign policy.
“If the opinions expressed in these videos are not uniform, Please note the summary, Most of them are part of the publicly stated goals of the Russian government and RT: to amplify internal divisions in the United States. » After the attack in March at a shopping centre near Moscow, one of the two employees asked one of the company’s founders to blame Ukraine and the United States.
The Tennessee company in question is not named in the charging document, but it is Tenet Media, founded by Lauren Chen and her husband, Liam Donovan. Tenet Media lists itself on its website as “a network of heterodox commentators focusing on Western cultural and political issues”. He wanted to bring together far-right stars such as Tim Pool, host of the podcast “The Culture War,” and Benny Johnson, host of the “Benny Show,” under one roof.
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