Banned Russian Channel RT Secretly Funds Bloggers to Spread Kremlin Narratives

On 14 March 2025, OCCRP report­ed that Rus­si­a’s state-con­trolled RT news chan­nel is covert­ly financ­ing sup­pos­ed­ly inde­pen­dent video blog­gers who pro­mote pro-Krem­lin nar­ra­tives to West­ern audi­ences. The arti­cle begins:

Since Rus­si­a’s full-scale inva­sion of Ukraine in Feb­ru­ary 2022, the state-con­trolled inter­na­tion­al news chan­nel RT has all but dis­ap­peared from West­ern screens. The Euro­pean Union banned the out­let, for­mer­ly known as Rus­sia Today, in a mat­ter of days, describ­ing it as “essen­tial and instru­men­tal” in pro­mot­ing the war. In the Unit­ed States, RT was dropped from stream­ing plat­forms, its YouTube chan­nel was blocked, and its local ser­vice shut down. Even­tu­al­ly RT was sanc­tioned by the U.S. gov­ern­ment, and Meta, the par­ent com­pa­ny of Face­book and Insta­gram, blocked its accounts as well. But the out­let’s efforts to pro­mote pro-Russ­ian mate­r­i­al in the West have con­tin­ued. A new inves­ti­ga­tion by iSto­ries, OCCR­P’s Russ­ian part­ner in exile, has iden­ti­fied sev­er­al sup­pos­ed­ly inde­pen­dent influ­encers who have received funds from RT.

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Key Points:

• Mul­ti­ple blog­gers who claim inde­pen­dence receive reg­u­lar pay­ments from RT while pro­mot­ing Rus­sia as a haven for tra­di­tion­al val­ues and jus­ti­fy­ing the Ukraine war.
• One YouTube chan­nel, “Real Reporter,” received over $180,000 from RT while its host claimed he was inde­pen­dent and “man­aged to piss off both sides.”
• The oper­a­tion aligns with Rus­si­a’s cam­paign to attract West­ern immi­grants who “share tra­di­tion­al Russ­ian val­ues” and reject lib­er­al poli­cies in their home countries.
• The inves­ti­ga­tion iden­ti­fied a net­work of influ­encers appear­ing on each oth­er’s chan­nels and coor­di­nat­ing cov­er­age of pro-Krem­lin events and narratives.

In July 2022, the GIOR pub­lished a report titled “US Ampli­fiers of Russ­ian ‘Ampli­gan­da’”. Accord­ing to the report synopsis:

A group of promi­nent US social media influ­encers from both the right and the left has recent­ly act­ed as ampli­fiers of Russ­ian dis­in­for­ma­tion, claim­ing the Unit­ed States is devel­op­ing bio­log­i­cal weapons in a net­work of labs locat­ed in Ukraine. These indi­vid­u­als demon­strat­ed a pri­or will­ing­ness to sup­port Russ­ian posi­tions, and most were known ear­li­er for var­i­ous forms of COVID denial­ism. Self-inter­est, par­tic­u­lar­ly eco­nom­ic, is like­ly a major rea­son behind the shift by social media influ­encers to these Russ­ian narratives.

Down­load the full report here.

Dis­claimer: This post was gen­er­at­ed using AI, with added con­text where pos­si­ble. Please ver­i­fy all infor­ma­tion before using. Images are also AI-gen­er­at­ed and are for illus­tra­tive pur­pos­es only—they are meant to rep­re­sent the events or indi­vid­u­als con­cerned but should not be under­stood as “real world” photography.