Meduza’s daily newsletter: Tuesday, September 17, 2024 America’s expanding RT crackdown, new arrest warrants for Pussy Riot activists, and prison time for a vox-pop respondent

The Naked Pravda: America's expanding crackdown on RT and Moscow's covert influence operations

Last month, the FBI raided the homes of Scott Ritter, a former United Nations weapons inspector and critic of American foreign policy, and Dimitri Simes, a former think tank executive and an adviser to Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. In late August, The New York Times reported that these searches were part of the U.S. Justice Department’s “broad criminal investigation into Americans who have worked with Russia’s state television networks.”

In the past two weeks, U.S. officials have taken numerous measures against Russia Today and its affiliates and accelerated police actions against Russia-based individuals and entities accused of covert influence operations, including money laundering, sanctions violations, and unregistered foreign agent work. For example, the Justice Department announced the seizure of 32 Internet domains used in Russian government-directed foreign malign influence campaigns (colloquially referred to as “Doppelganger”), alleging that Russian companies used online domains to impersonate legitimate news entities and unique media brands to spread Russian government propaganda covertly, violating U.S. laws against money laundering and trademarks. 

That same day, the Justice Department indicted two Russia-based employees of RT for conspiring to commit money laundering and conspiring to violate the Foreign Agents Registration Act in a $10-million scheme to fund and direct a Tennessee-based company to publish and disseminate information “with hidden Russian-government messaging.” A day later, officials charged Dmitri Simes and his wife with participating in a plot to violate U.S. sanctions and launder money obtained from Russian state television.

About a week later, the U.S. State Department issued a special “alert to the world,” declaring that new information obtained over the past year reveals that Russia Today has “moved beyond being simply a media outlet” and has become “an entity with cyber capabilities” that’s “also engaged in information operations, covert influence, and military procurement.” Washington claims that the Russian government embedded within RT in Spring 2023 an entity “with cyber operational capabilities and ties to Russian intelligence.” Based on these allegations, Meta — the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp — soon announced that it had banned Russia Today and its affiliates from all its platforms. 

A day before that big announcement from the State Department, a jury in Tampa, Florida, convicted four American citizens of conspiracy to act as agents of the Russian government. Case evidence first reported by RFE/RL shows that the activists on trial secretly coordinated their activities and received funding from “Anti-Globalization Movement” head Alexander Ionov, who acted on orders from Russia’s Federal Security Service.

To discuss this recent explosion of American police and diplomatic activity targeting RT and Russian covert influence operations in the U.S., The Naked Pravda spoke to RFE/RL journalist Mike Eckel, who coauthored the September 6 report on how Ionov and his FSB handlers “chatted and plotted to sow discord in the United States.”

This podcast episode demands 45 minutes of your precious time.

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Meduza’s feature reporting

• 🎯 The dozens of bases that could be in Ukraine’s crosshairs if the West greenlights long-range missile strikes deeper inside Russia
• 🪖 ‘Perhaps it’s all part of a clever plan’: Russian pundits and politicians react to Putin’s latest army expansion order
• 📸 Photos and voices from Sumy, a Ukrainian border city facing constant Russian attacks

The news in brief

• 🎤 Russia’s federal censor ordered streaming services to block a new album from the rap group Kasta because of its anti-war lyrics. Now the group has released it for free on its website, soliciting donations.
• 🪖 Some of Ukraine’s top army commanders (including General Zaluzhny) questioned Zelensky’s plans to invade Russia’s Kursk region, Ukrainian military officials tell POLITICO (but the president has General Syrskyi’s support)
• 👮 Russian police issue arrest warrants for five Pussy Riot activists, reportedly on charges of “financing terrorism” (presumably referring to fundraising efforts for the Okhmatdyt Children’s Hospital in Kyiv, which was hit in a Russian missile strike on July 8)
• 📦 “U.S. military aid packages for Ukraine have been smaller in recent months, as the stockpiles of weapons and equipment that the Pentagon is willing to send Kyiv from its own inventory have dwindled,” reports CNN (though American artillery-shell production increases are “on schedule”)
• ⚖️ A military court has transferred “Patriot Park” director Vyacheslav Akhmedov to house arrest. He was arrested last month on charges of embezzling the park’s state funding in a scheme that also allegedly involved former Deputy Defense Minister Pavel Popov (who was arrested on August 29).
• 🏳️‍🌈 Amid a boycott by opposition deputies, Republic of Georgia lawmakers adopted the final reading of “family values” legislation on Tuesday that bans same-sex marriages, adoption of children by same-sex couples, and “gay propaganda.” The law also criminalizes gender confirmation medical treatments and procedures.
• ⚖️ A Moscow court has replaced a five-year compulsory labor sentence with a five-year prison sentence for a man who told RFE/RL in a street survey in July 2022 that Russian troops had committed atrocities in Ukraine. (Yuri Kokhovets wasn’t arrested for the interview until a year later, and his initial sentence was handed down in April 2024.)

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