Putin’s “Doppelgängers”: The Insider gets inside the operations of the Kremlin's foreign disinformation network

In December of 2023, Ohio Senator JD Vance went on Steve Bannon's podcast, where he asked rhetorically: “Who are the people who will cut Americans’ Social Security benefits and plunge our grandparents into poverty? And for what? So that one of Zelensky’s ministers can buy a bigger yacht?” 

Just a couple of weeks earlier, Russian propaganda outlet Komsomolskaya Pravda had published a story about “Zelensky’s yacht,” citing “documents from the Mediterranean Association of Yacht Brokers.” The story also appeared in English on DC Weekly, a fake-news website founded by former U.S. Marine John Mark Dougan, who lives in Russia.

Two weeks later, the story was already being cited by Republican senators Thom Tillis and Vance, as well as by Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene.

At the offices of Russia's Agency for Social Design (ASP), the reposts about “Zelensky’s yacht” — along with the efforts to debunk the story — were gathered in a folder titled “Collection of publications on the work of the Doppelgänger group.” The intended audiece of the folder was the Russian Presidential Administration. 

The ASP was a hub for coordinating the spread of disinformation and, at times, organizing physical operations in other countries. The Insider has obtained hacked correspondence between Presidential Administration and ASP staff.

The folder also contained reports on the November 2023 graffiti campaign involving Stars of David painted on buildings in Paris, as well as a fake video threatening attacks by Turkish nationalists against visitors to the Paris Olympics. 

The folder also included other reports about France. An assignment given to an operative in the Doppelgänger disinformation campaign in early June 2024 read: “We need materials related to the Olympics. For discrediting and planting [false stories]. Come up with something for Minaev. Guides on how to protect yourself from threats: terrorism, infections.”

A few days later, France held the first round of its snap parliamentary elections, in which the far-right National Rally won 33% of the vote. Several thousand people took to the streets to protest the results, and Russian propaganda channels portrayed the demonstrations as if a revolution had broken out, citing a video of a fire supposedly started by “left-wing activists” in the town of Bobigny. Local authorities had to refute the claim. In fact, the fire shown in the video — spliced with footage of the protests — had occurred before the demonstration.

Amid real corruption scandals over food and equipment procurement for the Ukrainian army that led to the resignation of Defense Minister Oleksiy Reznikov’s, outlets linked to Doppelgänger spent 2023 spreading false claims that Reznikov and his family had bought property in Cannes, Dubai, and Madrid.

Reactions to fake stories about Olena Zelenska’s luxury jewelry and clothing were also included in reports to the Presidential Administration. A rumor that Ukraine's first lady had shopped at Cartier in New York — first spread by an obscure Instagram account — was picked up by Russian propagandists and prominent bloggers on X and TikTok. A few days later, British politician George Galloway posted a video about the rumor on his channel. (Galloway once ranked among the three wealthiest members of the British Parliament, thanks in part to his earnings as a presenter on Iranian state-owned Press TV and Russia’s RT, where he worked until 2022).

False claims about Olena Zelenska’s lavish shopping had circulated on social media before. In December 2022, for example, obscure anonymous accounts on X began posting that Zelenska had spent €40,000 in Parisian stores during a visit to the city, citing “information from social media.”

The claim was reposted by American journalist, RT contributor, and admirer of authoritarian regimes Max Blumenthal, who has 860,000 followers on X. Trump loyalist Candace Owens, who has 7.8 million followers on the platform, also cited the claim. Responding to a post by Volodymyr Zelensky, she wrote: “We want nothing to do with you. Stop stealing from our people while your wife splurges tens of thousands of dollars shopping in Paris. Disgusting.”

Other “achievements” listed in the Doppelgänger campaign’s reports included fabricated reports of graffiti in Berlin depicting Zelensky as a cannibal and a disinformation campaign about bedbugs in Paris in late 2023.

Hacked correspondence from ASD sheds light on how the fake-news factory operated and who ran it.

The documents reviewed show that Sergey Kiriyenko initiated the fake-news operation, while the Kremlin’s key overseers were Alexander Kharichev (head of the Presidential Administration’s Directorate for Monitoring and Analysis of Social Processes) and Sofia Zakharova (an aide in the Kremlin directorate responsible for ICT development and communications infrastructure). Kharichev oversees disinformation about Ukraine, while Zakharova is responsible for spreading it in Western countries.

Kharichev began his career in Russia's Radiation, Chemical and Biological Protection Troops (specifically at the 27th Zelinsky Scientific Center, which was sanctioned after the 2020 poisioning of Alexei Navalny). Kharichev's work there focused not on chemical weapons but on “morale and psychological support.” After Putin came to power more than two decades ago, Kharichev moved to the Presidential Administration, where he held various posts. In 2024, the Kremlin created a department specifically for him: its task was to monitor social processes.

The project was carried out by Ilya Gambashidze, a former adviser to propagandist and State Duma deputy Pyotr Tolstoy, who became chairman of the Duma’s Committee on International Affairs in 2026. Gambashidze’s Agency for Social Design (ASD) was responsible for the project's implementation.

“After two years of operation, the project has effectively become the only way to influence public opinion in the target countries naturally, without being openly branded as ‘Russian propaganda,’” Gambashidze wrote in a report to the Presidential Administration. The claim sits uneasily with the fact that both he and some members of his team have been sanctioned by the United States, the EU, and other countries for spreading disinformation, while intelligence agencies and NGOs regularly publish reports and warnings about Russian influence operations.

In a promotional video — also intended to secure another year of funding from the Presidential Administration — Gambashidze declared: “Our narratives are embedded in the worldview of Western citizens. Having carefully prepared our information attacks and understood the project’s goals and objectives, we firmly believe in ultimate victory. The battlefield is the minds of the people of planet Earth!”  

In practice, however, these “carefully prepared attacks” usually amounted to crude disinformation targeting migrants and stoking ethnic hatred. In 2022, Doppelgänger operatives began circulating videos and articles to the German audience claiming that daycare workers were protesting an influx of Ukrainian refugee children, that Ukrainians were leaving German students without enough room in dormitories, and that Ukrainians had beaten up a Munich resident for refusing to buy them expensive alcohol. Numerous other fabricated stories about refugees followed. 

The operatives also posed as Ukrainians to post post comments under such stories — claiming, for example, that “Germans owe them for Hitler" based on the reasoning that “a slight increase in prices and utility rates is a normal price to pay for the 10 million Ukrainians you killed during World War II.” ASD employees advocated for the use of such tactics. In 2022, one wrote that: "This is the kind of outrageous nonsense we need to invent and attribute to Ukrainian movements in Europe. They gave us examples to model our stories on and churn out trash in their name.” 

Other notes recommended making a German-language video in which Ukrainians “compare themselves with Nazi heroes,” and one in which they argue that “there are many refugees today, but Ukrainians are the only ones who truly deserve support from Germans or Italians.” The team also planned to circulate a video in Germany featuring a Syrian man claiming that “Ukrainians are joining ISIS to fight Russians and Jews in Europe.”

To stoke hostility toward refugees in Italy, the team proposed spreading a false story about how “seized villas belonging to Russians will be handed over to Ukrainian refugees, with the cost of maintaining them coming out of local budgets.” Additionally, Italian bloggers were to be paid to produce a sketch about the harm caused by sanctions against Russia. “The main thing is that they don’t figure out who commissioned it — right now, they think it’s an Italian political party,” warned an ASD employee.

For the UK, the plan was to produce a video supposedly featuring a Syrian man in London with ISIS affiliations threatening, “If I see one more Ukrainian here, I’ll slit his throat!” Another proposed story claimed that Norwegian far-right terrorist Anders Breivik had supported Ukraine's Azov Brigade — “we’ll make it look like a screenshot from Facebook Messenger and produce a 30-second video mixing footage of Breivik’s attack with footage of Azov rallies.”

In several countries covered by the project, the team proposed creating online communities “for whiners,” where people could vent about whatever had annoyed them that day. “People post, others sympathize. Later, political topics will fit in nicely — complaints about prices, clashes with refugees, and so on,” the idea’s author noted.

ASD refers to fabricated videos, screenshots, and photographs as “augmented reality” or “special reports.”

At a meeting in February 2024, for example, Sofia Zakharova noted: “Work is already underway on augmented reality about the defense of Kyiv. Klitschko has been given instructions on which units are moving where toward Kyiv.” The ASD's internal documents literally use the term "fakes" to describe their collection of fabricated stories, writing that a "fake" claim about Ukrainian refugees having priority access to medical care was an example of a “document from ‘augmented reality’ that accidentally leaked onto social media.”

At the very start of the Doppelgänger campaign, ASD drew up a guide to “techniques for creating fake content”:

• Augmenting reality with computer graphics:
  - Adding an element to a shot to change its meaning.
  - Deepfakes – replacing faces in a wide shot (for example, putting the German military attaché at the Moscow Victory Day Parade).
• Revoicing footage according to our script: recording voice-overs and selecting appropriate ambient sounds.
• Using a chroma key (green screen).
• Filming original content:
  - Staged shoots using professional recording equipment (dashboard cameras, mobile phone cameras, surveillance cameras). Filming can take place in Russia, with props and other details used to recreate settings resembling Germany, Italy, or England. Actors perform our scripted scenes, with computer graphics used to manipulate the footage where necessary.
  - Staged shoots carried out directly in the target countries.

The idea for what would later become known as the Matryoshka network also emerged in 2022. One proposal, for example, was to fabricate a story about the rape of a child in Germany: “Ukrainian teenagers raped 12-year-old Marta Mengel in Rostock. The girl has been seeing a psychologist for two weeks and is slowly beginning to talk. The authorities have banned any mention of the case, but we have investigated it and will publish our findings in a couple of days. In the style of Die Zeit... On-screen caption: coming soon in the newspaper and on the Die Zeit website. 30 seconds, 40 at most.”

Gambashidze founded his first PR agency in 2002, at the age of 25. Around the same time, he became a political strategist for United Russia and an aide to Oleg Mitvol, the former prefect of Moscow’s Northern Administrative District. In 2009, Gambashidze was reportedly the target of an attempted kidnapping. In 2020, he developed chatbots to help people vote in the constitutional reform referendum that "zeroed out" Putin’s presidential term limits. In 2023, he advised Vladimir Koshelev, a deputy from LDPR, and helped develop the Zhirinovsky AI model.

How this relatively obscure PR specialist became the operative behind Russia’s largest disinformation campaign and came to work with Sergey Kiriyenko remains unclear. The Insider found that, since at least the mid-2010s, Gambashidze had regularly accompanied deputies Leonid Slutsky (LDPR) and Pyotr Tolstoy (United Russia) on trips abroad, including those related to their work at the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE). According to FBI documents, however, the first such meeting took place in April 2022. At the meeting, the former head of Rosatom stressed the need to “create nuclear psychosis,” wage a “war for peace,” and “exaggerate everything.”

Vladimir Tabak, CEO of the autonomous nonprofit organization ANO Dialog, was also brought into the project. The organization, which employs around 2,000 people, focuses primarily on producing content and promoting it in the media and on social networks. In the first week of March 2022, Timofey Vi, a member of Tabak’s team, registered domains that would later be used by Doppelgänger.

By July 2022, Kiriyenko already had a plan to launch a propaganda campaign simultaneously in five European countries. The meeting was attended by Kiriyenko and Gambashidze, along with Sofia Zakharova and a certain “Stas”  — apparently Stanislav Starostin, information security adviser to the CEO of ANO Dialog Regions. The Insider found that Starostin later joined the Doppelgänger operation.

At the meeting, the group outlined what the ASD would later call a “counter-campaign,” or “CC.” The first priority was to discredit the United States, the United Kingdom, and NATO; the second was to convey the “truth” about the war in Ukraine; and the third was to persuade Germans to oppose what the team called “ineffective sanctions policy.” Germany was the main focus of the campaign’s early stages.

By late June 2022, the operation was active in at least three countries – Germany, Italy, and the UK – according to documents reviewed by The Insider. Social media posts linked to fake websites impersonating well-known news outlets, with hundreds of dollars a day spent promoting them. Comments linking to these fake sites were also posted under posts by legitimate media outlets. Such inauthentic comments appeared not only on Facebook and Instagram but also on Telegram. Advertising on Meta’s platforms was paid for through the Agency for Social Design (ASD) and its affiliated group of companies, Structure, a Meta investigation found.

The breakup of Yevgeny Prigozhin’s media empire gave Doppelgänger a major boost. After a private jet carrying the late Wagner Group head crashed in August 2023 (two months after Wagner's failed march on Moscow), Prigozhin's troll factory was left without a leader. Kiriyenko’s project suddenly became the leading force in spreading online disinformation abroad, and from that point forward, ASD operations expanded rapidly — as the actual playbooks from Gambashidze’s team demonstrate.

Several examples are provided below.

Example: how to write a comment from any point on the political spectrum

Headline:

• Turks lay wreaths at the Swedish consulate general
• Türken tragen Kränze zur schwedischen Botschaft
• Des Turcs portent des couronnes à l'ambassade de Suède

Format:

Facebook posts featuring a screenshot of a tweet. The screenshot shows the Swedish consulate general in Turkey, with wreaths photoshopped into the image.

Facebook post texts:

• Average French citizen:

Looks like Sweden won’t be joining NATO. Maybe the Turks will leave, too. What idiot approved that stupid Quran stunt?

On dirait que la Suède ne sera pas dans l'OTAN. Et peut-être que les Turcs sortiront aussi maintenant. Quel est l'idiot qui a autorisé cette action coranique stupide?

• Muslim from France:

No one in France has condemned this disgrace. But our brothers in the lands of the Prophet (peace and blessings of Allah be upon him) will not remain silent! The wreaths are just the beginning.

• German leftist:

The U.S. and NATO stand for carte blanche and appalling stupidity. It’s a shame that both the Swedes and our own country are going along with them. =( Now Muslims will be entirely justified in demanding revenge.

Die USA und die NATO sind nachgiebig und außerdem furchtbar dumm. Schade, dass sowohl die Schweden als auch unser Land da mitmachen =( Jetzt werden die Muslime völlig zu Recht Rache fordern.

• German of Turkish origin:

I haven’t been to a mosque in a long time, but now I will. Evil and sin are growing stronger, while our tolerant authorities remain silent. Who will protect Muslims? Is violence the only way to save our holy sites?

Ich war schon lange nicht mehr in einer Moschee, aber jetzt werde ich hingehen. Das Böse und die Sünde werden immer stärker, und unsere toleranten Behörden schweigen. Wer wird die Muslime schützen? Ist Gewalt das Einzige, was unsere Heiligtümer retten kann?

Note: The comments may need to be translated into simpler, more basic language.

Prompts for AI models

Examples of prompts for AI models saved by a manager of the Doppelgänger disinformation campaign in April 2024 include:

“Write a 450-character comment from the perspective of a 38-year-old Frenchman who considers the Olympics a foolish waste of France’s scarce budgetary resources. Macron wants to show off France as a world leader, but everyone can see that it isn’t. How can anyone talk about the beauty of France when garbage collectors aren’t clearing the rubbish from the capital’s streets?”

“Write a 400-character comment from the perspective of a 38-year-old Polish woman who blames the government for the country’s crazy surge in food prices. Poland has cozied up to Ukraine and allowed a million Ukrainian migrants to settle in the country, where they take jobs and claim benefits. It can’t even resolve the Ukrainian grain issue to protect its own farmers!”

“Write a 400-character comment from the perspective of a 38-year-old Israeli woman who believes Israel is overstretched by military spending. Healthcare workers are under pressure and stress, just as they were during the pandemic. The war is dragging on, and the U.S. is criticizing the way it is being fought. If the government had acted more decisively and wisely, and the U.S. had genuinely helped us, we would have won by now.”

Those working on Doppelgänger’s European operations called it the “European counter-campaign,” or ECC. They were officially employed by the autonomous nonprofit Center for Global IT Cooperation, but their backgrounds were closely tied to Russian state institutions.

The Center for Global IT Cooperation was established in 2020 as a think tank tasked with developing ideas to promote Russia’s image as a global IT leader and bringing international best practices in IT to the Russian expert community. In recent years, the nonprofit has co-organized the Russian Internet Governance Forum (RIGF).

In 2024, the organization suddenly hired around two dozen people — including former Foreign Ministry official Yuri Lindre-Tsvetkov (who took the surname Lindre in 2022) and recent MGIMO graduate Roman Shamraev. The center’s director, Vadim Glushchenko, is identified in a document as “Sofia’s employee,”  apparently a reference to Sofia Zakharova.  Glushchenko aide is listed as Elizaveta Mikhailova (Kirina).

In the early 2000s, Glushchenko worked at the central office of the Russian Ministry of Defense, including in its Main Directorate for International Military Cooperation. From 2014 to 2020, he served as an adviser on information and communications technology at Russia’s Permanent Mission to the EU in Brussels. 

Elizaveta Kirina appears to have worked with Glushchenko in Europe, as during the same period, she regularly flew between Brussels and Moscow. 

Yuri Lindre is a former official with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA). According to a surviving résumé on HeadHunter, from 2016 to 2020 he reported to MFA spokeswomsn Maria Zakharova and served as first secretary in the Department of Information and Press.

Glushchenko and Kirina are also listed as “Sofia’s employees,” suggesting that Sofia Zakharova is routinely involved in the activities of the Center for Global IT Cooperation.

The most senior figure in Doppelgänger’s European unit is Alexey Goltyaev. A former Foreign Ministry official, he has served since 2024 as head of the Department for CIS Affairs and Security in the Caucasus Region as part of the Security Council staff. 

Goltyaev has a long record of propaganda work. In 2009, he received a commendation from the president “for active participation in efforts to provide political and propaganda support for Russia’s foreign policy priorities.”

As a diplomat specializing in international affairs, Goltyaev focuses on human rights. In 2018, he spoke on Russia’s behalf against a UN resolution calling for an investigation into one of the deadliest episodes of the Syrian civil war: the bombardment of Eastern Ghouta, an operation that Russian aircraft are believed to have taken part in. Goltyaev also presented a UN resolution on the relationship between human rights and so-called traditional values. The Russian Foreign Ministry sought to use the resolution to legitimize the idea that refusing to respect certain human rights could be framed as respecting traditional cultural values.

At meetings of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, Goltyaev never missed an opportunity to highlight violations of media freedom in Ukraine. He also described how Russia, despite objections from several Western countries, was “doing everything to restore historical justice and ensure the dignified development of the Crimean Tatars” — even as Russian authorities in annexed Crimea persecuted Crimean Tatar activists and members of the Crimean Solidarity movement, raided their homes, and handed down lengthy prison sentences.

Margarita Klimanova is responsible for audience targeting in Doppelgänger’s disinformation campaigns. She, too, is a “Sofia employee” — and officially so: Klimanova is listed as an adviser in the Presidential Administration’s Directorate for ICT Development and Communications Infrastructure.

Klimanova was born in Bulgaria to diplomat Vladimir Klimanov. In the mid-2010s, she studied in France, visited the European Commission, and lived in Brussels for a time. She speaks fluent French and English.

In 2022, Klimanova traveled to Ethiopia to attend the UN Internet Governance Forum (IGF), along with Vadim Glushchenko and ANO Dialog employees Timofey Vi and Alla Volodina.

In April 2026, Klimanova was appointed to the Russian delegation to the 15th UN Congress on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice, alongside Nina Fedorova, deputy director general of the Center for Global IT Cooperation, and Russian Foreign Ministry officials.

Within Doppelgänger, Klimanova is responsible for “delivery.” Minutes of meetings reviewed by The Insider show that this means targeting fake content at specific audiences, particularly migrants and young people.

In October 2023, for example, Klimanova complained that fake street interviews were “not getting past moderation. You can tell from the wording alone.” She also proudly reported that websites belonging to RRN — another name for the Doppelgänger network — had ranked third in Google News.

In March 2024, at a time when the team had grown concerned about Zelensky’s rising approval ratings in France, Klimanova was promoting banners bearing the slogans “Someone Else’s War” and “Europe Needs Peace” in an effort to reverse the trend. Klimanova also suggests topics for fake comments and posts: “Criticizing the U.S. goes down really well.”

Another Presidential Administration employee, MGIMO graduate Ekaterina Sorokova, handles statistics for Doppelgänger’s European unit. Together with Klimanova, she draws up monthly event calendars and decides which events to prioritize.

Elena Rodnova is responsible for promoting fake-news websites, known within the project as RRN, or the “Media Swarm.” She previously worked at Readovka and NTV, presented sports news on Rossiya-1, and ran her own international travel agency.

At Doppelgänger, Rodnova became a key figure in the promotion of fake news. According to Tochka, she sent content plans to MGIMO students who wrote articles and solicited comments from “experts” for the fake-news sites. She also tracked page views and evaluated their performance.

Around the autumn of 2023, Readovka founder Alexey Kostylev began attending meetings of the teams handling the EU and, in particular, Ukraine. He proposed, for example, making short videos claiming that nationalists were attacking Volodymyr Zelensky over his “support for Jews” after the October 7 terrorist attack. Kostylev suggested “planting” these videos among neo-Nazis. The topic, intended to discredit Zelensky, was designated a key priority at a meeting attended by Alexander Kharichev on Nov. 24, 2023.

As Meduza reported, Readovka founder Kostylev met Vladimir Tabak, head of ANO Dialog, in early 2022. After that, Readkova outlet began receiving lists of topics and narratives it was expected to publish.

Kostylev continued to attend meetings of Doppelgänger’s Ukraine team until at least the summer of 2024. The minutes of a meeting quote Kharichev as saying: “‘Ukraine Against Fags’ — that really took off: 70,000 subscribers, 3,000 comments!” 

In October 2024, Kostylev was left paralyzed after an ATV accident. In August 2025, he transferred ownership of Readovka to Andrey Tkachenko of ANO Dialog.

Then in February 2026, Kostylev was detained on charges of large-scale fraud. According to investigators, he was part of an organized group that embezzled public funds while carrying out a multibillion-ruble government contract to purchase and supply drones to the Ministry of Defense. The alleged damage was estimated at 1 billion rubles ($12.0 million). Despite his disability, Kostylev is being held in a pretrial detention center. He has denied the charges.

Another Readovka employee, Kirill Solok, was at least aware of the ECC team’s activities. He and Kostylev had co-founded NPO Oborona LLC, which was presumably intended to manufacture the ill-fated drone, and his name appears in the metadata of a “Briefing on Narratives" that states:

“Running Telegram channels in enemy territory is based on the fundamental principles of intelligence work and psychological operations... From the earliest stages of the project, it was decided that all outlets would pose as Ukrainian and conduct information and psychological operations without overt Russian propaganda... All of the project’s channels feature Ukrainian news narratives, creating the illusion that they are not connected to Russia. Abandoning pro-Ukrainian themes over time would expose the sponsor and derail the project’s entire strategic plan.”

Apparently, Kostylev and Solok were expected to build a similar network of channels in Ukraine. After all, they already had experience with this kind of operation through Readovka.

Another propagandist on the ECC was Alexander Samokhvalov, whose previous work included stints with REN TV, Sputnik, Izvestia, and RT. From 2022 to 2024, he worked at ANO Dialog, where he headed the New Media Development Department. His subordinate at the organization was Yevgeny Zlenko, who later moved to the Center for Global IT Cooperation.

At a regional media forum in 2024, Samokhvalov was introduced as head of Telegram channel operations at ANO Dialog.

Sergey Chernakov, 54, oversees the TikTok operation and the spread of fake videos on Twitter while also heading the “Expert Clubs of Russia” project at EISI, a Kremlin think tank. In 2013, Chernakov and Dmitry Gusev (his former boss, now a State Duma deputy) authored a book: Ears Wag the Donkey: Modern Social Programming. Calling themselves "social programmers," the authors write: “Russia’s international objectives remain. In fact, as the United States fails to manage global affairs, increasingly resorts to brute force, violates international law, and loses its moral authority, Russia’s information troops and special operations abroad are becoming even more relevant.” 

The “Ukrainian counter-campaign,” initially codenamed “Uganda,” was launched in early 2023. Sergey Kiriyenko outlined four overarching priorities: discrediting Ukraine’s military and political leadership, dividing the country’s elites, demoralizing the Ukrainian armed forces, and disrupting civilian life. ASD prepared the project pitch, and the aformentioned Kharichev — then head of the Presidential Administration’s Directorate for Supporting the State Council — became the campaign’s chief Kremlin overseer.

In June 2024, the directorate was split in two, and Kharichev took charge of the new Directorate for Monitoring and Analysis of Social Processes. A longtime ally of Kiriyenko, he became the Kremlin’s top official responsible for ideology after the full-scale invasion began.

Kharichev’s subordinates, Boris Rapoport and Yevgeny Kazakov, also attended meetings on the Ukraine campaign. Working under Vladislav Surkov in the mid-2010s, Rapoport had helped oversee the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk “people’s republics.” He “enjoyed considerable respect among the separatist movement’s leading figures and was regarded as an ‘ideological supporter,’” according to Novaya Gazeta. In 2018, Kharichev proposed that Kiriyenko bring Rapoport back to the Kremlin.

Kazakov has been described as “a friend of Kharichev from their time in the armed forces.” Kharichev brought him back to the Kremlin in the summer of 2022 to work on the Ukrainian counter-campaign.

Two political strategists attended the Ukraine meetings most frequently: Alexander Asafov and Oleg Gaba.

“Disseminating fake news is one of the main tools of information warfare,” Asafov, head of EISI’s New Technologies Laboratory, said in a July 30, 2026 report in Vzglyad (a newspaper controlled by EISI). Asafov, of course, was referring to fake news purportedly being spread by the Ukrainian authorities.

Yet Asafov himself has spent years helping produce Russian disinformation about Ukraine and its government. In May 2023, he proposed spreading a fake story about “bribes paid to commanders to avoid being sent to the front.” In January 2024, he proposed claiming that Ukraine was pulling air-defense systems back to Kyiv to “protect the authorities.”

In January 2024, Yevgeny Kazakov chaired a meeting in Kharichev’s place. The team discussed the possibility of fabricating stories following reports of the crash of a Russian military Il-76 aircraft in Belgorod Region. Kazakov suggested sending a fake story to the widows of Ukrainian servicemen: “They died for an expensive Il-76 — the Russians have few of those.” The meeting also produced the idea of claiming that Ukraine’s territorial recruitment centers (TCCs) had sent widows “a can of stewed meat with a little flag as compensation.”

The team ultimately dropped the fake about the expensive Il-76, but they did launch the canned-meat story three days later. Mikhail Biyunладимирович, 29.03.1986 (who describes himself as a “hypebeast and political strategist” and his longtime associate Sergey Minaev, one of the creators of the “Zhirinovsky” neural network and a Minecraft monument to the late LDPR leader. The accompanying copy was written by Andrey Yadykin, who worked at the PRopaganda Center for Communication Technologies under Mikhail Vinogradov in the early 2000s.

Mikhail Baraev, head of the Agency for Social Design’s design department and a longtime associate of Gambashidze, was also involved in producing another fake story about the Il-76.

Mikhail Biyun, Mikhail Baraev, Andrey Yadykin, Sergey Minaev, and Minaev’s longtime assistant, Kristina Bezborodova, were the main creators of fake posters, banners, memes, and videos. Content distribution was handled by former employees of Prigozhin’s troll factory, Andrey Manzolevsky and Dmitry Lukienko, as well as Anastasia Kazakova, who had previously been part of Gambashidze’s team working with Pyotr Tolstoy, a State Duma deputy and propagandist. Other members of the ASD team had also worked in Prigozhin’s organizations or served on election campaign teams organized by Gambashidze.

The Insider’s investigation found that people linked directly to Alexander Kharichev and the Agency for Social Design were involved in organizing training camps for operations across Europу and prepared recruits for a range of activities — from interference in Moldova’s elections to acts of provocations and sabotage in Western Europe.

While MGIMO alumni churned out fake stories designed to pass as articles in Western media, a group of neo-Nazis and soccer hooligans recruited by the same Presidential Administration officials trained at a camp in the Balkans to operate drones laden with explosives — and to teach others these skills. However, that aspect of the Russian operation will be covered in the next part of this investigation.

This article was produced in association with the Gnida project.