This article was originally published in French in a special issue of Réseaux.

Russia’s foreign policy and influence capabilities have seen major changes since February 24, 2022. Beyond the front lines and physical battlefield, the conflict sparked by the full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russian armed forces has spread into the information space. While recent literature has started to analyze how Russia’s propaganda apparatus has been employed—domestically and abroad—to justify this brutal escalation of a war that began in 2014 (Alyukov, 2022; Kiriya, 2022; Tolz and Hutchings, 2023; Patrona, 2023), little research has addressed its direct impact on the actors and organization of Russia’s information influence apparatus.

The multifaceted ecosystem of state and non-state actors that conduct Russia’s information influence operations began to take shape in the mid-2000s with the launch of Russia’s first English-language channel, Russia Today (RT). Today, almost two decades later, Russia’s transnational state media outlets RT and Sputnik have been banned in the European Union (EU) and new barriers to the free flow of information put up, with most Western social media platforms blocked inside Russia. Additionally, one of the most resounding information manipulation operations of the 21st century, Project Lakhta—run by businessman and Wagner Group founder Yevgeny Prigozhin—has been dismantled following Wagner’s failed rebellion and Prigozhin’s dramatic death in a plane crash in the summer of 2023.

How has the war transformed Russia’s information influence capabilities and objectives, now more than two and a half years after the war in Ukraine began? How have the Russian government and the agents involved in this ecosystem adapted to the increasingly confrontational global information space amid the war?

Information influence as a comprehensive concept

This article relies on the comprehensive and instrumental concept of information influence, which we define as the range of practices that leverage information resources and technologies to shape the perceptions and behaviors of a target audience, with the aim of achieving outcomes aligned with the agent’s preferences, desires, or interests. This definition draws on the classical relational theory of power in political science, where influence is distinctly described as “a relation between human actors such as the wants, desires, preferences, or intentions of one or more actors affect the actions, or predispositions to act, of one or more other actors, in a direction consistent with—and not contrary to—the will, preferences, or intentions of the influence-wielders” (Dahl, 2003 (1963), in Stinebrickner, 2015). Influence also involves the shaping of consent and obedience (Charillon, 2022). Beyond attraction, persuasion, or incitement (Nye, 2011), it may rely on manipulation and deception. Unlike other forms of power, however, influence is incompatible with the use of force or coercion (Lukes, 2005 [1974]).

The analytical value of the concept of information influence, as we see it, lies in its comprehensive scope: it encompasses a wide range of practices, including public diplomacy (Snow & Cull, 2020; Szostek, 2020) through its mediated type (Golan et al., 2019), digital diplomacy, propaganda—particularly computational propaganda (Woolley and Howard (eds.), 2018)—and disinformation and “information warfare” operations (Chifu, 2023). Information influence is not confined to any single practice; instead, it allows for the consideration of various approaches depending on the context and the actors involved. For instance, RT serves as an actor capable of engaging in media-based public diplomacy, state propaganda, and information manipulation simultaneously (Audinet, 2024).

The notion of information influence, which appears in Russian doctrines (informatsionnoye vozdeystviye) to describe both domestic and foreign practices¹, has gained traction in recent literature (Hammond-Errey, 2019; Hoyle et al., 2023; Audinet & Limonier, 2017, 2022; Gérard, 2023). In her research on Russian transnational state media, Charlotte Wagnsson uses the term “malign information influence” to qualify “information sponsored by authoritarian regimes or other hostile actors” that aims to “to inflict harm upon others” and “blurs the lines between public diplomacy, propaganda, and traditional journalism” (Wagnsson, 2022). The association with the influence practices of authoritarian states continues the discussion around “sharp power," an updated approach to Joseph Nye’s “soft power” (Nye, 2011). Sharp power “pierces, penetrates, or perforates the information environments in the targeted countries," particularly liberal democracies, while “manipulating and poisoning information” (Walker and Ludwig, in Cardenal, 2017). Our examination of Russia’s practices of information influence echoes Sergei Guriev and Daniel Treisman’s research on “informational autocracy”: contemporary authoritarian regimes, in contrast to their predecessors, rely less on coercion and ideology, and more on information manipulation to convince domestic and foreign audiences of their governance performance while silencing critics (Guriev and Treisman, 2019).

Building on Steven Lukes and Joseph Nye’s research, we consider Russian information influence as an ecosystem of actors whose practices span a spectrum that range from behaviors traditionally associated with soft power—such as attraction, persuasion, and incitement—to more corrosive modes linked to sharp power, including manipulation and deliberate deception. Our article provides a comprehensive overview of this ecosystem, contrasting with the more fragmented approaches often seen in literature on Russian foreign policy and influence actors. We identify three categories of actors (Table 1), which we synthesize in an actor map presented in the conclusion.

The first category encompasses state actors: transnational state media RT and Sputnik, which are the most visible and subsidized agents of Russian influence. These outlets combine both public diplomacy and information manipulation and have taken a distinctly propagandistic stance since the invasion (Audinet, 2024(a)). This category also includes digital diplomacy, which refers to the communication of the ministries of foreign affairs and defense, as well as Russian embassies (Manor, 2021), all of which have also adopted a more aggressive stance since February 2022 (Massa & Anzera, 2024). Lastly, it includes clandestine units responsible for information operations within the intelligence services like the Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU), Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), and Federal Security Service (FSB).

The second category comprises unofficial Russian actors. Operating within the de-institutionalized political space in Russia, these actors act either independently or because the government has delegated certain sovereign functions to them in order to gain flexibility or deny responsibility, or both. Described as “adhocrats,” they contribute to the “privatization of Russia’s geopolitical interests” (Galeotti, 2017 (a), 2017 (b)). Most are “geopolitical entrepreneurs” (Stanovaya, 2019), “entrepreneurs of influence” (Laruelle and Limonier, 2021), or “political technologists” (Wilson, 2023), who opportunistically serve the state’s interests internationally or in the information space, hoping to curry favor with the ruling elite and boost their own financial, political, or symbolic capital in return. Although Prigozhin is the most notable example of these “entrepreneurs,” particularly in terms of mercenary operations (Wagner) and influence operations (Project Lakhta), these actors are proliferating in Russia. On varying scales, they conduct influence and disinformation campaigns that serve both Russia’s interests and their own. This category also includes what we call “influence contractors," i.e. Russian public relations and digital marketing companies with significant technical capacities to whom the state outsources the execution of online influence operations.

The third category consists of foreign third-party actors who, for financial, ideological, political, or activist reasons, or a combination of them, choose to cooperate with Russian influence actors. Whether voluntarily or through outsourcing arrangements (Audinet and Harding, 2021), they contribute directly and indirectly to legitimizing Russian positions or disseminating Russian narratives. They are politicians, activists, nongovernmental organization leaders, journalists, experts, and business figures. This phenomenon, often accompanied by corruption, has been observed in the post-Soviet space, Europe, the United States, and Africa.

Given our focus on the changes in the Russian ecosystem following the invasion of Ukraine, this article centers on the first two categories.

From on-site to digital fieldwork

This work is part of a long-term research project on contemporary Russian foreign policy and influence, rooted in international communications, international relations, and area studies. We have conducted fieldwork in Russia between 2014 and 2019, and in several targeted countries, including France. More recently, as the conditions for qualitative research in Russia have considerably deteriorated due to the war, several initiatives—such as the CORUSCANT research collective, where we are active—have been launched to encourage the adoption of open-source intelligence (OSINT) and digital methods in the social sciences disciplines, fields, and subfields, including Russian studies (Gritsenko et al., 2021). This “digital fieldwork,” designed as an extension of on-site fieldwork—or as fieldwork augmented by digital technologies—rather than a substitute for it (Limonier and Audinet, 2022), involves collecting, processing, and analyzing digital footprints produced by the actors under study (Severo and Romele (eds.), 2015). These footprints include website metadata, social network user activity, textual data, digital archives, and data from business or domain name registries. This article mostly relies on such digital fieldwork, observing the practices, behaviors, and digital footprints left by both institutional and individual actors involved in Russia’s information influence.

We begin by examining the restructuring of state-controlled RT and Sputnik, which have been banned in Western countries since 2022. The article then explores the dismantling of Project Lakhta and its subsequent takeover by institutional actors following the death of Prigozhin. Finally, we assess the adaptation of Russia's influence system in light of the Russian Doppelgänger/RRN operation, which exemplifies the growing phenomenon of outsourcing and contractualization of Russian information influence activities.

Russian transnational media: Ban, ‘clandestinization’ and reorientation

Founded in 2005 and 2014, respectively, RT and Sputnik are Russia’s two leading organizations broadcasting or publishing internationally. Research has shown that they play a key role in legitimizing Russian foreign policy, with significant government oversight of their editorial policy and a high degree of alignment with official discourse (Crilley and Chatterje-Doody, 2020; Elswah and Howard, 2020; Yablokov and Chatterje-Doody, 2021; Audinet (a), 2024). As they have expanded internationally, seeking to appeal to specific segments of public opinion in their target countries, RT and Sputnik have increasingly positioned themselves as “alternative” or counter-hegemonic voices within the media landscapes where they operate (Wagnsson et al., 2023), moving away from the more Russia-centric approach RT adopted in its early days. Analysis of their content production and the public statements of their executives reveals a deeply relativistic, confrontational, and “weaponized” representation of the international media environment, consistent with the “post-truth” paradigm (Pomerantsev, 2015; Audinet (a), 2024). RT and Sputnik cultivate this approach to disseminate narratives that align with or support official Russian positions, while simultaneously discrediting Kremlin adversaries, including Ukraine, the “collective West,” and Putin regime opponents.

Their editorial lines, while flexible and tailored to various audiences, often include manipulative content, including elements of disinformation (Ramsey and Robertshaw, 2019). As a result, RT and Sputnik are widely regarded in Western liberal democracies as the most prominent Russian external “information threats.” This perception of the security risk began to solidify in 2014, with the onset of the war in Ukraine, and intensified following Russian election interference in 2016-2017. In Europe, no transnational media outlet had previously generated as much controversy in public debate as these two Russian networks, especially in France (Gérard et al., 2020; Gérard and Marotte, 2020).

Evicted from the Western media space

February 24, 2022, amplified this trend. Just days after the invasion began, countering Russia’s information influence became a priority in the sanctions introduced by the EU. On March 1, 2022, the Council of the EU adopted a regulation aimed at countering Russia’s “propaganda actions” to “justify and support” its military aggression in Ukraine. These “restrictive measures” resulted in the suspension of RT and Sputnik distribution across EU member states. Their channels were removed from broadcasting platforms, while their websites were dereferenced from major search engines and blocked by internet service providers (ISP). In addition, their accounts on key social media platforms were “deplatformed” (Smyrnaios & Papavangelou, 2022), including on YouTube, which had been a significant audience pool for RT. While these sanctions, enforced by national regulatory authorities, have hampered their reach, RT and Sputnik have continued to produce content. The legal rationale behind the Council’s decision was not grounded in the principles of free speech or media pluralism, but in the need to sanction an entity connected to the Russian state—akin to measures taken against companies or individuals—due to its role in legitimizing the invasion of Ukraine:² “There is no place for Russian war propaganda in our information space," argued European Commissioner Thierry Breton on X on March 1, 2022.

This European response abruptly halted the delocalization of RT and Sputnik networks in Western countries, a process that had begun in 2010 with the launch of RT America in the United States and picked up with the establishment of editorial offices across Europe, such as RT France in Paris in December 2017. Two key events took place. First, several branches of the networks were shut down in 2022, including Sputnik’s offices in Germany, Italy, Greece, the Czech Republic, and Poland. The Paris office of Sputnik France went into receivership shortly after the European sanctions were implemented. Meanwhile, RT America closed after losing its television providers, and RT UK had its broadcasting license permanently revoked by Ofcom, the UK’s telecommunications regulator.

A second course of restructuring emerged for RT’s French- and German-speaking branches. Initially, they opted to continue producing content despite the distribution ban, the suspension of their broadcasting agreements (such as the one with Arcom in France), significant staff resignations, and the discontinuation of many programs and talk shows. At RT France, the workforce shrank from around 170 to 120 employees throughout 2022.³ The network’s legal team filed an appeal with the EU court to overturn the March regulation, which proved unsuccessful. In December 2022, the EU adopted its ninth sanctions package against Russia, specifically targeting RT’s parent company, TV-Novosti and its CEO Alexei Nikolov, citing the “significant and direct threat to the EU public order and security” posed by these media outlets.⁴ As a result, RT’s assets were frozen within the EU, effectively forcing its branches to shut down due to lack of funding.

In France, following a brief transitional period, the Paris-based newsroom entered receivership in April 2023. Its director, Xenia Fedorova, condemned the move on X, calling it an “arbitrary measure” aimed at “silencing RT France [...] in defiance of the silent majority [...] brought to heel by the pensée unique [single thought].” Most of the remaining staff were laid off, with several former employees transitioning to the conservative right-wing and far-right media ecosystem (CNews, JDD, Europe 1, Omerta, Sud Radio, etc.), notably within the Vivendi group owned by French conservative businessman Vincent Bolloré. While RT’s French-language branch received little support beyond its own audience, its shutdown stirred some discomfort within the broader journalistic community. This unease was reflected in statements from the Syndicat National des Journalistes (SNJ), which defended RT France’s journalists by asserting that “intimidation and threats of reprisals have never served the cause of press freedom,” though they distanced themselves from Russia’s “liberticidal regime.”⁵ The Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MID) announced further countermeasures aimed at France beyond the 2022 banning of the Russian-language branches of several Western transnational media outlets—including the BBC, Deutsche Welle, VoA, RFE/RL, and RFI—by Roskomnadzor, the Russian communications and mass media regulator, following the censorship law passed by the Duma on March 4, 2022.⁶

Throughout 2023, both RT France and RT DE were relocated to RT’s Moscow headquarters, along with nearly all news production, news broadcasting, and talk shows. An analysis of content broadcast by the RT channels two years after the invasion indicates a more overtly propagandistic line, especially in their coverage of the war in Ukraine (Audinet, 2024, op.cit.). This shift is exemplified by RT’s new French-language program, Ici Moscou! Les Français parlent aux Français, hosted by Xavier Moreau, a French entrepreneur based in Russia. Moreau, closely aligned with far-right circles, is notorious for his staunchly pro-Kremlin and anti-Ukraine rhetoric.

Circumventing sanctions: A cat and mouse game

The loss of access to the European market and subsequent deplatforming meant swift and significant audience declines for RT and Sputnik. Across all platforms, RT saw a drop of approximately 40 million visits per month in 2023 versus 2018, with the steepest declines observed on its French-, Spanish-, and English-language branches (see Figure 1).

The decline was even more pronounced for Sputnik’s French-language site, which dropped from 12 million monthly visits just before the invasion (January 2022) to just 350,000 a year later, before gradually recovering to 1.2 million visits by the end of 2023.

To mitigate these losses and navigate the information barriers imposed by sanctions, RT and Sputnik have adopted three key strategies. First, they have shifted to alternative social media platforms like Odysee, Rumble (blocked in France), and Gab—popular among conspiracy theorists and far-right groups. RT also uses the video player of the Russian platform VK. Despite these efforts, audience numbers remain far below pre-2022 levels, with subscriber counts in the spring of 2024 ranging from 110,000 and 60,000 on Rumble and Gab for RT in English, respectively, to just 1,320 subscribers on Odysee for RT in French. RT promotes itself on these platforms with the slogan “Freedom over censorship, truth over narrative.” Second, RT and Sputnik encourage their European audiences to download virtual private networks (VPNs) to bypass ISP blocking, like Western transnational media banned in Russia do.

The third strategy is more subtle and sophisticated, going well beyond the conventional methods typically employed by media outlets to distribute content. TV-Novosti and the federal agency Rossiya Segodnya, Sputnik’s parent company, have developed a parallel, fragmented digital infrastructure made up of numerous mirror sites. These sites are identical to the originals but use different domain names, making them accessible without VPNs within Europe. Table 2 presents a non-exhaustive list of 25 mirror sites that were either updated or created after the invasion of Ukraine.

RT’s German-language site alone has a dozen mirror sites (“rtde.xyz," “freedert.online,” etc.) registered just days after the European sanctions of March 1, 2022. They appear to have helped offset the audience loss from its original domain, “de.rt.com,” which was blocked. Similarly, Sputnik France’s original subdomain (“fr.sputniknews.com”) was replaced in August 2022 by the mirror site “sputniknews.africa,” which quickly outperformed its predecessor in terms of audience, coinciding with the shift in Sputnik’s French-speaking editorial line (as discussed below). Using the BuiltWith tool, we uncovered dozens of additional domain names, including “sputnik.news” and “russiatoday.news,” many of which were created either before or after February 24, 2022. These mirror sites redirect users directly to the original RT and Sputnik platforms, bypassing restrictions and sustaining traffic.⁷

Thus, in response to the sanctions, Russia’s transnational media have intentionally fragmented and decentralized their digital infrastructures, which were previously centralized around the two main domains “rt.com” and “sputniknews.com” These websites now operate under various new domain names, often incorporating national or regional top-level domains such as .africa, .lat, .in, and .jp. This fragmentation makes it increasingly difficult for European authorities to keep up, complicating efforts to block or respond otherwise to the endless creation of mirror sites. While some mirrors established after February 24, 2022, like “swentr.site” (“RT News” spelled backward), had been blocked by early 2024, the majority remain accessible without a VPN. Margarita Simonyan, RT’s chief editor, hinted at this tactic during a surprising appearance on Russian state television in April 2022. She compared these methods of bypassing sanctions to the clandestine, guerilla-style activities of Soviet partisans during World War II: “We now move along partisan paths so that no one knows it’s us; we open a YouTube channel under a name other than our own. After three days, it gets a million views, their [intelligence] services realize it’s us and shut it down, so we open another. That’s how we operate now, but I’m not going to share any more details so they do not hold all the cards.”⁸

The covert activities of RT have not gone unnoticed by Western governments. On July 9, 2024, the US Department of Justice (DoJ) disclosed the existence of Meliorator, a tool used by the FSB to fabricate fake social media accounts, developed with the help of RT employees (US Department of Justice, 2024 (a)). Later, on September 4, the DoJ charged two RT employees in connection with the creation of Tenet, a fraudulent media outlet based in Tennessee (US Department of Justice, 2024 (b)). With a budget of approximately $10 million, Tenet covertly paid pro-Trump influencers to launder and spread content aligned with Russian interests. Other proxy outlets covertly operated by RT in various regions have been called out by U.S. authorities. These include African Stream, a “pan-African digital media” claiming that “it is time for African voices to narrate our stories,” as well as Red, a Berlin-based progressive and anti-imperialist platform. On September 16, the American company Meta finally banned Russian state media, including RT and Sputnik, from accessing its platforms worldwide to counter “foreign interference activities” in the context of the US presidential election.

Reorientation toward new audiences

Whereas these covert maneuvers aim to infiltrate the European information space by alternative means, RT and Sputnik have also been striving since 2022 to attract new audiences outside the EU, particularly in the “Global South,” what Russian experts formerly referred to as the “Non-West” (Ne-Zapad) and now describe as the “global majority” (mirovoye bolshinstvo) (Karaganov et al., 2023). The war and sanctions have not reduced RT and Sputnik’s funding, as the Russian state allocated nearly EUR 500 million to them in 2022 (RUB 28.7 billion for TV-Novosti and RUB 8.1 billion for Rossiya Segodnya), accounting for a third of the public funds designated for the media. Budgets for 2023 and 2024 were projected to have been similar. In November 2022, RT even launched RT Balkan, a new site in Serbo-Croat (which garnered 1.5 million visits monthly by the end of 2023), now flourishing in Serbia due to the close ties between Moscow and Belgrade. An “RT Hindi” account was also created on X in August 2023.

But it is primarily to sub-Saharan Africa, long sidelined by post-Soviet Russian public diplomacy, where RT and Sputnik are pivoting, with Russia's presence in the region significantly increasing in recent years (Audinet & Limonier, 2022). Fourteen of the 25 cooperation agreements or memorandums signed by the two Russian media outlets with African news agencies or media—allowing for reciprocal content sharing—have been concluded since the invasion of Ukraine. Sputnik France, which began expanding on the continent as early as 2018, has undergone a complete transformation by rebranding as “Sputnik Afrique,” just months after its closure in France and its relocation to Rossiya Segodnya's Moscow headquarters. Its website, which now includes a version for English-speaking Africa, is more frequently consulted in the Maghreb, West Africa, and Central Africa (e.g., Côte d’Ivoire, Republic of the Congo, Burkina Faso, Cameroon) than in France, where its web traffic has plummeted from over 80% to under 20% of visits since 2022. RT, which has yet to open an office in sub-Saharan Africa despite announcements, has most recently intensified its focus on African news. According to the director of the “RT Africa” program⁹, Africa now represents 25-30% of the content produced by the English-language channel, with two programs specifically dedicated to the continent: Africonnect on RT in French and Africa Now on RT International. Both RT and Sputnik focus heavily on content that legitimizes Russia’s actions, both in Africa and Ukraine, while promoting an anti(neo)colonial narrative aimed at discrediting the West (Audinet (b), 2024).

This reorientation toward Africa is supported by the Russian political elite, which apply the counter-hegemonic stance developed by the two media to other regions. At the Russia-Africa Summit in St. Petersburg in July 2023, MID spokeswoman Maria Zakharova called for breaking the “media monopoly” of “the US, London and France” on the continent¹⁰, while Vladimir Putin advocated for the creation of a “common information space” between Russia and Africa, where Russian media are expected to play a leading role in disseminating “objective and impartial information.”¹¹

Fragmentation of the ‘Prigozhin galaxy’

In addition to the restructuring of state instruments within Russia’s ecosystem of information influence, the invasion of Ukraine led to the fragmentation of one of its most prominent nonofficial components: Project Lakhta, spearheaded by influence entrepreneur and Wagner Group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin, who died on August 23, 2023. While some Project Lakhta activities were discontinued following Wagner’s mutiny in late June 2023, certain entities now seem to have been reintegrated into the state-controlled segment of the Russian influence apparatus, to which they had not previously been formally linked (Čikišev, 2023).

Project Lakhta: Serving the interests of both Prigozhin and the state

Project Lakhta is a clandestine organization, created between 2012 and 2013 in St. Petersburg, comprising a multitude of front companies and employing several hundred people, with a mission to plan and conduct online influence operations. Initially set up to target journalists investigating Prigozhin's activities, Lakhta was later used to serve state interests. For Prigozhin, it was a question of pledging loyalty to the authorities in order to obtain financial and political benefits in return¹². Project Lakhta initially sought to muzzle online expression by the “non-systemic” opposition and to “protect the Russian information space from the crude and aggressive propaganda of the West's anti-Russia theses.” To this end, the organization created and administered tens of thousands of fake profiles on Russian platforms such as VK and LiveJournal, earning it the nickname the “troll factory” (Gérard, 2019). Besides these fake accounts, it is behind the creation of dozens of media outlets targeting Russian-speaking audiences, including the Federal Information Agency (RIA FAN), which has been placed under US sanctions.

Initially operating clandestinely (Alexander, 2015), from 2019 onward these outlets were brought together under the Patriot media group, a new holding company officially headed by Prigozhin and serving as a public front for Project Lakhta’s activities (Mejia and Watts, 2021). Comprising 11 own-founded media outlets and a network of more than 150 partner media outlets, Patriot claimed in June 2021 to have more than 68 million unique monthly visitors, with a total of 177 million page views per month. It thus became a powerful communications tool, used by Prigozhin to run smear campaigns against his political opponents, such as the governor of St. Petersburg, Alexander Beglov.

Project Lakhta is best known for its activities abroad, in particular its interference in the last four American national elections since 2016 (Howard et al., 2018; DiResta et al., 2019), and more recently in the French elections of 2022 (Gérard, 2023). In Africa, it emerged as a key component of the three-pronged services offered by the “Prigozhin galaxy” (Audinet and Gérard, 2022). In exchange for granting Prigozhin companies licenses to extract mineral resources, client countries were guaranteed security services provided by the Wagner Group, as well as online “information support” provided by the Africa Back Office, the African subdivision of Lakhta.

Wagner’s rebellion and the dismantling of Lakhta in Russia

Over a decade of operations, Project Lakhta evolved into a major nonofficial instrument of Russia’s foreign policy (Pokalova, 2023). However, much like the Wagner Group, it primarily served Prigozhin’s personal interests, at times even working at cross-purposes with the state. This tension was exposed during Wagner’s deployment in the Donbas starting in spring 2022, alongside the regular Russian military. Prigozhin’s eventual public acknowledgment of his ties to this “semi-state actor” (Marten, 2019) significantly boosted his influence in Russia, while simultaneously intensifying conflicts with factions of the “people of force” (siloviki) within the Russian state, especially the top military brass.

Throughout Wagner’s 16 months of fighting in eastern Ukraine, Lakhta media outlets and fabricated online accounts persistently promoted Wagner’s battlefield successes and the valor of its mercenaries, drawing unfavorable comparisons with the inefficiency and failures of the regular Russian army. Prigozhin repeatedly and publicly insulted (now ex-) Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Chief of Staff Valery Gerasimov, accusing them of intentionally withholding ammunition from Wagner forces. By tapping into populist, anti-elite rhetoric, popular among "turbo-patriot" circles (Pertsev, 2023), Prigozhin substantially bolstered his political capital in Russia.

This apparent impunity came to an abrupt end following Prigozhin’s so-called “march for justice,” when he led thousands of his mercenaries toward Moscow on June 23-24, 2023. This mutiny was his downfall and resulted in the immediate dismantling of Project Lakhta’s public-facing operations. On June 24, after Russian authorities searched Patriot Group offices in St. Petersburg—a raid filmed and broadcast—Prigozhin’s media activity briefly ceased, only to resume later despite being blocked by Roskomnadzor.

This crackdown ultimately led to the closure of the Patriot Group and its “withdrawal from the Russian information space,” as announced on June 30, 2023, by RIA FAN General Director Yevgeny Zubarev. Following this, all Patriot Group media staff were laid off. Shortly after the ban, RT Editor in Chief Margarita Simonyan urged media executives not to “mistreat colleagues from the dissolved media group” and expressed her willingness to offer them positions at RT. Reports suggest that some former Patriot employees have since moved to Gazprom Media, one of Russia’s largest media conglomerates.

Doomed to oblivion? Lakhta’s survival and reorganization post-Prigozhin

The closure of the Patriot Group marked the end of most of Project Lakhta’s operations in Russia, but some activities abroad continued. One such exception is the Foundation to Battle Injustice (FBI), a self-proclaimed nongovernmental organization (NGO) founded by Prigozhin in 2021 to highlight police and prison abuses in Western Europe and North America. Remarkably, the foundation remained active as of November 2024, more than a year after Prigozhin’s death. While it had openly displayed Prigozhin’s financial support on its website, since the autumn of 2023, it has claimed funding from “private donations from Russian citizens.” Its current sources of funding in fact remain unclear. Note that its leader, Mira Terada, has increasingly been integrated into Russia’s state-backed information apparatus.

Since the Wagner mutiny, eight articles spotlighting the foundation’s activities have been published by South Front, a covert media outlet believed by the US government to be linked to Russian intelligence services (Global Engagement Center, 2020). Terada has also participated in high-profile events organized by the MID, including meetings with Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and an informal “Arria formula” gathering at the UN Security Council, at the invitation of Russian Permanent Representative Vasily Nebenzya.

Some Project Lakhta influence operations abroad persisted even after the June 2023 rebellion. Following the coup in Niger on July 26, 2023, several information campaigns targeting France were conducted by the Foundation to Battle Injustice and well-known Lakhta-associated accounts. Additionally, many of the Facebook pages used in the “Agence de SMM” operation, which targeted the 2022 French presidential election, remained active as of January 2024.¹³

While some Lakhta-affiliated accounts in the Central African Republic and Mali ceased their activity on the day of Prigozhin’s death, they resumed publishing as early as September 6, 2023 (see Figure 2). This pattern also holds true for media outlets in the Central African Republic created and funded by Lakhta, such as Nouvelles Plus, Le Potentiel Centrafricain, Ndjoni Sango, and Radio Lengo Songo (Audinet & Harding, op.cit.), all of which were still operational as of early February 2024.

Project Lakhta’s activities have continued despite the death of its founder, underscoring their strategic importance to Russia’s external operations. However, the issue of securing new funding remains unresolved. A New York Times investigation revealed a “bitter struggle” between various power structures vying to take control of Prigozhin’s influence network (Troianovski et al., 2023). The Wagner Group, it said, is supposed to be reintegrated into the GRU, while control of Project Lakhta may shift to the SVR.

Takeover by Russian intelligence services: The case of African Initiative

The takeover of Lakhta’s activities by Russian intelligence was confirmed with the creation of the “African Initiative” (Afrikanskaya Initsiativa) organization on October 19, 2023. This self-proclaimed news agency is the latest instrument of Russian information influence targeting Africa. Owned by the company Initsiativa-23 and registered on September 21, 2023, it is led by Artem Kureyev. Kureyev, a member of the Valdai Discussion Club think tank and contributor to the MID journal Mezhdunarodnaya Zhizn’, is also, according to The Insider, an agent of the FSB Fifth Service, responsible for operational information and international relations (Dobrokhotov et al., 2024; Grozev et al., 2024).

Kureyev is not the only intelligence-linked figure within the organization. One of the three “experts” listed on African Initiative’s website is Darko Todorovsky, a Macedonian citizen who presents himself as a war correspondent. Currently working on a Ph.D. thesis at Russia’s Presidential Academy, Todorovskiy is also a member of the Russian International Affairs Council (RIAC), a think tank cofinanced by the MID. He was part of a delegation of foreign figures invited by the Russian Defense Ministry (MoD) to visit “war zones” in Ukraine. According to Christo Grozev of Bellingcat, Todorovsky is a Russian agent working in Bulgaria on behalf of the GRU, being paid for publishing pro-Russia articles.

Although Russian intelligence now controls African Initiative, the agency continues to employ former Project Lakhta personnel. One such example is Anna Zamaraeva, listed as an “expert” on the agency’s website. Zamaraeva, a deputy in the St. Petersburg city parliament, was previously a spokeswoman and head of the "media and bloggers" department at Wagner Center, which was launched by Prigozhin in November 2022 and dismantled after his failed rebellion. Furthermore, African Initiative is connected to the Russia-Burkina Faso association of the same name, codirected by Viktor Lukovenko-Vasilyev, a former member of the Lakhta AFRIC project NGO (Weiss and Vaux, 2020), recently implicated for his ties to the GRU (Dossier Center, 2023).

Despite its recent creation, African Initiative has quickly become a new platform for Russian influence in Africa, following the model of RIA FAN. In January 2024, it participated in a disinformation campaign to legitimize and prepare for the deployment of mercenaries from the “Africa Corps” [Afrikanskiy Korpus], a new paramilitary umbrella organization controlled by the MoD and GRU and aimed at replacing the Wagner Group. The operation accused France of backing a coup attempt and plotting the assassination of Burkina Faso’s transitional president, Ibrahim Traoré. One article on African Initiative’s website claimed “the president’s life is in danger” and suggested the issue could be resolved by “increasing the Russian contingent of the Africa Corps.” Nine days later, African Initiative’s Telegram channel reported the arrival of 100 “Russian military specialists” in Ouagadougou, along with plans for an additional deployment of 200 Russian soldiers.

Operation outsourcing and ‘influence contractors’: An expanding model?

In response to the blocking of its transnational media outlets in Europe and the United States, Russian information influence operators have increasingly turned to more covert and clandestine methods to spread their narratives to Western audiences. These tactics, characterized by a systematic and unabashed use of disinformation (Linvill & Warren, 2024), are notably not executed directly by the state; instead, they are outsourced to specialized firms in public relations and digital marketing known as "influence contractors."

This practice predates the war in Ukraine. During the Covid-19 pandemic, French YouTubers were approached by a Russian firm, AdNow, offering payments to promote videos discrediting Pfizer and AstraZeneca vaccines and aligning with the messaging around Russia's Sputnik V vaccine.¹⁴ Although no direct link to the Russian state was established, a similar case emerged in the spring of 2022. Léo Grasset, one of the YouTubers previously contacted in the vaccine smear campaign, was later approached by another Russian company, IPTeam, this time to publish anti-Ukraine content for money.

Doppelgänger/RRN: A large-scale operation outsourced to influence contractors

A year later, IPTeam was involved in the “Doppelgänger” operation, which stood out for its tactic of impersonating websites of various media outlets and government institutions across Europe, the United States, and the Middle East. It involved, among other things, domain typosquatting¹⁵ to publish pro-Russia and anti-Ukraine forged articles. After several reports revealed the existence of Doppelganger (EU DisinfoLab, 2022), Meta attributed the operation to two Russian companies: Struktura and the “Social Design Agency” (SDA, or Agentstvo Sotsial’nogo Proektirovanniya- ASP).¹⁶ These firms were founded and run by “political technologist” (polittekhnolog) Ilya Gambashidze, a former advisor to MP Pyotr Tolstoy, deputy chairman of the Duma.

Paris publicly denounced the Doppelgänger operation following a report by the French agency to fight disinformation, VIGINUM (VIGINUM, 2023). This rare public exposure came after operators had hijacked the identities of several official sites, including the French Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs, the German Ministry of the Interior, and NATO. The VIGINUM report also indicated that official social media accounts of Russian embassies helped amplify some of the content, suggesting that Struktura and ASP had state backing. Although no public contracts appear on the Russian Unified Information System for Public Procurement (GosZakupki), financial analysis reveals a striking increase in the companies’ finances. Between 2021 and 2022, the year the operation was launched, Struktura’s revenues and assets surged 595% and 487%, respectively, while ASP’s grew 309% and 8% (see Figures 3 and 4).

Outsourcing closely supervised by the Presidential Administration

Despite the Russian Embassy in France denying any state involvement in the operation, the Council of the EU imposed sanctions on two individuals and three Russian companies on July 28, 2023.¹⁷ Described in a Meta report as “the largest and the most aggressively persistent Russian-origin operation [...] since 2017,” the campaign continued into February 2024, despite being exposed in 11 public reports. Meta further noted that the companies behind the operation “incentivized to exaggerate their own effectiveness, [...] to burnish their credentials with those paying them.”¹⁸

It has since been demonstrated that Ilya Gambashidze’s companies are backed by the Russian state. Beyond the involvement of the Russian diplomats, the report by VIGINUM highlighted the participation of an employee from ANO Dialog, a structure closely linked to the Russian Presidential Administration and tasked with producing and disseminating state propaganda aimed at domestic audiences (Zholobova et al., 2023).

On November 7, 2023, the US State Department reported a covert Russian influence operation spanning 13 Central and South American countries, attributing it to Struktura and ASP (US Department of State, 2023). The press release described these two entities as “‘influence-for-hire’ firms” with “deep technical capability” carrying out operations on behalf of the Russian government. Although no specific Russian government entity was named, several investigations have fingered Sergei Kiriyenko, the first deputy chief of staff of the Presidential Administration and a key figure in Putin’s regime, as the overseer of influence operations targeting European audiences (Belton, 2023, 2024). Kiriyenko is said to have commissioned “political technologists” to disseminate pro-Russia narratives in France aligning with those used in the Doppelgänger/RRN operation.

On September 4, 2024, the US Department of Justice attributed the operation to the Presidential Administration, revealing internal documents from Gambashidze’s company ASP. These documents disclosed the existence of “Center S” and the “Team I”, that appear to be coordination hubs for the Doppelgänger operation involving ASP employees and members of the Presidential Administration (US Department of Justice, 2024, b.). A few days after this allegation, a 2.4-gigabyte leak of internal ASP documents, obtained by a European media consortium, revealed valuable and previously undisclosed details about how the Kremlin-linked contractor exaggerated its influence over foreign audiences. According to Thomas Rid, who analyzed the documents, ASP’s primary objective was not to sway citizens in adversary countries but to convince Russian bureaucrats of the company's effectiveness, ensuring future contracts and budget renewals (Rid, 2024). This pattern of inflating capabilities mirrors the practices observed with Prigozhin’s Project Lakhta.

The invasion of Ukraine has thus led to a centralization of Russia’s information influence apparatus under direct state control. While Project Lakhta had seen the Presidential Administration delegate some sovereign functions with a degree of autonomy, this model now appears to be giving way to tighter contractual control, with operations increasingly overseen by top authorities. This is notably the case of John Mark Dougan, a former American policeman based in Moscow who runs a large network of AI-generated disinformation websites, dubbed as “CopyCop” (Recorded Future, 2024). A recent Washington Post investigation revealed that Dougan network would be funded by the infamous GRU Unit 29155, involved in several cyber and sabotage operations, as well as assassination attempts, like the one against Sergey Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury in 2018 (Belton, 2024).

Conclusion

Amid sanctions, blocks, closures, dismantling, circumventing sanctions and blocks, and restructuring, Russia’s information influence apparatus has faced significant fallout from the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Despite these challenges, it has played a central role in legitimizing the “special military operation” and relentlessly discrediting Ukraine and its Western allies by all available means. Through digital investigation, our article examines how this multifaceted ecosystem of state and non-state actors, developed over nearly two decades, has been reshaped since 2022. The actor map below illustrates this networked ecosystem and highlights the transformations analyzed in our study (see figure 3).

The spillover of the conflict into the international media environment has resulted in the partial expulsion of the Russian state-controlled media outlets RT and Sputnik from most Western countries, spearheaded by the EU. In response, both networks have adapted by fragmenting their digital infrastructure and "clandestinizing" certain content, while also shifting focus to new audience bases, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa.

Simultaneously, Project Lakhta, once supervised by Wagner Group founder and businessman Yevgeny Prigozhin and responsible for some of the most prominent recent influence operations, has been partially dismantled and reintegrated into the state apparatus since Prigozhin’s death in the summer of 2023. Russian intelligence services, both domestically and internationally, have assumed control over Lakhta’s activities. This transition is evident with the creation of African Initiative, a new entity that has emerged as a key agent of Russia’s influence operations in the Sahel region starting in late 2023.

Lastly, the restructuring of Russia’s influence operations has also coincided with a surge in covert disinformation campaigns as more visible elements of this ecosystem have been stifled in Europe. As illustrated by the Doppelgänger/RRN operation, such campaigns are outsourced by the Russian authorities to specialized companies, led by political advisors or “technologists” who act as influence contractors.

These transformations demonstrate the system’s adaptability to state oversight, both direct and indirect, during what is arguably the most significant crisis in post-Soviet Russian history. This increasing centralization of influence operations recalls the Soviet Information Bureau (Sovinformburo), established when the USSR entered World War II in 1941 and tasked with controlling the entire flow of information both domestically and abroad (Livshin and Orlov, 2012; Balandina, 2019).

Beyond the Russian case, this article contributes to research in security studies and political communication examining how warfare reshapes mechanisms of influence, propaganda, and strategic communication. Propaganda studies have long documented such changes (Taylor, 2003), particularly in cases like the UK’s War Propaganda Bureau during World War I (Taylor, 1999; Robertson, in Baines et al., 2020). While today's adaptation and circumvention techniques occur mainly in the digital sphere, the Cold War era provides a relevant comparison, especially in radio broadcasting. The United States and the Soviet Union extended their ideological battles through “audiovisual Trojan horses” (Mattelart, 1995). These efforts were both offensive, to rally foreign opinion around ideology, including Radio Moscow and Radio Liberty, and defensive, through jamming techniques used in electronic warfare. Moscow, for instance, spent around $20 million annually to disrupt Western radio transmissions into the USSR (Wasburn, 1988; Winek, 2009).

From a comparative perspective, this work could also serve as a counterpoint for studying shifts in the international communications and information influence of Ukraine since 2014 or in the Israel-Hamas war that began on October 7, 2023.

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