From a D.C. studio to an indictment: How a Russia-funded media outlet seeded propaganda in the U.S.

In mid-December 2005, back when U.S.-Russia relations remained on relatively friendly terms, a new media channel called Russia Today began broadcasting English-language news. 

There’s little that can be easily found about that occasion. A short article on the website of one of Russia’s state-owned news outlets, RIA Novosti, remains online. 

“It’s a very good start,” Russian President Vladimir Putin was quoted as saying of Russia Today at the time. “It’s a convincing start. I’m sure the company will be developing.”

And develop it did. In subsequent years, Russia Today would rebrand to RT, expand into other languages, and even open a studio in Washington, D.C. in 2010. As Russia’s primary English-language voice around the world, the operation would eventually be available on TV to more than 100 million viewers in the U.S. and Europe, launch ad blitzes in the U.K. and even hire American journalists. The organization’s news coverage focused on culture war stories that took a divisive angle toward American politics, gaining viewership over the years through social media platforms like YouTube and X, where it still has over 3 million followers. 

Generally regarded with skepticism by media watchers in terms of its impact, it appeared to be a relatively benign operation in its early years, one that offered a reminder of Russia’s ongoing efforts to frame the world through its lens. And, after all, Russia wasn’t quite the opponent it had been decades prior. 

But times changed. As U.S.-Russia relations turned from frosty to outright antagonistic, RT became a growing target of state sanctions. And with those state sanctions came a more aggressive stance from its leadership, most notably Editor-in-Chief Margarita Simonyan, whose profile both within Russia and abroad rose along with her escalating rhetoric.

On Wednesday, the U.S. went a step beyond sanctions. U.S. prosecutors indicted two RT employees who they say ran a large-scale influence operation, laundering nearly $10 million through shell companies to fund and direct a company in Tennessee that published thousands of English-language videos on TikTok, Instagram, X and YouTube. Using fake personas, Elena Mikhaylovna Afanasyeva and Kostiantyn Kalashnikov, employees of RT, edited, posted and directed videos created by U.S. commentators, the indictment said. 

It’s the most high-profile move yet on Russia’s influence operation and RT in particular, but Melanie Smith, director of research for the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a London-based think tank, said it could have a negligible effect on Russia’s overall propaganda efforts. She said RT has continued to come up with creative ways to push its content out across the web.

“Russia has been doing this for a very long time. We’ve seen them opportunistically engage with U.S. domestic crises throughout the course of this year, of which there’s been no shortage,” Smith told NBC News.

“Indicting RT is only one piece of the solution, and as it’s obviously an outlet that is overtly associated with the Kremlin, in a sense, the impact is dulled,” Smith added, noting that the targeting by officials of another more covert disinformation campaign, known to researchers as Doppelganger, which officials say impersonated legitimate U.S. and international media outlets, was “more notable.”

The commentators featured in the videos, who were not named, had been “deceived” by the RT employees, who posed as Eduard Grigoriann, a made-up finance professional who sought to fund the media channel, according to the indictment. The RT operatives are alleged to have recruited, negotiated and managed contracts with U.S. commentators and provided production and editing assistance.

The videos included commentary on U.S. events and issues including immigration, inflation and other domestic and foreign policy topics. Content was “often consistent with the Government of Russia’s interest in amplifying U.S. domestic divisions in order to weaken U.S. opposition to core Government of Russia interests, such as its ongoing war in Ukraine,” according to the indictment.

The Tennessee company was not named in the indictment but appears to be Tenet Media, according to a review by NBC News of details included in the indictment. It allegedly published nearly 2,000 videos garnering more than 16 million views on YouTube. Five of the six commentators who made those videos have said publicly that they had no knowledge of RT’s involvement, and the indictment found that at least two of them were deceived by Tenet’s founders. One, Lauren Southern, has not responded to requests for comment nor said anything publicly about the indictment.

RT had been previously flagged as a source of Russian propaganda and disinformation and was required by the Justice Department to register RT America as a foreign agent in 2017, following U.S. intelligence findings that the organization contributed to Russia’s efforts to influence the 2016 U.S. election by collaborating with WikiLeaks and by serving as a platform for Kremlin messaging to a U.S. audience, specifically promoting candidate Donald Trump and denigrating Hillary Clinton. 

RT America left the air in March 2022 alongside its operations in Europe, after Russia invaded Ukraine and the production was dropped by DirecTV and Roku. It was also blocked by platforms like YouTube and Reddit. Instead of shuttering, the state media organization found alternate ways to distribute content, including a social media bot farm, the DOJ said in a July news release outlining its efforts to remove the content.

In response to NBC News outreach over Telegram, an RT representative sent a numbered list of tongue-in-cheek replies, including “2016 called and it wants its clichés back,” “We gotta earn our Kremlin paycheck somehow,” and “Hahahaha!”

Darren Linvill, a professor and director of Clemson University’s Media Forensics Hub, said the DOJ can clearly “point at and name” RT as one of multiple Russian entities targeting the U.S., giving the department a reason to continue to focus on it.

“RT does still have a fairly significant reach in this country,” Linvill said. “There are plenty of right-leaning Americans that share RT news stories, and RT Espanol is also very popular, at one time the fastest-growing news outlet in Latin America.”

Smith, from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, noted that much of what RT did focused on inflaming social and political divisions rather than spreading false information. It’s something she expects to see Russia continue to do.

“Often what they’re doing is adding fuel to the fire of what’s happening domestically around things like crime and immigration,” Smith said. “Russian influence is important, but what’s happening in the domestic sphere is hugely important too, and they feed off of each other, so we should take the temperature down a little bit on what the potential impact is of these campaigns.”

On Thursday, RT’s editor-in-chief reiterated her focus on reaching an American audience with RT.

“We will crawl out of the cracks, what else can we do, since they are throwing us out of the door and throwing us out of the window,” Simonyan said. “We will be doing our job as long as we have the slightest opportunity to do it. This is our duty to the state that has entrusted us with such responsibility (…) First and foremost, in this case, to our U.S. audience.”