If you were to come across the InfoRos news portal while browsing the internet, you would think it was just another online newspaper. So far, so normal. However, recent media reports have shown that this is not the case and in fact, the InfoRos information agency is acting as a front for GRU psychological influence operations. In this article we examine the GRU connection, give details of Inforos’s plan to silence what it considers to be anti-Russian rhetoric, and reveal the European writers who are being paid to help.
But first, we know that the InfoRos new portal is just one part of the InfoRos enterprise; so what else does it do? It seems that the company offers web design advertising, PR and political and business consulting services. It also administers large information projects for the Russian state and international clients. In the course of our research, we have discovered that theer are two businesses registered under the InfoRos name. One is OOO IA “InfoRos” and the other is OOO “IA Inforos” (note the position of inverted commas). Both companies are registered to the same address – Moscow Krzhizhanovskogo Street, Building 13, Corpus 2 – and IA “Inforos” has a 20 percent ownership stake in “IA Inforos”, so it is likely that these two companies are registered separately, but work as one. There are other businesses registered to the same address as InfoRos, many of which have founders, owners or executives in common and have the shared goal of promoting Russia and its interests. InfoRos falls under one of these organizations: The Institute of the Russian Diaspora. The Institute was founded by a man called Denis Tyurin, who also controls InfoRos.
Given that he runs the InfoRos platform, has previously served in a GRU unit specializing in military psychological intelligence and sources confirm that he maintains close ties with Russian military intelligence, we suspect that Tyurin remains an operative of the GRU’s 72 Main Intelligence Information Center, or unit 54777, as it is known. Regular readers might recognize Unit 54777 from one of our previous articles, but if you are visiting for the first time or need a reminder on their activities, you can find it here: https://nightingalerussia.com/?p=8. It seems that Unit 54777 has a number of front companies which are financed by the Russian government as public diplomacy organizations but which are actually run by the GRU. In 2018, The Washington Post cited InfoRos and the Institute of the Russian Diaspora as being two of the most significant of these organizations. In July of this year, the Associated Press and The New York Times also ran articles linking 54777 to InfoRos and the spread of disinformation, particularly surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic. Both articles reference a report by the Brussels-based non-governmental organization, EU DisinfoLab, which exposes the French website observateurcontinental.fr as being an InfoRos platform. It makes for very interesting reading and highlights the fact that the GRU does not just use Russian language websites for its information campaigns. According to the report, one of the main contributors to Observateur Continental is a French journalist named Olivier Renault, whose articles have also been published on the InfoRos website. It turns out that he is not the only foreign journalist who has been working for InfoRos.
Use of European writers
nightingale can exclusively reveal how InfoRos has been using foreign journalists and experts to facilitate its influence operations. We have been made aware that, in 2017, a group of InfoRos employees embarked on a project which aimed to counter perceived anti-Russian information campaigns in the foreign media and generally promote a positive image of Russia and its actions on the world stage. A key part of the project was to create a pool of analysts who would produce expert commentary which could then be used to react to any stories in the Western press showing Russia in a negative light. The group behind the project must have decided that to spread their message globally they would recruit people from other countries to their pool, as they set out to attract not just Russian, but also foreign, journalists, experts and observers.
It seems that the project was successful in its aims. nightingale can reveal that, in 2017, Denis Tyurin employed a Polish writer named Tomasz Klasa to produce articles in which Polish politicians and commentators expressed favorable opinions regarding Russia’s foreign policy, or which were critical of the U.S. and the E.U. The articles were to be published in Polish and then translated to Russian for further publication. Klasa was to be paid around 3000 euros per year for this. His articles were published on obserwatorpolityczny.pl, a Polish news portal of which Klasa in the Editor-in-Chief. Interestingly, in 2014, Obserwator Polityczny became a partner of the Russian World Fund, which ostensibly seeks to promote the Russian language and Russian culture abroad, but is widely seen in the West as a propaganda agency operating under the direction of the Kremlin. Obserwator Polityczny frequently shares conspiracy theories known to be associated with Russian disinformation. This organization is located at the same Moscow address as InfoRos and Obserwator Polityczny also directs their viewers to the InfoRos website.
nightingale has also uncovered evidence of payments being made to German and Austrian writers in return for news items that are anti-Western or promote Russia’s interests, such as the BRICS countries. These writers include Austrian Robert Fitzthum, who has penned articles such as ‘USA against Huawei’ https://inforos.ru/ru/?module=news&action=view&id=91642 and Germans Karin Leukefeld and Rudolf Haensel, who have written pieces entitles ‘Desert Prisoners’ https://inforos.ru/ru?module=news&action=view&id=92303 and ‘NATO is 70. And no more’ https://inforos.ru/ru/?module=news&action=view&id=89637, respectively.
Apart from employing foreign journalists, in 2019, InfoRos arranged for a German named Thomas Roeper to attend Media Forum 2019, an event held in Prague to discuss freedom of speech in the media. Although it’s not clear exactly what they were hoping to achieve by doing this, sources have confirmed that Roeper sat on a discussion panel at the forum. Roeper is a writer and author who has also produced material for InfoRos. He runs the website anti-spiegel.ru and his work mainly focuses on Russia’s image in Germany and on criticizing the Western media in general. In addition to this, he is a moderator for the German YouTube channel NuoViso Studio, which calls itself a “pioneer in the alternative media scene”. InfoRos also organized for other members of this channel to attend Media Forum 2019 and report on it.
We know that the people named above aren’t the only foreign journalists and writers who contribute to the InfoRos platform, and we are currently investigating payments made to others. We should point out that it is not clear whether the contributors we have mentioned are aware that they are part of a clandestine Russian operation, but the fact that they have received money from the GRU for their work essentially makes them agents, unwitting or otherwise, and it is a worrying prospect that Russia’s military intelligence agency is paying foreign citizens to help further its shady aims abroad.
Many of use are familiar with these sorts of individuals who support Russia and see ‘Russo-phobia’ everywhere, who just ‘appear’ on our TV screens, in our newspapers and on our Facebook pages. These payments raise the question of whether the pro-Russia commentators in question coincidentally hold these opinions or they are being paid to promote these views. We do not know how many of these people might secretly be knowingly or unknowingly receiving money from Russian intelligence services.
So what?
Why should we be worried, you might ask? Well, whereas in the past Russia may have concentrated on influencing nearby post-Soviet states, the internet has provided it with a global audience and enabled it to branch out and threaten Western democracies and their social order. By focusing on issues online that are controversial and will provoke debate, like those mentioned in the articles above, the Kremlin aims to cause turmoil and either exploit existing divisions in societies, or create new ones. This is done with the end goal of promoting Russia’s geopolitical interests and acheiving its desire to be seen as a world power. These online disinformation campaigns are often paired with cyber-attacks to enable Russia to influence the outcomes of real-world events – you will no doubt be aware of the Kremlin’s meddling in elections in countries across the world. In many cases the GRU has been publicly outed as, or suspected of, being responsible. For more evidence of Russian interference in Western Europe, see our recent article: https://nightingalerussia.com/?p=8. Whilst we have used Russia’s attempts to influence the West to explain why what InfoRos is doing is a problem, it’s important to note that the Kremlin does not limit itself to this party of the world and evidence of GRU activity has been seen as far afield as Latin America and Africa.
So what next? Rest assured that nightingale will keep looking into InfoRos’s use of foreign journalists, as well as trying to find out what else it might be up to. Watch this space for more details.
