Propaganda for Export

At the beginning of March 2022, after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the European Union imposed sanctions against the Russian state television channel RT (formerly Russia Today) for “playing a significant role in instigating and supporting military aggression against Ukraine, as well as in destabilizing its neighboring countries.” At the same time, American streaming services disconnected RT from their networks, and RT America announced its closure. Google blocked the YouTube channels of RT and Sputnik (RT’s news agency) worldwide. In September 2024, the U.S. imposed sanctions against the channel, and Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, blocked the holding’s accounts.

Attempts to bypass the blocks by creating copies of the channels did not work: YouTube blocked them for violating hosting rules within just a few hours.

Likely after this, the television channel chose a different strategy — releasing content via blogs which are formally unconnected to the editorial staff. IStories discovered several channels linked to RT — they publish old videos of the television channel under the guise of their own, advocate in support of the war in Ukraine, criticize the policies of Western governments, and actively promote the relocation of foreigners to Russia — for “traditional values.”

Real Reporter and his “real” propaganda

The village of Oymyakon in Yakutia. In the video, a blond man with blue eyes, speaking perfect English without an accent, describes how people live in one of the coldest inhabited places on the planet. To demonstrate how cold it is in Oymyakon, the blogger tries to hammer nails into a board using frozen vegetables. The comments are full of enthusiastic responses in English.

This is one of the first videos on the English-language YouTube channel Real Reporter, registered on March 31, 2022, in Kazakhstan. The channel description states that its goal — “providing balanced and unbiased content.” The channel is dedicated to “people and their stories.”

Initially, Real Reporter published videos from the Russian hinterland with extreme weather conditions — Oymyakon, Yakutsk, Chukotka, but soon began to produce content on political topics. For example, about how the sanctions practically did not affect Russians, how Russian industry copes with import substitution, and the economy is growing, interviews with Russian mobilized personnel willing to “repay their debt” to the country, with foreigners from Europe, the USA, Canada and Australia who are moving to Russia for a better life.

Now Real Reporter has almost 300 thousand subscribers on YouTube, and some videos get millions of views. The blogger released a video about himself only a few months after launching the channel — after receiving numerous comments asking, “who the hell he is.”

The blogger said that his name is Konstantin, he is from Yekaterinburg and started his career as a weather forecaster on regional television. For 12 years he worked for various Russian TV channels, covering international news. At some point, thanks to his excellent English, he ended up at RT Documentary (a division of RT that produces documentaries). Shortly after that, he realized that he wanted to make his own content and created Real Reporter. He concluded: “Now my rather successful television career is in the past.”

However, some commentators doubted that Konstantin was an independent blogger. “It’s interesting that you started your channel a month after the Russian invasion and after RT was banned. Starting with dubious travel vlogs and then switching to war,” one of them writes. Some are amazed by the high quality of the videos: “The level of production is certainly amazing. Not every federal channel can deliver this.”

“Some people in the comments claim that this channel is Kremlin propaganda, some say it’s CIA propaganda, and that I’m a foreign agent working against Russians. But I’m neither one nor the other,” argues the host and expresses indignation at how Russian propaganda uses his videos in its own materials.

As discovered by IStories, some of Real Reporter's videos turned out to be RT films. For example, his very first videos on the channel (1, 2, 3) are excerpts from two of the journalist’s documentaries released on RT.Doc: about Oymyakon in Yakutia and Pevek in Chukotka. In the videos, the RT logo is replaced with the Real Reporter logo. After receiving a request from IStories, the blogger hid the Oymyakon and Pevek episodes on his channel — they are now unavailable, but are preserved in the web archive.

At least until the end of 2021, Konstantin Rozhkov officially worked for RT as a special correspondent — here, for example, is his report about migrants in a camp near the Belarusian-Polish border. Now mentions of Rozhkov as an “RT special correspondent” no longer appear on the website, his Telegram channel @Spetscorr has also been deleted.

But contrary to the statement that his “television career is in the past,” Rozhkov still works for RT. According to data from the Federal Tax Service and leaked materials, he received money from ANO “TV-Novosti” (RT’s legal entity) at least until 2024 inclusive. In 2023, for example, he earned more than 680 thousand rubles per month. Rozhkov does not mention this in his blog when he asks subscribers to send him even a small donation, equal to the “price of a cup of coffee.”

Rozhkov’s blog occasionally features street interviews conducted by Nina, an MSU graduate. She, as Rozhkov claims, helps him on a volunteer basis. Nina asks passersby about their attitudes towards Americans, whether they consider NATO a threat to Russia, and how the sanctions have affected their lives.

As IStories discovered, Nina Gliznitsa is a graduate not only of MSU, but also of the RT Journalism School. According to leaked data, in 2022–2024, she also received money from ANO “TV-Novosti.” Gliznitsa conducted her first street interview, asking “Do you hate Americans?”, near her alma mater. “I treat them as people who are deprived of the truth. I want to somehow feel sorry for them or explain [things to them]. It’s like people are confused,” a young woman told her about Americans. IStories identified the young woman as a graduate of the Higher School of Television’s bachelor’s program and MSU’s History Faculty’s master’s program, which she graduated from at the same time as Gliznitsa.

One of the latest videos on the channel called “Women Z” is dedicated to the Women’s Guard for Strengthening the Rear, the “largest women’s movement in Russia in support of the special military operation.” The video has many enthusiastic comments in English: “Thank you for showing the complexity of the Russian people, and not imposing stereotypes;” “The video is emotionally touching. Konstantin, great job;” “I didn’t expect to cry, but it happened.”

Konstantin Rozhkov did not respond to IStories’ questions about working for RT.

“Russian road” for foreigners

“Russia resembles old France,” “The West is trying to demonize Russia,” “I am Russian, it’s in my blood” — these are the titles of videos on the Russian Road YouTube channel. Russian Road is the reincarnation of the Russian Code YouTube channel, which was blocked in the summer of 2024 and had more than 70,000 subscribers, IStories found out. Russian Road currently has just over 2,000. Another 10,000 are on TikTok and 25,500 on Instagram.

All the videos on the channel are stories of foreigners who have moved to Russia: a large family “who fled the US” because of the “agenda,” an Englishman who moved to Orenburg with his Russian wife because of “Russophobia,” and a Japanese ballerina who came to Russia for the “best ballet school in the world.”

In a video titled “I’d rather go to a Russian prison than back to the US,” Maximum Tofurius Crane, a blogger from the U.S. who moved to Russia in 2023, allegedly because he is being persecuted by the FBI, gives an interview. IStories was unable to confirm this information in other sources. According to Crane, the FBI’s interest in him stems from his presence at the attack on the Capitol in Washington on January 6, 2021, as a blogger, filming the police “beating peaceful protesters.”

“I will never return to this country [the USA]... I cried when I got off the plane [in Russia],” says Crane.

In addition to the Russian Road interview, Crane has appeared in documentaries for RT.Doc. In one, he walks around occupied Donbas in a cap with the letter Z (“When Tofurius witnessed NATO shells hitting civilians, he couldn’t hold back his tears and began apologizing for his country”). In another, together with the Schutzmann family, a conservative family from the U.S. who moved to Russia, they discuss the advantages of emigrating to Russia: for example, that the authorities promote traditional values at the state level.

Many of the interviewees on Russian Road also appear in episodes of the RT program Why Russia?: interior designer from France Gregory Lesterlin (1, 2), blogger from Scotland Jim Brown (1, 2), bioengineer Gabrielle Duvoisin from France (1, 2), and others. IStories found archives of the videos in the program’s Arabic Telegram channel.

An anonymous Russian YouTube channel producer, who spoke with IStories, notes that the production level of Russian Road is “televisual.” It is surprising that there are no visible attempts to make the channel profitable, he says. “They have no monetization, and I haven’t noticed any advertising in the videos. This means that the money is coming from either someone very big, with a safety net of at least six months, or the project exists to fulfill some KPI that they report to their superiors,” the source told IStories.

All Russian Road videos are filmed without journalists on camera, but we found out that the YouTube channel is run by RT employees. A correspondent from IStories, having contacted one of the channel’s characters and asked for the contact information of someone from the project team, received the number of Artem Vorobyov. IStories found out that Vorobyov has been working at the ANO “TV-Novosti” for the past few years. In social networks and on the website of RT, he is listed as the author of documentaries for RT.Doc. In 2022, he even released a film about the “surge of Russophobia” in Europe.

Another character from a Russian Road video gave the contact information of another team member — Pavel Baydikov. This documentary filmmaker from Omsk has been working at RT for 18 years.

Russian Road producer Artem Vorobyov did not respond to a message from the IStories journalist. Pavel Baydikov answered the call but refused to answer questions.

Noah’s Ark for disgruntled Westerners

Both Real Reporter and Russian Road, in which relocated foreigners praise Russia and criticize the West, fit perfectly into the Kremlin’s new campaign to attract immigrants from the U.S. and Europe to Russia.

In August 2024, Vladimir Putin signed a decree on providing “humanitarian support” to foreigners from developed countries who “share traditional Russian spiritual and moral values.” Starting September 1st, they can obtain a residence permit for three years, bypassing standard rules: they do not need to pass a Russian language exam and obtain a quota for residence in a specific region. The decree is aimed at citizens of 47 liberal countries: the USA, Canada, EU countries (except Hungary and Slovakia, whose governments are positively disposed towards the Kremlin), and some others.

Those wishing to relocate need to sign a statement and confirm that “the motive for moving to Russia is the rejection of the state’s policy, which imposes ideological attitudes that contradict traditional Russian spiritual and moral values.”

The face of the migrant attraction campaign is Maria Butina, a State Duma deputy. In early March, she became co-chair of the State Council’s subcommittee on assisting foreign immigrants, and previously founded the Welcome to Russia organization, which supports foreigners wishing to relocate.

The founders of Welcome to Russia, in addition to Butina, are four foreigners: blogger Alina Lipp from Germany, entrepreneur Martin Held from Austria, farmer and also blogger Sabrina Hare from Australia, and the founder of the project Ruspatria (helps residents of France, Belgium, and Switzerland move to Russia) Alexander Tsiko-Stefanesco.

Who are these people and how are they connected to RT?

• Alina Lipp is a popular blogger: her channel in Telegram, which she mainly runs in German, has 184,000 subscribers. Lipp lives in Russia; in Germany an investigation was launched against her for “approving the criminal actions” of the Russian army in Ukraine.

IStories found out that Lipp received a Russian passport in November 2022. Her mother, a German citizen, was granted a Russian residence permit in 2023 after a request from the RT editorial office to the Ministry of Internal Affairs. On her Telegram channel, Lipp has supported Russia’s invasion of Ukraine from the very first days. Following Kremlin media, she calls the full-scale war the “denazification of Ukraine” and the “liberation of Donbas,” and Ukrainian citizens “Ukrs” and “Ukronazis.” Lipp denies the Russian army’s war crimes: for example, she repeats the Kremlin narrative that the mass killings of civilians in Bucha were a “provocation by the Kyiv regime.”

• Austrian entrepreneur Martin Held says he moved to Russia eight years ago. In Russia, Held owns two companies — Fancy Nerds and Geroy [Hero].

Fancy Nerds is listed as the developer of the VPN Tester service, which provides access to Russian and foreign VPN servers, as well as to RT DE video streaming in German. IStories gained access to Fancy Nerds’ financial documents and discovered that the firm receives money from RT for “creating audiovisual works.” In 2023, the media company transferred 15.3 million rubles to Fancy Nerds, and in 2024 — twice as much, 30 million. RT is the sole source of income for Held’s company.

While inviting foreigners to Russia, Held claims that he links his future exclusively with Russia: “I see Russia as a country where my daughters will grow up. Here, in Russia, we have a great future.” However, journalists from the Austrian publication Der Standard and the German investigative media outlet Paper Trail Media, IStories’ partners in this investigation, found out that Held is likely being disingenuous. They obtained a contract for the purchase of a house in Wiener Neustadt, Austria, concluded in April 2024. The house, worth 500,000 euros, was bought by Held’s wife, a Russian woman from Krasnodar. Martin Held’s last registered address is also at this address.

When journalists arrived at Held’s house to talk to him, they met his wife, who was driving into the courtyard in a black Tesla. She said that her husband lives there but cannot talk, and closed the gate behind her. The reporters noticed a sign attached to the mailbox: “Fancy Nerds GmbH.” The Austrian legal entity of Fancy Nerds is managed by Martin Held’s wife. The Held children attend school in Austria, as discovered by journalists from Der Standard and Paper Trail Media, and later confirmed by Martin Held himself.

Held’s other company, Geroy, is registered to several domains that publish RT videos in German, as well as videos by Alina Lipp. Her only source of income is the same Fancy Nerds (a Russian legal entity). In 2023–2024, Fancy Nerds transferred more than 600,000 rubles to Alina Lipp marked as “salary.” In a conversation with IStories, Lipp confirmed the transfers from Held’s company — this is supposedly how he helped her receive donations from her Telegram channel readers, which they send to her in euros, in Russia. “I have a large channel [on Telegram]. My subscribers want to support me, and they send me money in euros. And he [Martin Held] received them in Europe and transferred rubles to me. That’s all. And this way I officially work, I pay taxes, everything is as it should be,” Lipp explained to us.

She demanded that IStories not publish information about the transfers from Fancy Nerds, otherwise threatening to go to court. Held responded to questions from Der Standard and Paper Trail Media journalists. He denies that RT pays him money and also threatened the journalists with legal action if information about his private life is disclosed.

• The Hare family claims to have left Australia “due to disagreement with liberal legal reforms.” RT also helped the Australians obtain Russian documents. Back in 2018, the media company, together with the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia, launched a project to “provide assistance to compatriots who live abroad and want to return to their homeland,” but it also helps foreigners dissatisfied with the Western agenda.

• Alexander Tsiko-Stefanesco is a Frenchman who moved to Moscow in 2008. In his blog he calls himself “Frussian” and a “positive Russophile.” Tsiko-Stefanechko heads the Atsal recruitment agency, and his Ruspatria project helps foreigners relocate to Russia. The entrepreneur also runs his own YouTube channel with 40,000 subscribers about life in Russia.

RT joined Maria Butina’s propaganda campaign. In November 2024, the propagandist began hosting a new show, Family — Russia, on RT, dedicated to people who decided to move from the West (RT also launched the website Gateway to Russia in several languages, where it publishes information about ways to relocate, notes about the Russian language and culture).

Butina travels around the country with a group of foreign bloggers. For example, on March 3, 2025, several bloggers — Alexandra Jost from the USA (Sasha Meets Russia blog), Gabriel Duvoisin from France, Lisa Graf from Germany — posted similar posts about a trip to the Kaluga region with Butina. The same Jost, Duvoisin, and Graf, as well as the Italian Pietro Stramezzi and “Russian German” Arthur, visited the New Jerusalem Monastery in the Moscow Oblast with her on January 18 for Epiphany bathing. In early January, Graf, Jost, Duvoisin, and Martin Held traveled with Maria Butina to the Ivanovo Oblast to meet with foreigners who are considering the region for relocation.

Foreign bloggers, paid by RT, have covered the same events multiple times. For example, Rozhkov (Real Reporter) in May 2024 filmed a video featuring captured “trophy Western weapons” displayed in Moscow: American Abrams tanks and German Leopards. The video garnered 3.7 million views, becoming one of the most popular on the channel. Lipp, Jost (Sasha meets Russia), and the authors of the Russian Code channel also recorded videos at the same location. The latter two videos were published on channels that were deleted in the summer of 2024, but are preserved in the web archive.

You can “request” a Western blogger to cover an event through Martin Held, co-founder of Welcome to Russia. The domain windows2russia.ru, which offers this service, is registered to his company, Geroy.

“The time when Western media were technically blocked in Russia, and Russian media are censored for Western audiences, makes our work more necessary than ever,” advertises the service created by Held. “In the West, people often have no idea what life in Russia is really like.”

The website of the immigration agency Vista Immigration is also registered to Geroy. This is the agency recommended for relocation to Russia by the Welcome to Russia chatbot of the organization of the same name, led by Maria Butina.

In January 2025, Maria Butina stated that 3,500 citizens of Western countries have moved to Russia since 2022. And in the three months since Putin’s decree came into effect, 200 people have contacted her organization, Welcome to Russia. At the same time, since the beginning of the full-scale war, at least 650,000 people have left Russia and not returned.

The Chancellor’s Folder: “strong,” but censored

In 2021, the Hirsch family — German natives Remo and Birgit — moved to the Nizhny Novgorod Oblast. The couple decided to build an “eco-village” in Russia for emigrants from Germany like themselves. The family was quickly embraced by the local authorities — Remo was appointed advisor to the governor on the relocation of foreign specialists to the Nizhny Novgorod Oblast, and Putin, in an exceptional case, awarded the Hirsch family citizenship.

Many pro-government media outlets reported on a couple of immigrants from Germany in love with Russia. Among them was the YouTube channel The Chancellor’s Folder, where an interview with a German man garnered 400,000 views.

The Chancellor’s Folder covers news from Germany and conducts interviews with German immigrants in Russia. The channel is aimed at a Russian-speaking audience, but many videos are accompanied by German subtitles. “About Germany: strong and uncensored,” the channel description reads.

The channel’s hosts do not mince words. They call Germany a “vassal of the USA,” elections in the country a “mouse fuss,” and Volodymyr Zelenskyy a “Fuhrer.”

The hosts of The Chancellor’s Folder openly support the far-right pro-Russian party Alternative for Germany (AfD), calling it the Germans’ “favorite party.” They regularly criticize the actions of German politicians, but not the AfD. On the contrary, the hosts express approval and “admiration for the sanity” of the right-wing radicals, and complain that they are “persecuted” by other deputies.

The hosts do not shy away from LGBT issues either. For example, they scared viewers with stories about how German children are “brainwashed” with “nauseatingly rainbow-colored goodness” in sex education classes. But the most popular videos on the channel are not biased news compilations, which average only 2–4 thousand views, but interviews with German residents who have moved to Russia and praise Russian “traditional values.”

The Chancellor’s Folder YouTube channel lasted six months longer than the blogs Moya Rossiya by Held, Sasha meets Russia by Jost, and Russian Code, and was deleted in February 2025. At that time, it had about 50,000 subscribers. An archive of the episodes remains on Rutube, which continues to be updated, but there are just over a thousand subscribers there. The account in TikTok with 60,000 subscribers was also blocked. The project still has a channel in Telegram in Russian, with about 80,000 subscribers, and in German with 6,000 subscribers. According to TGStat, the channel most often links to messages from the F**k you That’s Why channel, which belongs to Z-propagandist and RT author Igor Maltsev, as well as to the Ruptly channel, also part of RT.

The creators of The Chancellor’s Folder do not mention how the channel is financed. There is no advertising on it, and monetization for Russian accounts has been disabled by YouTube. However, four hosts regularly appear in the releases: Susanna Perechesova, Marina Zakamskaya, Ksenia Bykova, and Ekaterina Grigorieva. According to data on their income, accessed by IStories, all four receive salaries from ANO “TV-Novosti” — that is, RT. Moreover, at least two — Bykova and Zakamskaya — themselves mentioned that they work for RT.

The hosts did not respond to questions from IStories.

Useful idiots

RT has previously been caught trying to broadcast propaganda through foreign bloggers. In September 2024, RT employees in the U.S. were accused of financing Tenet media, a company that paid American millionaire bloggers to promote a pro-Russian agenda. How effective is this strategy?

“A British acquaintance of mine, who happened to see RT somewhere in a hotel, watched it mesmerized for half an hour, and said: ‘God, they look so human,’” Anna Fenko, an associate professor at the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Amsterdam, told IStories. — “He was very surprised that they had good English, a tie, a shirt, they looked like people. This gentleman is many years old, and he is used to the fact that people in ties and shirts on television should tell the truth. And for such older people, the best prevention of Russian propaganda is to actually ban channels like RT.” But young people don’t watch TV and don’t read newspapers, and propaganda through bloggers is aimed specifically at them, says Fenko.

Kremlin narratives about traditional values and anti-immigrant rhetoric resonate well with the discontent of certain groups in the West who are dissatisfied with the current policies in their countries.

“The effectiveness of any content depends on the match between the audience's preferences and the message itself,” continues Anna Fenko. “Say, RT can choose certain groups of people, for example, incels, and tell them that all the girls in Russia are very beautiful and obedient. For those who don’t like migrants, they will produce content about how there are many migrants in Europe, but everything is fine in Russia. That is, you find a certain group of people and press on their pain points. Social media algorithms are designed so that people receive the content they like. And yes, it will be effective. There are many aggrieved people in the West too. It’s impossible to convince someone who is doing well that they need to support Putin. But a person who is offended by their government, not represented by their media, will listen to this propaganda.”

Bloggers will not be able to attract a significant number of migrants from Western countries to Russia, but creating a positive image of Russia is quite possible, argues Anna Fenko: “The traditional goal of propaganda is to attract ‘useful idiots’ to their side. Attracting them is cheaper than, for example, bribing politicians. You don’t need to spend millions, a few bloggers will cost pennies. Then they [RT] hope to influence politicians in this way. Since the West is still a democracy, politicians are forced to reckon with the opinion of the so-called people. And if the people say: ‘let’s ban abortions,’ ‘let’s ban migration,’ ‘let’s stop supporting Ukraine because it’s expensive for us’ — then, accordingly, any politician will take this into account. They [the current Russian authorities] want this.”

Editor: Maria Zholobova

The version of the investigation is also available in English from our partners OCCRP and in German in Der Standard (Austria).