Over the past three or so years, since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Europe and the United States have largely chased out Russia Today, the Kremlin’s global television network. In the E.U., officials banned RT outright, designating the outlet as an element of Russian “hybrid warfare.” In the U.K., regulators revoked RT’s broadcast license, deeming its parent company “unfit” for British airwaves. In the U.S., cable distributors dropped RT, social platforms banned its accounts, and the federal government has gradually added sanctions and criminal charges against RT staff and affiliates, making it impossible for the network to broadcast in America as it once did. However, a new investigation by Novaya Gazeta Europe reveals that Russia Today has established a network of covert projects to circumvent these obstacles and continue reaching Western audiences. The financial and organizational hub for these operations is the United Arab Emirates. Meduza summarizes Novaya Gazeta Europe’s findings.
Fighting for British and American audiences
RT’s flagship project in the U.K. was a news and political show called Going Underground, hosted by British television presenter Afshin Rattansi. After Rattansi’s program lost access to the British airwaves and its 165,000 YouTube subscribers (the show remains active on X), he resurfaced in Dubai and continued producing Going Underground, now hosted on Rumble, a Canadian video platform popular among conservative and far-right users. (Rumble’s cloud services business also hosts Truth Social, Donald Trump’s social media platform.)
On LinkedIn, Rattansi lists his current employer as Ghaf TV — a network that employs at least three other former RT U.K. workers: Maria Tokmakova, Ekaterina Chekushkina, and Farhan Ahmed, the ex-head of social media at RT U.K. In addition to Going Underground, Ghaf TV also produces another show, Forecast News, where Rattansi and his co-host Millie Pinch discuss current events.
Despite claiming neutrality on Ukraine, the UAE has become a key hub for parallel imports that help Russia bypass sanctions. According to Novaya Gazeta Europe’s investigation, Dubai also hosts RT’s reconstituted, multimillion-dollar financial and organizational base for reaching Western audiences.
Last fall, the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control imposed sanctions on 10 individuals (including Russia Today editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan) and two legal entities allegedly involved in the Russian government’s “malign influence efforts” and “illicit cyber activities” targeting the 2024 U.S. presidential election. The U.S. Justice Department also charged two RT employees — Russian nationals Kostiantyn Kalashnikov and Elena Afanasyeva — with conspiracy to violate the Foreign Agents Registration Act and conspiracy to launder roughly $9.7 million.
The indictment mentions two companies in the UAE that paid the American media platform Tenet Media to publish thousands of English-language videos on TikTok, YouTube, X, Instagram, and other platforms about topics like immigration, inflation, and other U.S. issues. Data provided in the indictment reveal that one of these companies was the Dubai branch of Sonorous Technologies, a Singapore-based entity owned by Denis Khudiev, whose personal information matches that of a former Ukrainian politician who belonged to the now-banned pro-Russian Party of Regions.
Sputnik remained on some American radio waves until October 2024, when the U.S. State Department imposed sanctions on Russian state media entities, including Sputnik’s parent organization, Rossiya Segodnya, for providing direct and material support to the Russian military. The sanctions don’t specifically prohibit the broadcast of Sputnik’s content, but they make it nearly impossible for Sputnik to buy airtime on U.S. stations.
Records available through the U.S. Foreign Agents Registration Act database indicate that Sputnik funded its U.S. radio broadcasts through the Dubai-based Monolink Group FZCO, a company with family ties to a former top contractor for the Russian Defense Ministry. In its foreign agent registration documents, the company’s listed contact was Samuel/Stanislav Novakhov, the son of Gennady Novakhov, the primary owner of Russian Energy Complex. (The Novakhovs no longer own active businesses in Russia, and Stanislav Novakhov and Monolink are now under British sanctions.) According to Monolink’s website, the company not only assists Russian state propaganda in America but also trades a wide range of goods, including grain, fertilizers, gold, and diamonds.
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Novaya Gazeta Europe’s investigation also examines the relocation of the video news agency Ruptly (another RT project) from Germany to the United Arab Emirates. Before February 2022, Ruptly had stringers worldwide, and its footage appeared on reputable international media outlets, despite evidence that the agency had participated in some fabricated stories created to disseminate the Kremlin’s information agenda. (Novaya journalists highlighted two such incidents: in 2017, Ruptly produced a video about a nonexistent hamburger in New York City supposedly dedicated to Vladimir Putin; and in 2020, Ruptly edited footage of police clashes with Black Lives Matter protesters to make the scene appear more provocative.)
Following E.U. sanctions in March 2022 against Ruptly, the Russia Today subsidiary began dissolving its German legal entity. Meanwhile, former Ruptly director Dinara Toktosunova surfaced in Abu Dhabi at the local Creative Media Authority, now connected to a new video agency called Viory.
Viory resembles a scaled-down version of Ruptly, selling video footage produced by agency stringers around the world. The agency files content related to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine under the title “Russia-Ukraine Conflict,” and the word “war” doesn’t appear in any of the videos’ headlines. Viory’s reach is less global than its predecessor’s: its website is available in only two languages, English and Arabic, whereas Ruptly’s site also offered Spanish and Russian.