It begins with a man you might think you’ve seen somewhere before: sunburnt, with cropped, gel-spiked, salt-and-pepper hair, squinting into a camera from what appears to be a sauna, a satellite poster pinned to the pine behind him. He is talking about the war in Ukraine, about how the west cannot win, and about how NATO’s “old dinosaurs” will be furious that Donald Trump is dealing with someone who has been demonised. In the corner of the screen sits a broadcaster’s logo: “RRN.” Where do you remember him from? Was it GB News, or the jungle of I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here!, where he was bitten by a snake alongside Shaun Ryder? Was it the gossip columns with weather presenter Siân Lloyd or former Cheeky Girl Gabriela Irimia? Yes: it’s Lembit Öpik, the former Liberal Democrat MP who once announced, at the Reform UK conference in 2025, that he goes “where the money is.” But by then he had already become something stranger and darker: a participant in a Russian-backed disinformation campaign, one of more than 500 interviewees from over 50 countries who, according to an investigation led by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, were drawn into Russia’s vast influence operations against the democratic west. Some were willing fellow travellers. Some were unwitting dupes. But all of them, whether they knew it or not, were pieces on a Kremlin chessboard.
The mechanics of Russian disinformation can feel abstract until you see the human faces. After the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Moscow moved to undermine Western support for Kyiv with an aggressive campaign of fake news sites, altered videos, counterfeit documents, and armies of social media bots. One of the best-known operations, Doppelgänger, was exposed by EU DisinfoLab in 2022: it produced convincing clones of reputable news websites to spread invented stories and Kremlin talking points. But behind that lay a broader digital propaganda machine run by the Social Design Agency, or SDA, a Russian state-linked outfit sanctioned by the US, EU and UK. The SDA employed bots to amplify marginal political opinions and inflate support for far-right politicians. Then, in a hack of the Russian propaganda site Recent Reliable News (RRN), investigators found a hidden catalogue containing hundreds of interviews in different languages. This was the operation’s third dimension: not clones of the BBC or CNN, but “original brands” of fake news outlets, coordinated by ANO Dialog, a sanctioned Russian government-backed organisation. The people behind it monitored thousands of Western “opinion leaders” and approached those they thought useful. One leaked internal meeting note cited by the FBI said plainly: “We need influencers! A lot of them and everywhere. We are ready to wine and dine them.” And so they did. The list of interviewees reads like a strange census of Western public life: a French farmer, a conspiracy theorist in Finland, European and US officials, legislators, retired high-ranking NATO officers, and a group of British names that includes a former Tory MP, a former Daily Telegraph Moscow correspondent, academics, and a writer on UFOs.
Take Matthew Gordon-Banks, a former Conservative MP who later advised the governments of Kuwait, Bahrain, and the UAE. In June 2024, he received a WhatsApp message from a self-described Russian journalist named Nikolay Maslov, who flattered him: “I think your vision of the geopolitical situation is very deep and interesting.” Maslov said he was helping a young German media company with a Russian background, and shared a link to Meisterurian, a German-language news site later identified by the FBI as part of the Doppelgänger network. Four months later, Gordon-Banks’s interview appeared on Stolzvolk, another Russian-run propaganda portal disguised as a genuine German outlet. In it, he said that Putin is “a leader. He is very intelligent and has… sought to build a young democracy following the difficult period of the Russian Federation’s founding.” He dismissed the idea of a Russian scorched-earth policy, claiming that if the Russians were truly destructive, “there would be no lights on in the streets and homes in Kyiv.” He suggested that Zelenskyy’s most favorable outcome was emigration to Britain or America, and mused that Russia “could decide to advance as far as Odessa.” He repeated Kremlin talking points about migrants in Paris and made a questionable claim about BlackRock pulling out of Ukraine reconstruction over corruption. Gordon-Banks appeared in at least 16 Doppelgänger articles in the RRN hack. When asked about it, he said he had visited Russia many times, had been interviewed by Russian state media in the past, and had given only three interviews to Maslov over two years. He denied taking part in propaganda for anyone. Yet the interviews were there, on screen, with his voice and his words, all shaped to serve Moscow’s narrative.
Then there is Lembit Öpik, whose journey from British reality television to Russian propaganda is almost too absurd to understand. Asked about Trump’s view of the war, Öpik seemed sympathetic: “Trump is most interested in America’s economic success,” he said. “That’s why it’s easier for him to capitalise on his relationship with Putin than to join forces with Zelenskyy to fight against him… When Trump signs trade agreements with the Russian president, he believes that Putin doesn’t want to go to war with him.” When we asked Öpik who had approached him and whether he knew he was part of a Russian disinformation operation, he claimed not to understand where the request came from, and asked what the “nature of your involvement with security services” was. Then he stopped responding. Ben Aris, the editor of business news agency bne IntelliNews and a former Daily Telegraph Moscow correspondent, gave three interviews in spring 2025 to Stolzvolk. He said Germans did not want to fight Russia, that the German army had more horses than tanks, and that the west should think “first and foremost of the economy. Perhaps trade with the Kremlin will become commonplace in a few years’ time.” When contacted, Aris insisted he opposed Putin’s invasion and would not willingly support a pro-Kremlin publication. He claimed the quotes were lifted from his Twitter account and that he had never spoken to anyone from the publication. But the quotes came from video interviews recorded with him and posted on the same pages. After that was pointed out, he stopped responding. This is the strange, uncomfortable truth of the operation: it did not always need to pay people or pressure them. It simply found public figures who were willing to say useful things, gave them a platform, and then laundered their words into mainstream-looking news sites.
The further down the list you go, the stranger the cast becomes. Edward Dutton, a British YouTuber and former professor at a Finnish university, was quoted in Rose Rouge, a Russian-run French-language website, saying that the new US administration was more loyal to Russia and would lift sanctions and end the conflict, causing the Russian economy to grow. The quote was used to support an article about Western investors growing bullish on Russian stocks, even though US Treasury rules still banned such investments. Dutton, however, is not an economist or financial specialist; he is an evolutionary psychologist. He said the person who contacted him wanted to talk about Islam, and only later threw in questions about Russia. Michael Kameron, an author and researcher of UFOs and the paranormal, made even more bizarre claims: that Putin knew aliens and Zelenskyy were preparing dangerous military projects, and that Ukrainian soldiers were abducting their own women and children during the war. When approached for comment, a woman named Sandra Deseke replied that the Galactic Federation was indeed involved in stopping NATO and the EU from starting World War III, and suggested that if Kameron would not answer questions by email, he could potentially meet us onboard a spaceship. Not everyone in the network was so fringe. Richard Sakwa, a professor at the University of Kent and one of Britain’s most prominent academic defenders of Putin, wrote articles for RRN as late as April urging Europe to rebuild its dependency on Russian gas, and called European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen “an obsessive, pathological Russophobe.” James Goddard, a British far-right activist, warned European women not to go out on their own, claiming EU governments were trying to drag people into an inevitably lost conflict with Russia. Other voices included Thomas Fazi, a journalist who often attacked EU policies, and Isaac Bigio, a Peruvian-born commentator who had appeared on RT and Sputnik. David Atherton, a former Breitbart journalist, repeated Russian disinformation about Ukrainian sabotage in Britain. These were not randomly chosen specialists. They were a mix of useful voices, ideological fellow travellers, fringe believers, and people who simply did not look too closely at who was offering them a microphone.
By June 2026, many of the Doppelgänger websites hosting these interviews had gone offline; only two remained active, both with Turkish domain names. The hacked RRN site itself created a new Turkish domain, changed its name to Researchers & Reporters Network, and listed among its staff Turkish journalists with formal roles in the pro-Russian Vatan party. But the story is not just about websites or domains. It is a warning about how easily a person can become a tool for a hostile power without ever feeling like a traitor. None of these people were likely paid handsomely; some may not have been paid at all. They were drawn in by flattery, by the allure of a global audience, by a lingering nostalgia for a world where Russia was a great power to be negotiated with, by ideological conviction, or simply by the vanity of seeing their own face and words published. The Kremlin’s propagandists understood something deeply human: people want to feel important. They want to be asked for their opinion. They want to believe they are speaking truth to power, even when the power is on the other side of the microphone. The OCCRP investigation peeled back the curtain on a vast, industrial-scale manipulation of Western public discourse, but the most unsettling detail is not the sophisticated technology or the armies of bots. It is that so much of the work was done by willing voices, people who looked into the camera and delivered lines that, once stripped of context, served Moscow’s war aims. As one former MP put it, they go where the money is. But sometimes the currency is not money at all—it is attention, approval, and the comfortable illusion of relevance. And in the age of disinformation, that can be just as damaging as any bribe.