U.S. State Department says Russian state media outlet runs intelligence operations

Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Russian state media company RT is now being deployed by the Kremlin to conduct cyberintelligence and covert influence operations across the globe as well as to help procure weapons for Russia’s war against Ukraine.

State Department officials warned Friday that the newly exposed covert Russian disinformation operation to influence public opinion in the United States represents only a small fraction of Moscow’s efforts to undermine democracies globally through its state propaganda arm RT.

Announcing new sanctions against RT’s parent companies, Rossiya Segodnya and TV-Novosti, that aim to cripple funding for RT and its operations, Blinken said new information showed that these entities “are no longer merely fire hoses of Russian propaganda and disinformation. They are engaged in covert influence activities aimed at undermining American elections and democracies, functioning like a de facto arm of Russia’s intelligence apparatus.”

The sanctions, which come in addition to last week’s Treasury Department actions against 10 top RT executives and its designation of RT as a “foreign mission,” were not an action against the state outlet for the content of its reporting, the State Department said, but were aimed at its covert influence campaigns.

“Covert influence activities are not journalism,” the State Department said in a statement. “The United States will always stand for freedom of expression.” Unlike the European Union, which banned RT in 2022 following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the United States had previously required RT only to register as a foreign agent.

Blinken said the United States, together with the British and Canadian governments, would instruct its diplomats to inform governments about RT’s expanded capabilities and was calling on “every ally, every partner” across the globe to treat the activities of RT “as they do other intelligence activities within their borders.”

The head of the State Department’s Global Engagement Center, James P. Rubin, likened the diplomatic outreach over RT to the campaign the Trump administration waged against Huawei, the Chinese telecommunications provider, over fears that it could be used to gather intelligence.

RT has become increasingly entrenched as a channel voicing Kremlin propaganda in Latin America, Africa and the Middle East, and it has gone underground to operate through a web of front companies in the West, according to RT’s editor in chief, Margarita Simonyan.

In comments posted on Telegram, Simonyan responded to Blinken by saying, “We have done this, are doing this and will do this.”

In an interview Sunday with Russian state television, Simonyan mocked U.S. claims that RT got its orders from the Kremlin, saying: “All the employees of RT and the editor in chief only obey the orders of the Kremlin! All other orders are toilet paper!”

The Russian state media outlet is currently being deployed in Moldova, Blinken said, to subvert next month’s presidential elections including through attempts to foment unrest, with Simonyan and other RT employees coordinating with the Kremlin.

RT has also been transformed into a cyberintelligence outfit, he added. The Russian government embedded an entity within the media company in the spring of 2023 “with cyber-operational capabilities and ties to Russian intelligence,” Blinken said.

In addition, he said, RT is being used to crowdfund support for the Russian military online, helping procure weaponry including sniper rifles, drones and radio equipment.

The Justice Department last week indicted two RT employees, accusing them of laundering nearly $10 million through shell companies to covertly run a Tennessee-based media firm that posted thousands of videos seeking to sow division in the United States and undermine support for Ukraine.

The media outfit, subsequently identified as Tenet Media, garnered millions of views as it paid hundreds of thousands of dollars per broadcast to popular right-wing influencers to parrot Kremlin propaganda lines. In response to the charges, and the levying of U.S. sanctions against senior RT employees, Simonyan boasted of setting up “guerrilla” information operations in Western countries, including the United States.

The State Department said Friday that RT had mirrored those tactics across the globe to covertly “recruit and pay social media personalities and provide them with unbranded content to disseminate and promote” as part of increasingly sophisticated disinformation operations.

“RT employees are leveraging intelligence tactics, front companies, and network technologies to obfuscate their role in these covert efforts,” the State Department said.

In one example cited by Blinken, the Russian state media company was secretly running a social media platform in Africa named African Stream, which was launched in January 2023 claiming it would promote African voices over “colonial-era and Western-oriented narratives.”

“In reality the only voice it gives is to Kremlin propagandists,” Blinken said.

In Germany, RT had hidden its involvement in the running of an English-language outlet called Red, which promoted the activities of pro-Palestinian protesters at Berlin universities. Blinken said Red was the successor to a now-defunct RT-linked outlet named Redfish that was frozen as a result of the European Union’s ban of RT.

RT’s activities have been just one prong in an extensive campaign by Russia to promote a pro-Kremlin agenda and sow division in Western democracies, part of a second front in its war against Ukraine that current and former senior Western officials said has become almost as important for Moscow as its military operations.

The United States last week shut down 32 internet domains being run by Kremlin-directed political strategists Ilya Gambashidze and Nikolai Tupikin, as part of an operation called Doppelgänger that cloned the sites of legitimate American media outlets, creating fake webpages undermining support for Ukraine.

Fiona Hill, a senior director for European and Russian affairs on the National Security Council in the Trump White House, said it had become increasingly important to take action against RT.

“There has to be concerted action against RT,” she said in an interview. “This isn’t about free speech. This a full information war. This is the kind of dilemma we are facing all of the time about how to balance freedom of speech against subversion. … It is probably one of the biggest dilemmas of our epoch.”