‘We thought we’d return the favor’

Leaked documents reveal that Kremlin propagandists are trying to tap into a new audience — Meduza’s

Leaked documents from a source close to the Putin administration reveal that Russian propagandists have a new target in their sights: government critics and opposition supporters. In an attempt to win over this skeptical audience, they’ve been repurposing out-of-context clips from a popular YouTuber’s old interviews, adding their own messages in the descriptions. They’ve also tried coming up with news stories they think might attract the attention of independent Russian media outlets (like Meduza). Here’s what they’re doing.

Dialog, an “autonomous nonprofit organization” (ANO) created on Vladimir Putin’s orders to spread disinformation, is using targeted advertising and repurposed material from “foreign agents” to try to promote a pro-Kremlin narrative to those who oppose the current Russian government, according to leaked documents shared with Meduza.

As part of the initiative, Dialog repurposed content from Russian YouTuber Yuri Dud (declared a “foreign agent” in Russia) and added captions encouraging people to go to the polls, according to a document from 2023 titled “Election Campaign on the Internet.” Specifically, the organization utilized excerpts from an interview Dud conducted with the Communist Party’s 2018 presidential candidate Pavel Grudinin before that year’s elections. Dialog shared the clips with phrases such as “If they come to the elections, falsifications will be impossible,” and “Dud recommends,” and then used targeted advertising to promote these clips “solely” to social media users critical of the government.

The document, written by Andrey Tsepelev, the deputy general director of Dialog Regions, aims to implement a “relevant system for managing internet operations in election headquarters.” However, the specifics of how this system works aren’t detailed, and Tsepelev didn’t respond to Meduza's inquiries.

This “relevant system” will be implemented with assistance from the Association of Internet Technologists, which is also headed by Tsepelev. Other co-founders include propagandist Kristina Potupchik, who owns a network of pro-Kremlin Telegram channels, and Stanislav Apetyan, a board member of the Civil Society Development Foundation (led by former Kremlin official Konstantin Kostin). Artyom Tkachenko, the director of the regional affairs department at Dialog Regions, and Vladimir Tabak, the head of Dialog, are also among the founders.

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It was Tabak’s idea to try to engage with Russians critical of the current government, according to two of his acquaintances. A Dialog employee confirmed to Meduza that there have long been internal “discussions about content and narratives that could work for a liberal audience.”

“A couple of years ago, [Tabak] was already saying that he’d gone around the regions to help locals with elections, and he complained that they were all stupid, complete dipshits, knew nothing, didn’t work with analytics, posted strange things, and didn’t know what to do with social media,” explained one acquaintance. “All of that needed to change. So, he’s changing it. Tabak’s logic is basically: you [the authorities] managed to seal off the country, hundreds of thousands of people left, but that doesn’t mean their opinion doesn’t matter.”

So far, the plan has had very little success. Besides distributing repurposed clips from Yuri Dud, Dialog employees also credit themselves with creating “special projects” that have been covered by independent media. For instance, in a presentation about Russia’s recent presidential campaign, there’s a slide on press coverage of the fact that Vladimir Putin’s latest address to Russia’s Federal Assembly was shown in Russian movie theaters free of charge.

“The news spread across Telegram channels (2,491 publications), social networks (3,000 publications), TV (four TV segments), Russian-language media (2,067 publications) and foreign media (55 publications),” states Dialog’s presentation. According to the organization, the total number of views exceeded 31.8 million.

The presentation lists media outlets that reported on the theater broadcast, including Ostorozhno, Novosti (a project by Ksenia Sobchak), Meduza, and Dozhd (TV Rain). Despite Dozhd and Meduza being declared “undesirable” organizations in Russia, Dialog used their logos in the slides — which theoretically violates current legislation and could be considered the dissemination of prohibited materials.

A source in the Telegram industry told Meduza that Dialog highlights the interest of independent media in such news to demonstrate the effectiveness of its projects to the authorities. “It’s not hard to distribute and plant news in their own network of Telegram channels,” the source explained. “It’s much cooler if it’s not just a paid [propagandist] writing about you but a TV channel like Dozhd. They sell it as evidence that Dialog is so effective that it can even get the interest of ‘enemy’ media.”

The source added that Dialog employees are also trying to capitalize on the fact that independent media were forced to leave the country due to censorship, which may make it harder for them to assess the significance of certain news:

Liberal media that have left the country are out of touch with reality, since they’re not in Russia. Therefore, [according to Dialog propagandists], they amplify news that barely interests anyone here [in Russia]. Plus, even though the Justice Ministry has declared Meduza and Dozhd ‘undesirable,’ those working on elections understand that these are popular media outlets with a suitable audience that needs to be engaged and tapped into.

However, Dialog’s presentation doesn’t mention this, nor does it provide examples of other news events that independent media might have written about. It only includes mentions of short publications about Putin’s address being shown in theaters. How exactly this helps Dialog influence and “engage” the “opposition audience” remains unclear.

Nevertheless, propagandists believe that “it holds more weight when your enemies write about you,” explained one of Tabak’s acquaintances. “The media outlets that have left — Meduza, for example — have a huge Telegram audience, 1.2 million followers, and you need to work with that audience too,” he said.

When asked about the mention of independent media in the presentation, Tabak told Meduza: “It's not only you who can write about us; we thought we'd return the favor.” He refused to comment further.

Reporting by Svetlana Reiter (Meduza) and Maria Zholobova (iStories)