THE TENET MEDIA FRONT
Thank you for visiting our special presentation about the TENET MEDIA Campaign
UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT
SOUTHERN DISTRICT OF NEW YORK
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
V.
KOSTIANTYN KALASHNIKOV,
a/k/a Kostya,” and
ELENA AFANASYEVA,
ak/a “Lena,”
Defendants.
SEALED INDICTMENT
24 Cr. 24CRIM 519
RUSSIA TODAY
TABLE OF CONTENTS
BACKGROUND ON RUSSIAN INFLUENCE OPERATIONS
- RT is a Russian state-funded and state-directed media outlet. As RT‘s editor-in-chief has publicly acknowledged, “since RT receives budget from the state, it must complete tasks given by the state.”[i] For nearly two decades, RT has promoted the objectives of the Government of Russia by publishing disinformation and propaganda, leveraging its international network to amplify the Government of Russia’s message to foreign audiences, and using its guise as a conventional media outlet to lend credibility to that message. RT‘s propaganda is most obvious when it reports on matters of importance to the Government of Russia, such as public opinion about Ukraine in the United States. When direct propaganda is not effective, however, RT has pursued malign influence campaigns in countries opposed to its policies, including the United States, in an effort to sow domestic divisions and thereby weaken opposition to Government of Russia objectives. For example, in discussing RT‘s coverage of the United Kingdom’s exit from the European Union in 2016, an RT journalist recalled to an academic researcher: “I asked my editor, what is RT‘s line for this [Brexit], and he said: ‘Anything that causes chaos is RT‘s line.'”
- In or about March 2022, following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the European Union, the United Kingdom, and Canada banned broadcasting by RT. That same month, RT also ceased its operations in the United States after major television distributors dropped the network. But as RT itself has boasted, despite its post-March 2022 bans on broadcasting and lack of formal distribution channels in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the European Union, the Government of Russia continues to use RT to direct disinformation and propaganda at Western audiences. For example, on or about February 25, 2024, RT‘s editor-in-chief declared, during a Russian television appearance, that “public opinion in the West is changing, very rapidly and very cheerfully,” due in part to RT. RT‘s editor-in-chief further explained that, despite being “banished everywhere on February 25”- referring to the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 RT had built “an enormous network, an entire empire of covert projects that is working with the public opinion, bringing truth to Western audiences.”
- As set forth below, TENETMEDIA is one of RT‘s “covert projects” in the United States.