Not-so-useful idiots: How the International Russophile Movement consolidated the Kremlin’s European influence networks

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In cooperation with Transparency International — Russia

An alliance of political marginals and conspiracy theorists

The founding congress of the International Russophile Movement was held in Moscow in March 2023. According to the organizers, around 90 representatives from 42 countries attended the event. Prominent “Russophiles” among the guests included actor Steven Seagal, former French president Charles de Gaulle’s grandson Pierre, and Italian princess Vittoria Alliata di Villafranca (who translated The Lord of the Rings into her native language). The Guardian described the participants as “political marginals and conspiracy theorists.”

Those who came to support and guide the “Russophiles” included Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, his deputies Mikhail Bogdanov and Alexander Grushko; Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova, Rossotrudnichestvo head Yevgeny Primakov, “Orthodox oligarch” Konstantin Malofeeev, far-right philosopher Alexander Dugin, and the chairs of the international affairs committees from both chambers of the Russian parliament — LDPR leader Leonid Slutsky and senator Grigory Karasin. At the congress, Lavrov read out a message from Vladimir Putin that noted the “targeted anti-Russian hysteria in many countries” and thanked the participants for their “firm resolve to oppose the Russophobic campaign.”

The congress unanimously elected Bulgarian politician Nikolai Malinov, who led Bulgaria’s local Russophiles movement for 16 years and has long been “friends” with Malofeev, as IRM secretary-general.

In 2019, Bulgarian prosecutors accused Malinov of espionage after investigators alleged he had cooperated with the Russian Institute for Strategic Studies — subordinate to Russia’s presidential administration and, until 2009, part of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service — as well as with the Two-Headed Eagle society led by Malofeev. Malinov was barred from leaving Bulgaria but bribed a judge in order to be able to travel to Russia in 2019 to receive the Order of Friendship personally from Putin. Because of that bribe, the politician has been under U.S. sanctions since 2023.

Although Malinov is publicly presented as the initiator of a global union of “Russophiles,” the key role in the movement is played by Malofeev. He organizes Russophile congresses, which his Tsargrad television channel broadcasts live. Tsargrad also often invites “Russophiles” onto programs as experts and covers the movement’s activities.

According to its latest statements, the movement now has three regional and at least 77 national chapters. Formally, representatives operate in 12 EU countries: Italy, Bulgaria, Germany, France, Austria, Cyprus, Poland, Spain, Romania, Latvia, and Lithuania, with a joint chapter covering the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

Membership lists in European chapters include pro-Kremlin politicians, leaders of pro-Russian organizations, propagandists, and Euroskeptics. For example, Malinov heads the Bulgarian political party Russophiles for the Revival of the Fatherland, which holds no seats in parliament. Malinov’s deputy in the IRM, German national Waldemar Herdt, is a former Bundestag lawmaker from the far-right Alternative for Germany party and chairman of the International Council of Russian Germans “Revival.” Slovak Jan Čarnogurský is a former prime minister and was a candidate in the 2014 presidential election. The head of the Romanian chapter, Mikhail Lauruk, leads the local Union of Subcarpathian Rusyns movement.

Many IRM founders also promote the ideas of Alexander Dugin or publish their work on his platforms. Such authors include anthropologist and former Sputnik Italy correspondent Eliseo Bertolasi, Austrian propagandist Patrick Poppel, Spanish political strategist and “expert in methods of social manipulation” Nuño Rodríguez, and German propagandist and activist Tobias Pfennig. Additionally, French “Russophile” Fabrice Sorlin is notable for his longstanding cooperation with Malofeeev’s structures and was an author for the Katehon Analytical Center.

The movement’s “foreign” composition distinguishes the IRM from earlier pro-Kremlin structures and makes it less vulnerable to scrutiny and sanctions by EU countries. The “Russophiles” strategically chose not to register the movement as a legal entity, openly saying they sought to avoid international sanctions. “Excuse the Russian expression: when you go bare-assed against a poker, the poker always wins. So let’s act a bit Byzantine — smart, but cunning,” Malinov explained the decision at the IRM’s second congress.

For their part, Russian authorities stress that the “Russophile” movement is a grassroots initiative created by foreigners, not a “project invented from above.” In reality, however, the IRM’s leadership includes Russians who previously worked in organizations controlled by the Kremlin.

Slutsky’s foundations, Russkiy Mir and other allies of the “Russophiles”

The Russophile movement receives support from several organizations that are either controlled by the government or linked to Russia’s military intelligence agency (GRU) or its Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR).

A range of organizations work with the movement: the Russkiy Mir Foundation, run by the Russian Foreign Ministry; the Russian Peace Foundation and the Soviet Peace Foundation, headed by the aforementioned Duma deputy Leonid Slutsky; the Foundation for the Support and Protection of the Rights of Compatriots Living Abroad, known as Pravfond; and the network of propaganda portals Baltija.eu. Pravfond and Russkiy Mir are under EU sanctions for justifying Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and spreading Kremlin propaganda.

In August 2023, the IRM signed a cooperation agreement with the Soviet Peace Foundation. Six months later, Malinov and Malofeev ceremonially opened the movement’s office in the foundation’s mansion on Prechistenka Street in Moscow. The Russian Peace Foundation allocated a symbolic 800,000 rubles ($10,000) for the IRM’s founding conference.

Slutsky’s organizations declare their mission to be peacekeeping and humanitarian assistance. However, the Russian Peace Foundation has nevertheless financed the purchase of drones, machine-gun mounting systems, and military training for troops mobilized to fight in Ukraine. The foundation is known for inviting foreign politicians, scholars, and public figures to Russia — and for sharing information about them with the GRU, with likely the aim of recruiting them.

At Slutsky’s invitation, French presidential candidate Marine Le Pen traveled to Moscow at the height of her 2022 election campaign, where she attended an “unscheduled” meeting with Vladimir Putin. The Insider later reported that Slutsky’s foundation passed intelligence on citizens of the U.S., Canada, France, Belgium, Israel, and other countries to the GRU.

The Russkiy Mir Foundation has also supported the Russophile movement since its inception, initially providing media and organizational support. The movement’s members held a roundtable at the Russkiy Mir congress in 2023, and at the following congress Malinov moderated a discussion titled “The Russian World as a Bulwark Against Destructive Neoliberal Ideology.” More recently, people who worked for years at the foundation have joined the IRM leadership.

Since 2024, the Russian Foreign Ministry has been the sole founder of Russkiy Mir, and the organization has been led by ministry officials. Former Russkiy Mir director Vladimir Kochin went on to become an adviser to the IRM secretary-general, and his former assistant, Natalia Zaitseva, took over the movement’s Moscow office.

In the summer of 2025, the IRM signed a cooperation agreement with Pravfond. Like Russkiy Mir, Pravfond was created by a decree from Putin and was founded by the Foreign Ministry and Rossotrudnichestvo. Although the organization presents itself as an association of human rights centers providing legal advice to Russians abroad, it is believed to serve as a front for a Russian influence network operating in 48 countries.

Leaks of Pravfond’s internal documents indicate close ties to Moscow’s intelligence services. According to Denmark’s DR broadcaster, two regional directors worked for the SVR and another employee was a GRU agent. The organization also issued grants for the legal defense of Russian spies and criminals, including arms dealer Viktor Bout and hitman Vadim Krasikov. An investigation by OCCRP found that Pravfond financed pro-Russian websites and Telegram channels in European countries and continued to do so even after the EU imposed sanctions.

Although Pravfond and the IRM announced their cooperation only recently, links between them can be traced back to 2023. They quote each other on their websites and often publish identical news items. The same stories appear on the pro-Kremlin Baltija portal — Pravfond, Rossotrudnichestvo and Russkiy Mir’s information partner — whose founder, propagandist Alexander Kornilov, administers the Russophiles’ website.

Kornilov is a member of the Coordination Council of Russian Compatriots in Estonia. Until 2018, he was a publisher and the editor in chief of the Baltnews news agency, whose editorial agenda he secretly coordinated with the state-controlled Rossiya Segodnya (lit. “Russia Today”) media group. In 2022, Estonia revoked Kornilov’s residence permit and barred him from entering other Schengen countries for five years. He challenged the ban, but Estonian courts rejected his appeal. Local police describe him as “a link in Russia’s influence network.”

The IRM website mirrors content not only from Baltija but also from the Good News portal, a joint project by Kornilov and the Moscow House of Compatriots, a subsidiary of the Moscow city government. The site’s design resembles that of the Russophiles and Baltija portals. Good News mostly republishes material from Russkiy Mir and the Moscow House of Compatriots. Although the IRM proclaims as its goals uniting Russophiles worldwide and “combating disinformation,” its website contains almost no content in English or French.

“Russia is not my enemy”

“You arrived at a time of dramatic events taking place around the world. We are truly fighting, and everyone has their own front line,” Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova told participants at the Multipolarity Forum in February 2024. The gathering of Dugin followers was organized by the IRM with support from the Foreign Ministry and Putin’s presidential administration. Russophiles, members of Dugin’s International Eurasian Movement, conspiracy theorists, and political consultants from multiple continents gathered to discuss their shared pursuit of resisting Western hegemony and defending “traditional values.”

The next day, the IRM held its second congress, where it discussed its work plan. Malinov outlined the goal of the European Russophiles: to collect 1 million signatures in the EU of people who support lifting sanctions on Russia. That aim, in place since its foundation, has come to naught, but the movement’s activities in the areas of informational and hybrid warfare have indeed made a few modest gains.

In the summer of 2024, posters reading “Russia is not my enemy” appeared on the streets of Verona and several other Italian cities. The campaign was organized by the Veneto-Russia association, a partner of the IRM’s Italian branch. Months later, at a Russkiy Mir congress, branch chairman Eliseo Bertolasi shared the “success story,” describing how the initiative had “spread to other countries.” Bertolasi is a propagandist who filmed a movie in Russian-occupied Donetsk and Mariupol. In November 2025, Putin awarded him the Order of Friendship. His Italian Russophile branch was the first to open.

Just a week after the movement was founded, Italian participants held a rally in Modena with support from Malofeev’s Two-Headed Eagle society, the pro-Russian Vento dell’Est (lit. “Eastern Wind”) association, and the Christian group Una Voce Nel Silenzio (lit. “A Voice in the Silence”). “The International Russophile Movement, created in Moscow last week, is expanding its ranks. About 150 Italians…took to the streets last weekend with pro-Russian slogans,” Malofeev wrote on Telegram. He said they protested arms deliveries to Ukraine and called for Italy to leave NATO.

The branch holds conferences and roundtables grounded in the ideas of Dugin and Ivan Ilyin, Putin’s favorite philosopher. Bertolasi has also presented propagandistic books in Italy, including “From Gorbachev to Putin: Russia’s Geopolitics” by Russian Senator and conspiracy theorist Alexei Pushkov and “The End of Europe: Together With Russia on the Path to Multipolarity” by Valery Korovin, Dugin’s deputy in the Eurasian movement.

The Cypriot Russophile branch promotes the pro-Kremlin agenda even more bluntly. It is led by Mikis Philaniotis, a translator of Russian literature who graduated from a university in Odesa. Philaniotis has visited Russian-occupied territories in Ukraine and claimed on behalf of local Greeks that they were “happy to return to Russia” and asked Greece and Cyprus “not to send any military aid to Ukraine.”

In the fall of 2025, Cypriot members organized the propaganda film festival “RT.Doc: Time of Our Heroes” in Nicosia and Limassol. The audience was greeted by Russia’s ambassador to Cyprus, former security services officer Murat Zyazikov. The program featured two films — one about the “atrocities of Ukrainian troops against civilians in Mariupol,” and another about Italian propagandists in the Donbas who “challenged Western censorship.”

“Protecting the traditional family” as a pretext

At its second congress in February 2024, the Russophiles discussed another area they had previously barely addressed: defending “traditional values.” A year later, the movement became more active in opposing abortion and LGBTQ rights.

The first step was a declaration on “family protection” signed by the IRM in January 2025 in cooperation with Malofeev’s groups and 13 other organizations from Russia, Belarus, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan. They called for banning the promotion of “anti-family ideas and values” such as “gender” and “gender diversity.”

Later, Malinov and French “Russophile” representative Tatiana Bokova met with Ekaterina Lakhova, head of the Union of Women of Russia. Lakhova previously co-authored the so-called Dima Yakovlev law, which banned U.S. adoptions of Russian children, and she also famously presented a complaint to Putin about the “LGBT propaganda” content of Raduga (lit. “Rainbow”) brand ice cream. The Russophiles announced plans to cooperate with Lakhova’s organization and to create a “women’s branch,” likely to be headed by Bokova. Judging by the family protection declaration, its agenda will not be feminist.

The Italian branch also focused on “family protection” in 2025, organizing a conference titled “Eurasia and Traditional Values: A Challenge to Globalism.” Co-organizers included the pro-Russian Veneto-Russia and Vento dell’Est associations, the Centro Studi Suvorov (lit. “Suvorov Study Center”), the La Terra Dei Padri (lit. “Land of the Fathers”) center, and the right-wing Christian group Identità Europea (lit. “European Identity”).

The conference opened with remarks by conspiracy theorist and former Catholic archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, whom the Vatican accused of schism and excommunicated in 2024. In a lengthy speech, he accused the World Economic Forum and the U.S. Agency for International Development of destroying the family and promoting “woke propaganda that advances LGBTQ moral perversion and gender ideology.” Viganò has supported the Russophile movement since its founding.

Another speaker was Dugin ally Valery Korovin, head of the Center for Geopolitical Expertise that Dugin founded. Other figures who frequently appear at the center’s events are GRU officer Yuri Khoroshenky, from Unit 29155, and U.S. propagandist John Mark Dougan. European intelligence provided documents to a newspaper showing that Dougan had developed deepfakes and disinformation websites targeting Kamala Harris’ election campaign. The U.S. later imposed sanctions on Korovin.

An information gap

As past document leaks from Kremlin-controlled structures show, the public image of such groups can differ markedly from the tasks they actually perform. In the case of the International Russophile Movement, that gap may be significant. After all, the contrast between the substantial organizational, media, and human resources the Kremlin invests in IRM and the movement’s limited public outreach within the European Union is unmistakable.

According to Malinov, activity in the EU is critically important for the Russophiles, and that is the sole reason they fear sanctions. Putin, for his part, has said the IRM “helps disseminate objective and reliable information” about Russia abroad. However, it is difficult to find many examples of European Russophile branches actively distributing news about Russia or their own activities in the languages of their host countries.

Overall, Malinov’s espionage scandal and involvement in corruption, Malofeev’s patronage, indirect links to intelligence services, and an information partner in the form of the propaganda portal Baltija suggest the movement is unlikely to be limited to fighting “Russophobia.” Its European representatives may even be involved in recruitment and influence operations — and, unlike agents holding Russian citizenship, they do not require visas or diplomatic passports to do so.