Sabotage Exposed
A new OCCRP report reveals the depraved lengths Russia will go to try to break the spirit and trust of the West
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I like the quiet hours, when the world is still. It’s there when my thoughts escape onto the page. I had a realization that this kompromat we’ve been searching for during the past decade was likely just alignment.
I wrote:
We thought it was about kompromat and maybe for some it was — but for the primary Russian subcontractors in the US, it’s an alignment of authoritarian, white supremacy, and forced slave labor beliefs — if there’s any hope for the future, all ringleaders need to be neutralized.
Like Rodrigo Duterte on trial in The Hague, those marching the world in an authoritarian direction need to be tried and convicted for crimes against humanity.
I refuse to accept that this is how the world ends — with power lying in the hands of maladjusted bunker cowards.
I was shocked when writing my report on how the word ‘stability’ will be used to sell fascism to discover a 2024 interview with Keir Giles, where he predicted, note for note, our current scenario.
In July 2024, the author of Russia’s War On Everybody, told me:
In the US, of course, it’s a very, very different picture where there’s a clear favorite between Biden and Trump, if you have one of the two candidates that many people have already forgotten was actively working for Russia in his first term, then obviously, there’s going to be a a clear incentive for greater attempts at influencing the result in the US then then there was in the UK…
… this global confrontation between the retreating forces of democracy and those authoritarian powers that think it’s a return to the normal and natural order for them to be in the ascendant, is certainly not going away.
Maybe it’s because I’m 150 episodes into Mike Duncan’s The History of Rome podcast, that I can now fully appreciate Keir’s comment about authoritarian powers thinking it’s natural for them to be ascendant. We live in a walled prison of their technology, they have us right where they want us.
He continued:
And the nightmare scenario, of course, for Europe is that in the not too distant future, with the return of a Trump presidency, and Trump enacting all of the things that he and his coterie have said they want to do, Europe is actually going to be even more beleaguered because they will be confronted, not with two main authoritarian hostile powers, Russia and China, but three because the United States will actually join them going down that track and following the same principles that drive Beijing and Moscow.
Well, we saw this play out exactly as he predicated in recent days.
Keir had predicted that it was too late to wake America from its slumber due to “collective amnesia” — the self-deception that “it can’t possibly be that bad.”
Russia watchers like Keir knew it would be that bad, and two years later, he seems downright prescient.
As intellectual historian Marci Shore told me this week: “My general feeling is that the demographic of hard-core sadistic lunatics is marginal, but the demographic of people whose vulnerabilities can be exploited is huge.”
As the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project revealed yesterday, leaked documents show Russia continues to exploit the vulnerabilities of those in the West. Putin’s administration is behind election interference, false-flag attacks, and cruel Islamophobic stunts.
OCCRP reported:
In September 2025, nine mosques and cultural centers in and around Paris were targeted with a grotesque Islamophobic stunt: Bloody severed pig heads, each marked with the word “Macron” in blue ink, were left outside their front doors.
A few months later, three men from Serbia were convicted of the crime in their home country. They had been directed, the verdicts read, by “structures of the intelligence service of the Russian Federation” in an effort to incite unrest and intolerance.
Now, a cache of leaked documents obtained by reporters from Delfi Estonia and shared with OCCRP and other media partners pulls back the curtain on that provocation. The files showcase the meticulous internal planning that went into the operation, shed new light on who was behind it, and unveil a swathe of other pro-Kremlin influence efforts across Europe and beyond.
The documents point to the Social Design Agency (SDA), a Russian PR firm already sanctioned by the U.S., the U.K. and the EU for previous influence campaigns — and to the Russian Presidential Administration, whose officials are seen overseeing the firm’s work.
The several dozen files include internal reports about planned and completed missions as well as screenshots of private conversations from a workplace collaboration tool used by both SDA staffers and administration officials.
They detail numerous operations — described internally as “cognitive strikes” against the West — that included other vandalism attacks in France and Germany, efforts to advance pro-Russian messages through Western opinion leaders, and election interference campaigns. Among the latter is a plan to influence the upcoming parliamentary election in Armenia through a media outlet aimed at Russian-speaking voters, with the goal of arresting the country’s geopolitical turn towards the West.
According to the report, “one leaked message sets out one of the goals of this kind of information warfare: helping Russia ‘maintain the image of a superpower’ on the world stage. ‘The more Russia participates in active influence campaigns all over the world, the stronger the image of a global Russian power,’ it reads.”
If the name SDA sounds familiar to my readers, it’s because I reported extensively on the Kremlin-directed project in 2024, in the days leading up to the US election, how Elon Musk shared SDA memes, and was in regular contact with Putin, whose office was directly overseeing the SDA project.
In the final weeks of Biden’s presidency, the DOJ and FBI reported in granular detail how SDA was carrying out influence operations. The DOJ released an affidavit from an FBI agent, who testified that it was under the “direction and control” of the Russian presidential administration.
It should have made a difference in the 2024 election, but it didn’t. America’s collective amnesia that Trump worked for Russia in his first was apparent on November 5.
It didn’t help that Biden’s staff refused to release the names of about 600 US-based pro-Russian influencers, who we learned existed by reading the affidavit. We had a right to know. There were more Russian subcontractors than Benny Johnson, Tim Pool, and — according to Justin Trudeau — Tucker Carlson and Jordan Peterson. Nearly 600 more.
‘DESTABILIZING DEMOCRACIES’: Canadian PM Names Tucker Carlson and Jordan Peterson as Paid By Russia
I have a friend in Europe who believes that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky buys yachts and luxury apartments in skyscrapers in Dubai with military aid money. According to the OCCRP report, the origin lie was hatched in SDA, and “this story went viral globally, reaching over 86 million views, according to the internal report.”
One of those views hacked the mind of my friend.
The leak showed how the Russians continue to speak through Western opinion leaders, and OCCRP says that their plans for this year include “Project 2026,” eight projects, some described as “partially begun,” including an internet resource; AI-driven self-fulfilling knowledge base; an “opinion leader database” designed to monitor nearly 10,000 so-called opinion leader accounts on social media; an “Opinion tracker” intended to monitor the 100 “most prominent French opposition opinion leaders”; a website called “Russian Wave,” planned for publication in French, German, and Russian; a project called “AI News,” aimed at France, which seeks to create three “projects” across six social networks producing hundreds of videos.
I have continued to report on each breaking news story offering evidence that Russia is attacking every Western democracy, often turning to disinformation analyst Dietmar Pichler for insight. Pichler is the first source who informed our community about “throwaway agents” or gig worker espionage.
I asked the Vienna-based analyst to offer the Bette Dangerous community his take on the OCCRP report:
This leak gives a fantastic additional insight into how Moscow is using operations far beyond social media and cyber attacks to influence, weaken, and split our societies.
There is a misunderstanding that this broad variety of actions described here is a new step in the evolution after the famous “troll farms”, but this is not true. False flag operations to polarize societies or harm reputations, as well as forgeries, were already used during the Cold War, for instance when the Soviets painted swastikas on walls in Germany after World War II to portray Germany as a “still Nazi country”.
This is what we can see now with the Star of David graffiti in the Jewish neighborhood in France or the pig head used to humiliate Muslim citizens. These measures aim to polarize societies and amplify our existing societal conflicts.
Amplification is a key word. This is also one of the reasons why one of the described measures is to monitor “opinion leaders”, because pro-Russian individuals get boosted through shares and likes by the digital army of the Russians, in many cases without their knowledge. Because of this practice, many “agents of influence” for the Kremlin are not even aware that they are already working for Russia and that their reach has been supported by an invisible but powerful army of trolls.
We need to be aware that this report shows only one organization, and the scope of Russian influence campaigns is much broader, not even mentioning many other autocratic regimes that are united with Russia in this influence, subversion, and sabotage campaign against the Western democracies.—Dietmar Pichler for Bette Dangerous
It’s 3 am where I’m staying, and I just took a break to gaze at the stars.
I am reminded of the words of my friend who worked on two Navalny campaigns, risking his life for a belief in something better.
He told me:
Putin envies the United States. He wants to rob the humanity… He wants to break everyone’s trust in one another… The ideology of Russia is just go wherever they can go. If we can stop them, we have to do something to stop them.
I refuse to think this is how the world ends, by not stopping the sadistic lunatics when we had the chance.
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