In recent years, he had sought to build public influence, often with an international audience in mind. And she wasn’t alone. Dugina was one of several influential Russian women on the front lines of Russia’s disinformation war, representing the public face of the broader propaganda effort, both at home and abroad. “There is a huge machine at work for this propaganda effort, (and) he was part of that machine,” said Roman Osadchuk, a Ukraine-based researcher at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab), who has investigated Dugina’s writing and digital output as of 2020. “He probably had the potential to be a major player,” Osadchuk told CNN. Her death provides a window into this massive enterprise, which exists on multiple levels. Dugina emulated the work of high-ranking Kremlin officials, flashy TV hosts, activists and countless content creators who — like her — put Kremlin-friendly content on Western-facing blogs and websites, many of which have camouflaged origins. Whatever their scope, “the thing that’s similar for all of them is the direction of their effort,” Osadchuk said. “The main idea is (to) sow division and mistrust towards the governments of the Western world… (to) create further polarization or expose problems and divisions in Western societies.”
A shady website that condemned the West
For much of her life, Dugina had “followed in her father’s footsteps,” according to Osadchuk. She used her public speeches, media appearances and website to promote a worldview similar to her father’s, which placed a “heavy foundation of the power of traditions” and saw religion as a “primary part of her own governance”. “They pitted themselves against the West, which (they argued) fights not for family values but for sodomism, sin and represents the worst in people,” he added. Central to her beliefs was a steadfast commitment to Russian imperial goals. Dugina’s own appearances on domestic television firmly placed her in the group of analysts and speakers supporting Russia’s war aims on a nightly basis. In a televised debate before her death, she said the West needed to be “fed” by Russia’s war in Ukraine in order to “wake up” to its uneducated worldview, according to a video posted online by BBC Monitoring” .Many call her a ‘kid,’ but she wasn’t,” Kamil Galeev, an independent researcher and former fellow at the Wilson Center, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington, D.C., wrote in a lengthy Twitter thread that described Dugina as ” propagandist” and likened her appearances to several Russian male experts. According to the US State Department, Dugina in 2020 became editor-in-chief of United World International (UWI) — an English-language foreign affairs website created by the corporate propaganda effort “Project Lakhta,” which the ministry said used fictitious online personas to interfere in the US election. The site mimics the format of Western think tanks and news blogs, with articles by guest contributors from around the world, and apart from the occasional mistranslation, bears little trace of its Russian origins. “Obviously she looks like (she has) a fringe view of the world, but you couldn’t tell right away that this is a Russian thing,” said Osadchuk, whose investigation in 2020 revealed that social media accounts owned by Dugina were responsible for creating UWI’s presence on Facebook. “But if you go into the articles themselves, you could read it and see the Russian position all over the place,” he added. “If Ukraine is admitted to NATO, it will disappear as a state,” read a headline on its website. A story published four days after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine falsely claimed that Putin was acting in defense of his country after receiving information about an imminent Ukrainian attack on Russia. another claims that “Ukraine joining NATO would lead to the disappearance of the state called the Russian Federation from the world map.” Other articles focus on European affairs. often scathing of Western leaders or highlighting the growth of far-left and far-right groups in the West. The site worked to give a platform to fringe academics and thinkers, while also nudging Western readers skeptical of mainstream political institutions toward Moscow’s worldview, Osadchuk said. “The Kremlin’s propaganda machine has a different target audience. They have their own citizens… (but) at the same time they have to find allies abroad,” he added. “This is where Dugina comes in.” Facebook said it removed UWI from the platform in September 2020 after receiving information from the FBI about its activity elsewhere on the internet”, adding that its investigation had revealed links to people previously involved with Russia Internet Research Agency (IRA), a notorious Russian troll farm known for its meddling in the 2016 presidential election. Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Dugina was also sanctioned by the US and the UK, along with her father, for her involvement with UWI. The UK government concluded that she was a “frequent and high-profile contributor of disinformation in relation to Ukraine and the Russian invasion of Ukraine on various online platforms” and therefore “supported and promoted policies or actions that destabilize Ukraine or undermine or threaten its territorial integrity, sovereignty or independence.” However, UWI remains accessible via the Internet, frequently publishing Russia-friendly opinion pieces on foreign affairs. Its website made no mention of its editor-in-chief’s death in the days following the explosion, despite dominating global and Russian news channels, nor has it ever acknowledged Dugina or her position on the site. UWI’s reach is decidedly modest. he had about 5,000 followers each on Facebook and Instagram before he was banned, while a temporary version of his also-banned Twitter account had about 6,800 followers. (A new account posting articles from the site is still live and has about 4,200 followers). “The problem is that it could always be back-to-back,” Osadchuk said. “Even if the site itself isn’t as influential, it still provides the ideas and platform for others to cite it as a credible source.”
Russia’s “disarmament” young activists in Europe
Sites like Dugina’s are not uncommon, according to Olga Lautman, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA), who called their production “extremely important” to Russia’s soft power goals. “It’s a very systemic method…you’ll see all these sites putting out the same identical message, the same talking points,” he said. “The reader reads it in their language, they feel comfortable reading it, but they’re not necessarily sure where the information is coming from,” added Lautman. “The whole point on a larger scale is to shift the balance of power from the United States to Russia and allow authoritarianism to rise and democracy to be undermined.” Dugina’s interest extended beyond Russia and Ukraine. Her website and talks often focused on elections across Europe, and in 2017 she was particularly involved in promoting far-right French presidential candidate Marine Le Pen In a public appearance before the first round of voting in 2017, Dugina told a Moscow crowd during a speech that Le Pen was a “leader for the people” while criticizing eventual winner Emmanuel Macron, according to a report by the nationalist Russian group. Rosehip. The fringes of European politics were a space Dugina shared with many other young Russian activists and provocateurs, including Maria Katasonova — a content creator who created an online “Women for Marine” movement and greeted Le Pen when she visited Moscow to meet. Putin in 2017. And Lautman suggests it’s no accident that young women are often at the forefront of the global information war. “Russia has always known how to use women as agents,” he said. “Women happen to appeal to a bigger crowd… ‘they’re more disarming, (in the case of Dugina and Katasonova) they’re younger, they can relate to the younger population.’ “I can’t imagine a group of 20, 30-year-olds hanging on (Alexander) Dugin’s every word, whereas Dugina is more energetic and can engage more with that age group.”
The inner front
At home, the fruits of Russia’s communications campaign are funneled into living rooms via televisions every evening on a scale that greatly undermines the output of younger, largely digital activists like Dugina. State media practitioners such as Vladimir Solovyov, a popular talk-show host singled out by the US State Department as perhaps the Russian government’s “most energetic” propagandist, figure prominently in the Kremlin’s information war. But that effort, too, is often made by prominent female figures, experts note, many of whom have rushed to pay tribute to Dugina and called for tough retaliation against Ukraine for her death, despite Kiev’s repeated denials that it was involved. her murder. Lautman pointed to several high-profile women at the top of Russia’s news and media — starting with Margarita Simonyan, the editor-in-chief of the state-run RT TV channel (formerly Russia Today), which was banned from broadcasting in many Western countries after the invasion of Moscow. After Dugina’s death, Simonyan said on her Telegram channel that Russia should target “Decision Centers!” in Ukraine. A January report from the US State Department described “close ties between Russian government officials and RT” and…
