According to the U.S. government, Russian political consultant Ilya Gambashidze is responsible for a large-scale disinformation campaign aimed at undermining trust in democratic processes and institutions in the United States and beyond.<\/p>\n
Working with Kremlin officials, his digital marketing agency creates fake news sites \u2014 sometimes clones of real news outlets to mislead people, the government alleges. Often, the goal appears to be reducing Western support for Ukraine.<\/p>\n
In March 2024, the U.S. Treasury Department, following the European Union\u2019s lead, imposed sanctions on Gambashidze, his business partner, and their companies.<\/p>\n
This increased attention to the little-known political strategist, who had previously worked for Russian lawmakers and regional politicians. For the most part, though, his biography remained largely unknown.<\/p>\n
Now, in a new investigation based upon scouring Russian state databases, business records in Russia and Europe, and social media posts, Voice of America can reveal more about Gambashidze\u2019s path from consultant to alleged disinformation mastermind and his ties to the United States.<\/p>\n
From 2013 to 2020, companies owned wholly or partially by Gambashidze, or a close family member received Russian government contracts worth about $2.7 million. And these were not the only companies owned by the political strategist.<\/p>\n
Although Gambashidze\u2019s work appears aimed at destabilizing the social and political situation in America, his two sons live in the United States.<\/p>\n
VOA learned this through an assiduous search of public records and social media. Gambashidze\u2019s ex-wife, who has been living in the U.S. for roughly 15 years, then confirmed the information. VOA is not naming them to protect the sons\u2019 privacy.<\/p>\n
Gambashidze\u2019s ex-wife and her current husband say that economic sanctions on the \u201cpolitical technologist\u201d have largely been a blow to his children because they have made it impossible to collect child support from Gambashidze.<\/p>\n
“In our opinion, the only thing these sanctions do is hurt the lifestyle of his kids, which is very modest,\u201d said their stepfather. \u201cThey just go to public school, community college.\u201d<\/p>\n
VOA\u2019s investigation shows the close connection between Russian business interests and the Kremlin’s foreign policy, and demonstrates the ties between people working to discredit Western institutions and the West itself.<\/p>\n
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\n<\/div>\n\n<\/div> Voice of America reached Gambashidze by phone in Moscow, but he declined to comment and requested the questions by Telegram messenger. He did not respond to that message.<\/p>\n What\u2019s known about Gambashidze<\/strong><\/p>\n Although it is difficult to reconstruct Gambashidze\u2019s full biography from open-source information, a general portrait emerges.<\/p>\n Gambashidze was born in Kyiv in 1977, according to information from the Office of Foreign Assets Control, or OFAC, which is responsible for enforcing U.S. sanctions, as well as business documents seen by Voice of America.<\/p>\n In 2008, he defended his PhD dissertation in sociology at the Russian State University for the Humanities. The title of his research was: \u201cFeatures of the development of local self-government in the Russian Federation in the context of the transformation of the party system.\u201d<\/p>\n A year later, Gambashidze was working as an assistant to the prefect of Moscow\u2019s Northern District, when he became the victim of a strange kidnapping attempt. His ex-wife and children appear to have lived in the United States since around that time.<\/p>\n Gambashidze remained in Russia, where he worked as an adviser to Pyotr Tolstoy, deputy chairman of the State Duma and the great-great-grandson of the famed author Leo Tolstoy.<\/p>\n According to media reports, Gambashidze also worked for the Batu Khasikov, the acting governor of Kalmykia, a traditionally Buddhist minority region in Russia\u2019s North Caucasus.<\/p>\n In 2023, on the eve of Russian parliamentary elections, Gambashidze was working for the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, or LDPR, a nationalist political party that is part of Russia\u2019s pro-Putin \u201copposition.\u201d<\/p>\n That same year, the Russian Association of Political Consultants awarded his teams prizes for three electoral projects. Two were unusual: a monument to LDPR founder Vladimir Zhirinovsky, who died in 2022, and a May Day rally<\/a> in the hit computer game Minecraft and the \u201cNeural Network Zhirinovsky.\u201d<\/p>\n The latter project is a digital image, supposedly based on AI, that can answer questions in the aggressive style and voice of Zhirinovsky.<\/p>\n In March 2024, before Russian presidential elections, a humorous music video<\/a> urging residents of the central Russian city of Tambov to get out to vote appeared online.<\/p>\n That video was the work of Gambashidze\u2019s team, one of his associates later wrote.<\/p>\n In the video, young men and women in Russian folk outfits dance alongside people in bear and wolf costumes, play the accordion and balalaika, and sing in English (with a nearly indecipherable Russian accent) about their desire to vote.<\/p>\n \u201cCustom [of] folk in our nation \u2014 we all go to voting station,\u201d they sing. \u201cThere is no autocracy, we live in democracy!\u201d<\/p>\n Independent experts and Western governments sharply disagree with that assessment.<\/p>\n Kremlin disinformation<\/strong><\/p>\n Since 2022, social media companies, researchers, Western governments and journalists have increasingly linked Gambashidze\u2019s two companies to a project to spread disinformation in Ukraine, Europe, Latin America and the United States.<\/p>\n In November 2022, Meta announced it had removed more than 2,300 accounts<\/a> and pages on Facebook and Instagram for \u201ccoordinated inauthentic behavior.\u201d<\/p>\n The accounts shared content from websites posing as real media outlets and government pages. These articles \u201ccriticized Ukraine, praised Russia and argued that Western sanctions on Russia would backfire,\u201d Meta wrote.<\/p>\n The targets of the disinformation were Europe and Ukraine. European officials later named the campaign \u201cDoppelganger.\u201d<\/p>\n Meta tied the campaign to two Russian firms: marketing company Social Design Agency, or SDA, and IT firm Structura, which together spent approximately $105,000 on advertising on Facebook and Instagram.<\/p>\n According to the Treasury Department, SDA was founded by Gambashidze (it is formally registered to a woman likely associated with his political work in Tambov).<\/p>\n Gambashidze was also co-founder of Structura, but today it belongs to Nikolai Tupikin, who is even less well-known. There is only one \u201cofficial\u201d photo of him from a Russian Telegram channel dedicated to startups. Little other information is available.<\/p>\n Tupikin declined to comment when Voice of America contacted him by phone. He did not respond to a subsequent emailed request for comment. <\/p>\n \n<\/div> In July 2023, the EU imposed sanctions against Gambashidze, SDA and Structura.<\/p>\n In November 2023, amid the Israel-Hamas war, Stars of David began to appear on walls in Paris. The images circulated actively on social media. French police soon detained two Moldovan citizens for painting the Jewish symbols. They had allegedly been acting on behalf of a pro-Kremlin businessman in Transnistria, a breakaway region of Moldova.<\/p>\n The French authorities accused the Doppelganger campaign of trying to provoke tensions in France by sharing photos of the stars. The Russian Embassy in Paris denied the allegations.<\/p>\n Later, French newspaper Le Monde<\/em> reported that the country’s intelligence agency suspected Russia\u2019s Federal Security Service of orchestrating the provocation.<\/p>\n In November 2023, the U.S. State Department’s Global Engagement Center accused Gambashidze, Tupikin and their firms of launching a large-scale disinformation campaign in Latin America on the orders of the Kremlin.<\/p>\n In a series of articles based on leaked Kremlin documents, The Washington Post<\/em> painted an even clearer picture of Doppelganger.<\/p>\n The team of political technologists behind the campaign work under Sergei Kiriyenko, the first deputy head of Russia\u2019s Presidential Administration, who normally is responsible for overseeing domestic policy.<\/p>\n They used the services of bot farms that sometimes posted on social networks while posing as ordinary U.S. residents who oppose American support for Ukraine. The bots tried to stir up fear about border security, increase racial and economic tensions, and support isolationism in the United States, The Washington Post<\/em> reported.<\/p>\n To that end, the campaign resembled the \u201cRussian troll factory\u201d that was accused of meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.<\/p>\n According to the Post\u2019s<\/em> source, the coordinator and \u201cbrain\u201d of the European and Ukrainian disinformation campaign is Sofia Zakharova, a Kremlin official who works in an office focused on information technology and communications infrastructure.<\/p>\n Little is known about Zakharova. However, according to a social media post documenting the official\u2019s meeting with students, she is a graduate of Russia\u2019s Diplomatic Academy and has experience working in the Presidential Administration, Foreign Ministry, and the United Nations.<\/p>\n Voice of America was unable to contact Zakharova through the Presidential Administration and the Russian Embassy in the United States.<\/p>\n Judging by publicly available information, since 2019, Zakharova has regularly taken part in conferences and events<\/a> dedicated to artificial intelligence. On at least two occasions, she represented her agency in meetings of the Council of Europe\u2019s Ad Hoc Committee on Artificial Intelligence<\/a>.<\/p>\n \n<\/div> \u201cThe dominant conversation across global elections so far this year centers on malicious use of generative AI for propaganda and disinformation,\u201d the Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center noted in a recent report<\/a>. <\/p>\n Researchers from George Washington University recently predicted<\/a> that incidents of \u201cbad-actor AI activity\u201d will become a daily occurrence by mid-2024. According to Microsoft, though, the technology has not yet demonstrated significant effectiveness in terms of spreading misinformation.<\/p>\n Gambashidze is also not far from AI. In a recent comment to the Russian sociological agency Russian Field, he suggested that political technologists \u201cwill begin to actively use AI to collect and process information from the Internet: they will study comments on social networks and the tone of posts, evaluate articles in the media, and so on.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cYes, of course, bot farms and political orders will give some kind of error,\u201d added the political strategist, \u201cbut the overall picture will be clear.\u201d<\/p>\n Political technology and PR<\/strong><\/p>\n In addition to working for politicians and the Kremlin, over the past decade Gambashidze has entered into various areas of business. Since 2013, his companies have repeatedly won public procurement tenders.<\/p>\n Gambashidze owned a one-third share in a company named Deep Communication. According to the official Russian state procurement portal, in 2014-2016, it won 12 contracts worth about $1.76 million at the 2016 exchange rate.<\/p>\n In 2014, the company U.S.P.R., owned by Gambashidze and a business partner, received a government contract worth around $83,000 based upon the average exchange rate that year.<\/p>\n From 2013 until 2017, the Energy company, owned by Gambashidze, received 15 government contracts worth almost $975,000. The Etude company, owned by a close relative (presumably his mother), received one contract for roughly $25,000 in 2020.<\/p>\n Some of the services provided by Gambashidze’s companies were predictable given his line of work: maintaining websites, public opinion research, advertising, conducting focus groups, etc.<\/p>\n There also were more unexpected tasks: According to one of the contracts, Deep Communication was involved in the production of the film called \u201cJasmine,\u201d which received government funding. Judging by the information in the contract and data from open sources, \u201cJasmine\u201d refers to the film \u201cHit\u201d directed by Margarita Mikhailova, which was released in 2016.<\/p>\n Film appears in Gambashidze\u2019s biography more than once. Deep Communication also worked on the Kyrgyz-Russian film Suleiman-Too, and for unclear reasons, Gambashidze shows up in the background of a photograph of American actor Zac Efron<\/a> arriving at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. <\/p>\n In total, Gambashidze\u2019s companies received state contracts worth more than $2.7 million according to the average 2016 exchange rate. Almost all companies that received these contracts have since been liquidated.<\/p>\n
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