The Alibi Machine: The Suspects

To identify suspects, investigators need to map out the landscape of Russia’s information operations. At the heart of the alibi machine are real people — government officials, media executives, reporters and bloggers.

“Understanding the system depends in part on knowing who participates in it. So firstly, we have to identify a hierarchical network involved in a particular information operation. This may include senior political leaders, media organizations, and social media influencers… We have to prove that there were some orders or instructions that were given by more senior groups to less senior groups.”

Nadiia Vaskivska,

Legal Advisor at Global Rights Compliance

They distribute the talking points — called “temniki” — directly to editors-in-chief of Russia’s biggest state media outlets: TASS, Channel One, Rossiya, RIA Novosti.

We asked Alexey Kovalev — a Russian journalist in exile who once worked inside one of those outlets — to describe how it functions.

“The presidential administration intervenes with specific instructions. It has a kill switch that can immediately blacklist any coverage in Kremlin-controlled media of any unwanted, undesirable topics, like protests, for example. The presidential administration is like the central nervous system of the beast.”

Alexey Kovalev

The Kremlin ‘brain’ doesn’t only issue orders. It also enforces silence. Russia’s official censorship body, Roskomnadzor, can red-flag content and suspend licences. The effect, Kovalev says, is a system that rarely needs to give explicit instructions because everyone already knows the rules.

“You should instinctively know what things to cover, what things not to cover, and from which angle. Do what you think is expected of you.”

Alexey Kovalev

These are the people whose job it is to take Kremlin narratives and project them onto the world stage. As well as Sergei Shoigu, Minister of Defense, and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, several names crop up regularly in the information alibis we’ve looked at:

Igor Konashenkov, spokesman for the Russian Ministry of Defense — the military’s public voice, whose briefings provide official cover for Russian military actions.

Maria Zakharova, Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson, who amplifies narratives across international media from behind her podium.

Vasily Nebenzia , Russia’s Ambassador to the United Nations, who takes the alibi to the Security Council, where it can be delivered with diplomatic immunity and broadcast live to the world.

“The Russian mission to the UN plays a very central role in this ecosystem. It picks up and amplifies disinformation that has been seeded in more esoteric parts of the internet and gives it a global platform.”

Peter Pomerantsev

The words of these officials have the full weight of the state behind them. And that helps achieve one of the key goals of the information alibi.

“The Russian use of info alibis has to be seen in their general kind of strategy of ultimately avoiding responsibility and giving their allies enough “implausible” deniability about what the Russians are up to… It gives allies at the UN, for example, a way to go ‘well, we just don’t know what happened, maybe this was an accident, maybe the Ukrainians bombed themselves.’”

Peter Pomerantsev

The Reckoning Project Co-Founder

This includes organizations that look independent, but which are actually funded by and have direct links to the Russian state.

ANO Dialog and the Social Design Agency — both now sanctioned by the U.S., UK and EU — are the engine room of this layer.

ANO Dialog — reportedly directly linked to Sergey Kiriyenko and the Presidential administration — distributes billions of rubles in grants to social media creators. Its network of social media channels started spreading fakes about Ukraine from the start of the invasion. One of the examples — a pseudo fact-checking Telegram channel War on Fakes , with over 400k subscribers.

“It’s a way to ensure that every content creator is hooked on the government money… The ‘don’t bite the hand that feeds you’ mentality.”

Alexey Kovalev

The Social Design Agency (SDA) operates differently — it focuses on creating and spreading Russian disinformation abroad.

“The Social Design Agency is industrialized disinformation, and it can be terrifyingly effective because explicitly pro-Kremlin narratives created by the SDA were shared by people like Elon Musk and Marjorie Taylor Greene. The stuff that they’re creating is really bleeding into mainstream Western discourse.”

Alexey Kovalev

An investigation by RFERL found that this meme denigrating President Zelensky, and shared by Elon Musk, was created by the SDA.  Prominent MAGA voice and noted conspiracy theorist Marjorie Taylor Greene also repeated SDA narratives, including about child abductions and organ harvesting in Ukraine.

Beyond the funded networks lies the wild west of the information ecosystem: Telegram channels run by so-called “voyenkory” — “war correspondents” —…