Secretary of State Antony Blinken said new information showed that the Russian state media company RT, formerly known as Russia Today, was now being deployed by the Kremlin to conduct cyberintelligence and covert influence operations targeting countries in Europe, Africa, and North and South America. It was also being used to procure weapons for Russia’s war against Ukraine, expanding RT’s remit far beyond that of a media outlet, officials said.
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Blinken says Russian state media outlet runs intelligence operations
U.S. officials warned Friday that the newly exposed covert Russian disinformation operation to influence public opinion in the United States represents only a small fraction of Moscow’s efforts to undermine democracies globally through its state propaganda arm RT.
Announcing new sanctions against RT’s parent companies, Rossiya Segodnya and TV-Novosti, that aim to cripple funding for RT and its operations, Blinken said these entities “are no longer merely fire hoses of Russian propaganda and disinformation. They are engaged in covert influence activities aimed at undermining American elections and democracies, functioning like a de facto arm of Russia’s intelligence apparatus.”
The sanctions, which come in addition to last week’s Treasury actions against 10 top RT executives and its designation of RT as a “foreign mission,” were not an action against RT for the content of its reporting, the State Department said, but were aimed at the media outlet’s covert influence campaigns.
“Covert influence activities are not journalism,” the State Department said in a statement. “The United States will always stand for freedom of expression.” Unlike the European Union, which banned RT in 2022 following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the United States had previously required RT only to register as a foreign agent.
Blinken said the United States was calling on “every ally, every partner” across the globe to treat the activities of RT “as they do other intelligence activities within their borders.”
The head of the State Department’s Global Engagement Center, James P. Rubin, likened the diplomatic outreach over RT to the campaign the Trump administration waged against Huawei, the Chinese telecommunications provider, over fears that it could be used to gather intelligence.
RT has become increasingly entrenched as a channel voicing Kremlin propaganda in Latin America, Africa and the Middle East, and it has gone underground to operate through a web of front companies in the West, according to RT’s editor in chief, Margarita Simonyan.
In comments posted on Telegram, Simonyan responded to Blinken by saying, “We have done this, are doing this and will do this.”