Right-wing influencers hyped anti-Ukraine videos backed by state-owned media...

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Kremlin could not have asked for better publicity at a better time when Ben Swann, a self-described independent journalist who promotes conspiracy theories, released a 12-part video series he promised would reveal dark truths about Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

Swann’s flashy documentary-style videos were filled with innuendo, attacks on Zelenskyy’s character and commentary from guests sympathetic to Russia in its two-year war with Ukraine.

The series, titled “Zelenskyy Unmasked,” launched in April as Congress was debating increasing military assistance to Ukraine, and it quickly caught the attention of conservative social media influencers who hyped the project to their millions of followers.

Among those who promoted the series was Donald Trump Jr., the former president’s eldest son.

“Curious about the billions of dollars and weapons Congress sent Ukraine?” Trump Jr. posted on X, Truth Social and Threads. “You need to watch the first episode of the explosive 12-part series.”

Unlike other conservative media personalities who last month expressed shock upon learning they may have been secretly financed by the Kremlin, Swann has no such qualms. He’s worked for Russia’s state-owned media empire for years, with one of his companies earning millions of dollars for producing Kremlin-friendly shows.

The creation of “Zelenskyy Unmasked” and its viral spread reveal how widely Russia-backed talking points are traveling on social media — a trend that concerns current and former U.S. intelligence officials and disinformation experts.

An investigation by The Associated Press also provides insights into the shadowy and profitable world of political influencers who are not required to disclose who is paying them, raising transparency concerns about their political endorsements in the largely unregulated realm of social media.

Swann brought on a digital marketing firm to publicize “Zelenskyy Unmasked,” and at least one creator acknowledged he was paid to promote the series.

Dire warnings

The revelations about Swann’s work for Russia come as U.S. authorities have issued increasingly dire warnings about the threat posed by Russian disinformation campaigns. In addition to undermining Ukraine, the Kremlin is seeking to disrupt the presidential election and sow discord in the U.S. and elsewhere in the West, those officials have said.

U.S. officials are particularly concerned about Russia’s covert efforts to take advantage of unwitting Americans to spread Moscow’s message and use artificial intelligence to quickly tailor false content.

Russia’s influence operation also appears aimed at boosting support for GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump, who has criticized Ukraine and praised Russian President Vladimir Putin, the officials said.

Trump has dismissed evidence of Russian influence operations, and he and many of his supporters have mocked the broader U.S. government’s effort to highlight Kremlin propaganda efforts.

Registered with the DOJ

Swann filed paperwork with the Justice Department two years ago to register one of his companies as working for Russian state media. In an interview with the AP, Swann said he has kept his work for Russian interests separate from what he produces for U.S. audiences. He has done this, Swann said, by operating two companies — one that generates content for Russian media and another that produces independent journalism, like “Zelenskyy Unmasked,” for U.S. audiences.

“The only connection is that I own both companies,” Swann said.

The AP, however, found that there was some overlap in how the two entities operated.

A handful of guests on “Zelenskyy Unmasked” also appeared on RT shows produced by Swann, according to a review of RT’s video archives and records filed with the Justice Department.

Swann’s shows for U.S. audiences and RT also have similar themes. The Zelenskyy series, for example, echoed Russian state media’s messaging that the Ukrainian president is a would-be autocrat who has duped the West into supporting a conflict that Russia will inevitably win.

A former TV anchor

Swann, 46, was a longtime TV journalist before he was fired from an Atlanta station in 2018 after promoting the debunked “Pizzagate” conspiracy that alleged Democrats were abducting children to serve as sex slaves.

He has since become a social media star who portrays himself as someone daring to ask uncomfortable questions on tough topics — revolving around unfounded claims such as whether the Sandy Hook school shooter acted alone, the coronavirus vaccine was a money-making ploy by big pharmaceutical companies, and Israel was a ”participant” in the massacre of Oct. 7, 2023.

Swann joined Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s anti-vaccine organization, Children’s Health Defense, in a lawsuit pending against several news organizations, including the AP, accusing them of violating antitrust laws by taking action to identify misinformation, including about COVID-19 and COVID-19 vaccines.

Swann said he worked as a correspondent for RT America, a cable channel that was part of a Russian state media outlet, until it went off the air following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. RT officials then asked if he wanted to produce shows for the network to air outside the U.S., Swann said.

“I said, ‘Well, I can’t produce shows for the United States, but if these shows are for overseas, I’ll help you produce them.’ So I started doing that for them, and we’ve been doing that ever since,” Swann said in a July interview.

Producing RT shows

Swann said he produced 10 shows a week using RT America’s old studios in Washington, and he stressed that those shows don’t air in the U.S. or Western Europe, although they are visible across the globe on RT’s website.

Under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, individuals must register with the Justice Department when they seek to influence U.S. policy and public opinion on behalf of foreign governments. Not doing so can result in criminal charges.

Swann’s company, Rebel Media Productions, first registered with the Justice Department in August 2022, saying it worked for RT’s parent company and related entities. The disclosures show Rebel Media Productions was paid more than $6 million in less than two years by RT-related entities.

RT, formerly known as Russia Today, is a major player in Russia’s sprawling propaganda apparatus, and a target of U.S. efforts to block Moscow’s covert influence.

The Justice Department has said RT has links to Russian intelligence agencies, while the U.S. State Department recently unveiled new sanctions on Russian state media. The sanctions target RT’s parent organization, TV Novosti, which Swann contracted with for his Russia-related work.

In February, Swann stopped reporting Rebel Media’s work for Russia to the Justice Department, even as his company kept producing RT shows.

Swann said he ended that registration with the Justice Department because his attorneys told him it wasn’t necessary, despite his company’s continued work for RT. “They said, ‘Why are you making things more difficult for yourself?’” Swann said.

In response to the recent sanctions, Swann said his company last month severed all ties to RT.

“While we disagree with the censorship of our journalists, who were doing quality work on behalf of our client, we have and will continue to respect the rule of law,” Swann said in a statement.

The Justice Department declined to comment.

‘Assume they don’t like Zelenskyy’

Swann said he creates content — like the “Zelenskyy Unmasked” series — for American viewers through another company, Truth in Media.

Truth in Media, Swann said, isn’t profitable and is funded by wealthy U.S. individuals whom he refused to name. “Most of them own very large companies,” he said, “if not publicly traded companies.”

Swann said the large payouts he received from Russian state media had not influenced his work on “Zelenskyy Unmasked,” but he acknowledged Russia’s leaders probably liked the series’ tough take on Ukraine’s president.

“I don’t know, I assume they don’t like Zelenskyy,” Swann said.

Many of the guests interviewed in “Zelenskyy Unmasked” have been RT contributors and guests on its programs.

That includes RT contributor Tara Reade, who briefly moved to Moscow after accusing President Joe Biden of assaulting her in the 1990s; former Ukrainian diplomat Andrii Telizhenko, who was sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury on allegations he had close ties to a “Russia-linked foreign influence network”; and Russell Bentley, an American citizen known to have fought with Kremlin-backed separatists and worked for Russian state media, who died earlier this year in Ukraine.

Another guest who has appeared on RT shows and in the Zelenskyy videos is Scott Ritter, a former U.N. weapons inspector sympathetic to Russia whose upstate New York home was raided in August by the FBI. Ritter told the AP that FBI agents in their questioning made clear that they were investigating his Russia-related work but did not ask specifically about his work with Swann.

Ritter provided the AP with a copy of an email he said was from a booking producer for Swann’s RT shows asking him to appear in the Zelenskyy series.

Ritter said an email invitation he received to participate in “Zelenskyy Unmasked” indicated that its executive producer was Sean Stone, who hosted an RT show and is the son of the filmmaker Oliver Stone.

Sean Stone did not respond to requests for comment, and Swann did not respond to a question about Stone’s involvement on the series.

Swann said his RT-linked company had passed along guest contact details to his business producing “Zelenskyy Unmasked.”

The two entities did not share staff, he said.

An ‘explosive’ series

Truth in Media began teasing the “Zelenskyy Unmasked” videos earlier this year on its website, writing the “explosive” 12-part series would answer “who is really benefitting from the $100 billion the U.S. has sent Ukraine.”

At that time, hard-right congressional Republicans were fighting a proposal to send more money and weapons to Ukraine.

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rep. Mike Turner and House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul, both Republicans, said some GOP lawmakers had been heavily influenced by Russian talking points.

Turner said on CNN that some of those talking points were being “uttered on the House floor.”

To promote “Zelenskyy Unmasked,” Swann said he paid for advertising on social media but believes the series received its most substantial boost in viewership thanks to promotion from conservative influencers. Swann’s videos that were embedded in X posts garnered tens of millions of views.

“When you have different influencers that you can send it directly to, who can watch it for themselves, decide if they like it, and then share it, that’s a pretty powerful tool,” Swann said. “That’s more powerful than the actual marketing of it on Meta or X.”

With the assistance of the tech firm Bright Data, the AP identified a core group of influencers who played a significant role in helping promote the series. Posts by those influencers were shared by at least 9,300 other unique X accounts that have 33 million total followers, according to an AP analysis of “Zelenskyy Unmasked” X data created by Syracuse University’s Institute for Democracy, Journalism and Citizenship.

Influencers promote videos

The spread of “Zelenskyy Unmasked” highlighted how such influencers are playing increasingly pivotal roles in politics, and many have become de facto campaign surrogates for Democratic and Republican candidates. Trump told a core group of conservative content c reators — who met in a “war room” during the last presidential debate — that they “are more important than I am.”

Some of those same influencers promoted the series, using identical or similar language to what Swann or Truth in Media promoted online.

Chaya Raichik, the founder of the far-right Libs of TikTok social media accounts, echoed Truth in Media’s promotion of the series, tweeting: “Where did $100 billion of our tax dollars that Congress sent to Ukraine go? Watch ‘Zelensky Unmasked’ to find out!” Raichik did not respond to requests for comment.

When Truth In Media promoted the third episode in the series, it tweeted, “The list of rich and powerful people profiting off the war in Ukraine includes President Biden and his son, but they’re far from the only ones.”

A few days later, C.J. Pearson, co-chair of the Republican National Committee’s Youth Advisory Council, wrote the exact same thing in a tweet about “Zelenskyy Unmasked.”

Others who touted the series were former Trump campaign attorney Jenna Ellis; Morgonn McMichael, a young creator linked to the right-leaning group Talking Points USA; and Andrew Giuliani, a former New York gubernatorial hopeful and the son of Trump confidant Rudy Giuliani. Ellis, McMichael and Giuliani did not respond to requests for comment from the AP.

Conservative influencer Xaviaer DuRousseau, another member of the RNC’s Youth Advisory Council, said he was paid to promote ”Zelenskyy Unmasked” on X through Urban Legend, an influencer marketing firm led by a former Trump administration staffer.

DuRousseau did not disclose how much he was paid, said he was unaware of Swann’s work for Russian state media until interviewed by the AP and said he would carefully consider any future collaborations.

“Is there maybe an ulterior motive to you being against Ukraine? Potentially,” he said. “But I would stress myself out so much if I researched every single person in this industry that thoroughly, to be honest.”

Swann said Truth in Media hired Urban Legend to help with marketing, but didn’t know the details of its work.

“We didn’t know whether or not they were talking to influencers,” Swann said in a statement.

Urban Legend declined to discuss its financial relationships with specific influencers. The company said in a statement that it had been unaware of Swann’s ties to RT and would no longer work with Truth in Media.

Among Swann’s most influential promoters was the former president’s son, Trump Jr., who did not respond to requests for comment from the AP.

In a tweet on April 5, Trump Jr. hailed the series as “explosive” for exposing “the truth behind the war in Ukraine!”

The social media platform’s users added a community note to his tweet that noted Swann’s ties to Russia and said his claims “are likely to be disinformation.”

The warning did not seem to deter Trump Jr. A few days later, he again took to X to praise Swann’s work — in identical language.