UK Sanctions Six Russians Disinformation Outlets

UK media is report­ing that the UK gov­ern­ment has sanc­tioned six Rus­sians it said were spread­ing dis­in­for­ma­tion. Accord­ing to a Reuters report:

July 4, 2022 Britain said it would on Tues­day intro­duce new eco­nom­ic, trade and trans­port sanc­tions on Belarus over its sup­port for Rus­si­a’s inva­sion of Ukraine, and also sanc­tioned six Rus­sians it said were spread­ing dis­in­for­ma­tion. […] The six Rus­sians named by Britain’s finance min­istry on Mon­day were most­ly asso­ci­at­ed with the web­sites South­Front and News­Front, which Britain said had “spread dis­in­for­ma­tion relat­ing to Ukraine and pro­mot­ed the Gov­ern­ment of Rus­si­a’s false nar­ra­tive about the Russ­ian inva­sion of Ukraine”.  Britain also sanc­tioned Unit­ed World Inter­na­tion­al, which it called an “online news site which pro­motes pro-Russ­ian dis­in­for­ma­tion”.  Under the sanc­tions, British finan­cial insti­tu­tions must freeze imme­di­ate­ly any assets they hold on behalf of sanc­tioned indi­vid­u­als or com­pa­nies and report them to the government.

Read the rest here.

The UK Trea­sury released a finan­cial sanc­tions notice iden­ti­fy­ing the fol­low­ing six Russ­ian indi­vid­u­als and one media out­let as “con­trib­u­tors of dis­in­for­ma­tion in rela­tion to Ukraine and the Russ­ian inva­sion of Ukraine”:

• Aley­ona Ana­tolyev­na CHUGULEVA, South­Front volunteer
• Yuriy Sergeye­vich FEDIN, CEO NewsFront
• Darya Alek­san­drov­na DUGINA
• Yev­geniy Eduardovich GLOTOV, Deputy Direc­tor of Newsfront
• Aeli­ta Leonidov­na MAMAKOVA, Respon­si­ble for solic­it­ing finan­cial dona­tions from read­ers to South­Front and pub­lish­ing material
• Mikhail Ana­tolye­vich SINELIN, Cofounder of Newsfront
• UNITED WORLD INTERNATIONAL, described as “an online news site which pro­motes pro-Russ­ian disinformation.”

Con­cern­ing UNITED WORLD INTERNATIONAL, the sanc­tions added, “There are rea­son­able grounds to believe that this enti­ty is or has been involved sup­port­ing, or pro­mot­ing poli­cies or actions which desta­bilis­es Ukraine or under­mines or threat­ens the ter­ri­to­r­i­al integri­ty, sov­er­eign­ty or inde­pen­dence of Ukraine.”

The Glob­al Influ­ence Oper­a­tions Report (GIOR) report­ed in April 2021 that South­Front and News­front were among a group of Russ­ian dis­in­for­ma­tion out­lets des­ig­nat­ed by the US over dis­in­for­ma­tion efforts and inter­fer­ence in the pres­i­den­tial elec­tions. In March 2022, we report­ed that the US added sev­er­al indi­vid­u­als asso­ci­at­ed with those out­lets, includ­ing Unit­ed World Inter­na­tion­al, to its des­ig­nat­ed enti­ties and indi­vid­u­als list.

In March, an exclu­sive GIOR inves­ti­ga­tion revealed that Unit­ed World Inter­na­tion­al appears to be con­trolled by a pro-Russ­ian Turk­ish polit­i­cal par­ty, the Patri­ot­ic Par­ty (Turk­ish: Vatan Partisi).