The Kremlin’s New Contractors
Inside Russia’s Market for Political Warfare
Over the past two decades,1 Western state security and intelligence services have increasingly purchased information products from commercial organisations. Private firms provide rapid access to large volumes of open-source data, offer specialised expertise in areas such as cybersecurity, regional analysis, and information monitoring, and enable governments to expand capacity without permanently enlarging their own bureaucracies.
Information products acquired by state services include, but are not limited to, OSINT reports (analyses of social media activity, news monitoring, and trend assessments); satellite imagery and geospatial data; cybersecurity analyses (reports on malware, hacking campaigns, and vulnerabilities); access to financial records, shipping data, flight tracking, and telecommunications metadata; and market and risk assessments.
However, while private firms produce and supply information products, it is state security and intelligence services that evaluate, integrate, and act upon them within their broader decision-making and operational frameworks. Exceptions include private military and security companies, which may combine intelligence gathering with operational activities, and cybersecurity firms, which not only detect and analyse threats but can also mitigate them without direct requests from state agencies.
Since the start of the Russian-Ukrainian war in 2014, a similar trend can be observed in Russia’s political warfare against the West. The field of Russia’s early political warfare could be divided into two large sub-fields. The first was dominated by state-sponsored media outlets such as RT and Sputnik, and also encompassed efforts by Russian state officials to buy influence among Western politicians; tactics of weaponising energy supplies through state-controlled companies; attempts by Russian intelligence and counter-intelligence services to plant specific narratives in Western media; and other top-down measures designed to exert malign influence in the West.
The second sub-field was characterised by bottom-up initiatives, in which various Russian stakeholders with limited or no access to Kremlin-controlled resources launched their own projects to contribute to political warfare against the West, guided by their interpretations of what kinds of malign influence operations the Putin regime might reward if successful. Such initiatives included grassroots media projects like NewsFront and the DONi News Agency; attempts by businessman Konstantin Malofeev to build alliances between Russia and the Western far right; efforts by Russian entrepreneurs such as Andrey Nazarov to normalise and legitimise the occupation of Ukrainian regions among Western companies; and other measures, some of which would indeed be rewarded by the Kremlin, while many would fail to produce any effect that could be positively evaluated by Moscow.
The emergence of the Internet Research Agency (IRA, also known as a “troll factory”) in 2013, owned by the late Russian businessman Yevgeny Prigozhin, introduced a new trend in pro-Kremlin malign influence both domestically and internationally. Until the rise of the Wagner Group following the outbreak of the Russian-Ukrainian war, Prigozhin’s main enterprise was Concord Management and Consulting, a holding company comprising catering businesses, construction firms, and media outlets. Owing to his links with the Kremlin – his companies provided catering services to the Russian government, earning him the nickname “Putin’s chef” – and his personal political ambitions, Prigozhin established the IRA as a traditional political technology firm.
Following Andrew Wilson’s studies on political technology, it can be understood as the professional engineering and manipulation of political systems and processes, designed to shape or fake public demand and serve partisan interests. Methods of political technology range from media manipulation and the use of so-called trolls or bots online, to manufacturing public consent through fake campaigns, staged controversies, and selective information intended to distort how people perceive politics. Since the 1990s, political technology has become omnipresent in post-Soviet Russia as the collapse of Soviet total state control left a weak democracy that powerful interests quickly filled with managed elections, fake parties, and media manipulation, creating the illusion of democratic politics while maintaining control behind the scenes.
Political technology is nevertheless not exclusive to Russia, and can be found in the West too. However, while, in Russia, political technology scripts and controls the entire political system, Western democracies exhibit its subtler, market-based equivalents, seen in practices such as spin, dark-money campaigning, astroturf movements, and data-driven propaganda, which similarly manipulate perception, blur the line between real and manufactured politics, and weaken genuine democratic participation.
Prigozhin’s IRA was neither a state-controlled organisation nor was it created with the sole purpose of offering services to the Kremlin. During its existence from 2013 to 2023, the IRA remained an independent organisation serving Prigozhin’s interests – either purely private ones, or coinciding with the interests of the Kremlin.
This overlap could be explained by Prigozhin’s place and role within the Putin regime. As a stakeholder fully integrated into the system, his interests were naturally aligned with those of the regime, but he was also prepared to offer the IRA’s services in support of the Kremlin’s domestic and international agenda in exchange for specific financial rewards to his Concord Management and Consulting. For example, domestically, the IRA would be used to praise Putin and attack the now late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, and, internationally, it would defend Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria and target Ukraine.
Prigozhin’s other projects functioned in a similar way. For example, in Africa, his Wagner Group initially operated as a private military contractor to secure his business interests, while the Association for Free Research and International Cooperation (AFRIC) provided support to African politicians and political forces considered useful to Prigozhin’s endeavours. At the same time, Prigozhin’s organisations operating in Africa directly contributed to enhancing Russia’s standing on the continent and advancing its broader foreign policy objectives.
In result, starting from 2014, Prigozhin’s Concord businesses “won” large Russian government food-service contracts with the military, schools, and other state institutions, generating revenues worth hundreds of billions of roubles and securing Prigozhin’s position as a key private contractor closely aligned with the Kremlin’s political and military structures.
In the early 2020s, yet another Russian political technology firm emerged on the market of Russian political warfare, Social Design Agency (SDA), run by Ilya Gambashidze. Before 2022, Gambashidze worked as a political technologist, managing election campaigns for regional politicians and serving as an adviser to Pyotr Tolstoy, vice chair of the State Duma (Russian “parliament”). His various companies received government contracts for public relations, media, and research projects. He also founded or co-owned firms involved in marketing, film production, and real estate, building a modest but diverse business network closely tied to Russia’s political establishment.
It was in 2022, or a little bit earlier, that the SDA, which was founded in 2017, became involved in propaganda operations outside of Russia, thus honing its political technology methods for political warfare objectives.
On 27 September 2022, EU DisinfoLab uncovered what it called “Operation Doppelganger”, a Russia-based influence campaign, which had been active since at least May 2022. The campaign cloned authentic European media outlets to spread fake articles, videos, and polls promoting Kremlin narratives, discrediting Ukraine, and sowing fear about the impact of sanctions on European citizens.
Most likely in coordination with EU DisinfoLab, Meta published the same day a report claiming that Facebook had taken down “a large network that originated in Russia and targeted primarily Germany, and also France, Italy, Ukraine and the United Kingdom with narratives focused on the war in Ukraine. The operation began in May of this year and centered around a sprawling network of over 60 websites carefully impersonating legitimate websites of news organizations in Europe, including Spiegel, The Guardian and Bild”. In December 2022, Meta published an update saying that the Russian network, which they had taken down, was linked to Structura National Technologies (SNT) and SDA.
In July 2023, the EU sanctioned both the SNT and SDA, as well as its founder Ilya Gambashidze, for being involved “in the Russian-led digital disinformation campaign [...] aiming at manipulating information and sharing disinformation in support of the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine”. In December 2024, the EU also sanctioned the SNT’s head Nikolai Tupikin, as well as Sofia Zakharova, who had been involved in the “Operation Doppelganger” and worked directly with Gambashidze and Tupikin. (The UK went much further than the EU as, by summer 2025, it had sanctioned 17 members of the SDA, targeting all levels of the organisation.)
Zakharova is key to understanding the peculiar nature of the SDA as a political technology firm involved in political warfare. Not only is she a project manager at the SDA – she is also a chief advisor to the Presidential Administration’s Directorate for the Development of Information and Communication Technology and Communication Infrastructure. Thus, she is a bridge between a state body and a private firm, implying that the SDA sells its political warfare products specifically to the Presidential Administration.
It remains unclear how exactly Gambashidze’s SDA began working with the Russian Presidential Administration and became involved in Russia’s anti-Western political warfare.
On the one hand, Pyotr Tolstoy, for whom Gambashidze served as an advisor, occasionally engaged with European politicians to advance Russian malign influence in the West. For instance, in December 2016, Tolstoy attended the signing of the cooperation and coordination agreement between the ruling “United Russia” party and Austria’s far-right Freedom Party. In February 2017, he was among the Russian officials who met with a delegation from the far-right “Alternative for Germany” during their visit to Moscow. Theoretically, Tolstoy could have introduced Gambashidze to officials within the Presidential Administration, suggesting that Gambashidze’s SDA was capable of providing political warfare services to Moscow.
On the other hand, Sergey Kiriyenko, First Deputy Head of the Presidential Administration and overseer of various Russian propaganda projects within its remit, was himself a political technologist – and, in a sense, remains one, as the Kremlin’s chief political technologist.
However, due to his high-profile position within the Putin system, Kiriyenko delegates much of his political technology work to other “social engineers”. As Andrey Pertsev, one of the leading experts on Kremlin politics, suggests, this is precisely how Gambashidze and his SDA could have been recruited by the Presidential Administration.
One of the officials to whom Kiriyenko entrusts specific projects is Alexander Kharichev, head of the Presidential Directorate for Monitoring and Analysis of Social Processes, who then passes assignments down to rank-and-file political technologists like Gambashidze. Kharichev most likely first engaged Gambashidze for propaganda projects targeting domestic Russian audiences and later, when Kiriyenko began assigning tasks related to foreign influence operations, brought Gambashidze’s SDA into this new field.
Analysis of the SDA’s internal meeting protocols indicates that Kharichev participated in several of the agency’s meetings devoted to information operations against Ukraine. In these documents, he is referred to as “ADKh” (АДХ), an acronym derived from his full Russian name, Alexander Dmitrievich Kharichev. Some protocols also contain a reference to Kiriyenko – “SVK” (СВК, Sergey Vladilenovich Kiriyenko), thus further confirming the operational relationship between the SDA and the Presidential Administration.
The SDA’s meeting protocols show that Kharichev represented the Presidential Administration during discussions of the agency’s operations specifically targeting Ukraine (referred to as the “Ukrainian counter-campaign”). It was, however, Sofia Zakharova who contributed to the planning and project management of both the Ukrainian and European “counter-campaigns”.
Several individuals registered with the Presidential Administration and reporting directly to Zakharova also appear to have been involved in the SDA’s operations: Vadim Glushchenko, Elizaveta Kirina, Margarita Klimanova, and Ekaterina Sorokova.
Zakharova herself serves as a chief adviser to the Presidential Directorate for the Development of Information and Communication Technologies and Communications Infrastructure, and therefore reports directly to the Directorate’s head, Tatyana Matveyeva. The latter is likely aware of the SDA’s activities and may even be involved in assigning tasks on behalf of the Presidential Administration.
Yet another link between the Presidential Administration and the SDA is Sergey Chernakov, a spin doctor and co-founder of the political technology firm “Bakster Group”, which has long collaborated with the Presidential Administration and specialises in conducting influence operations through TikTok.
The chart below schematically illustrates the relationship between the Presidential Administration and the SDA.
It is no coincidence that the SDA’s influence operations became particularly noticeable after 2022. Following the onset of Russia’s full-scale aggression against Ukraine in February 2022, Yevgeny Prigozhin – the original “king” of coordinated “troll and bot warfare” – became increasingly absorbed in the military effort through his Wagner Group. His Internet Research Agency (IRA) also took part in Russia’s information warfare against Ukraine, but over time Prigozhin appeared to become too preoccupied with the kinetic dimension of the conflict, and as a result, the operations of the IRA grew increasingly marginalised.
Prigozhin’s failed mutiny and his subsequent assassination – along with the top leadership of the Wagner Group – in the summer of 2023 effectively buried all his media and information projects, including the IRA. However, this did not mean that the Kremlin lost interest in outsourcing political warfare against Ukraine and the wider European region to private companies. On the contrary, the Presidential Administration’s demand for malign influence operations provided by commercial organisations increased, and the rise of the SDA in 2022-2023 was a direct consequence of Gambashidze’s ability to fill the vacuum left by the marginalisation and dissolution of Prigozhin’s information projects.
Yet it would not be entirely accurate to claim that the IRA and the SDA are equivalent. The history and eventual disappearance of the IRA show that this private company, although directly engaged in political warfare operations serving the Kremlin’s interests, appeared to enjoy far greater independence from the Presidential Administration in terms of planning and task coordination than the SDA does. The latter’s operations, while still conducted by a private company with independently recruited staff, display a much higher degree of coordination with the Presidential Administration, whose officials are directly involved in managing the SDA’s activities.
In fact, this dynamic reflects, to a certain degree, another development initially associated with Prigozhin. Following his assassination, the Wagner Group, which had grown too independent from the Russian state, was dissolved, and many of its members were subsequently incorporated into a new paramilitary structure, the Africa Corps, which is controlled and managed by the Russian government (Defence Ministry) rather than by a private individual.
A shorter version of this paper was presented at the conference “Enhancing Intelligence Competencies for a New World of Threats” that was organised by the International Association for Intelligence Education and took place at the University Rey Juan Carlos (Aranjuez-Madrid, Spain) on 9-11 September 2025. Check out my essay “From Valsaín to European Imperium” that is related to my September trip to Spain.
Really, when we write about the new version of the African part of the Wagner Group, we should spell it the good old-fashioned way. Afrika Korps. That would remind people of the kind of régime it's beholden to.