Ukraine’s Hit Lists

‘Countering Disinformation’ by Assassination: Lesson of the Fico Hit

by an EIR Investigative Team

[Print version of this article]

May 24—Whoever may have pulled the trigger, the May 15 assassination attempt on Slovakia’s Prime Minister Robert Fico is no domestic Slovak affair. The urgent strategic questions to be answered are: Who set up the hit? Who gave the order to proceed? Cui bono?

Any investigation into those decisive questions must take into consideration the fact that Ukraine’s Center for Countering Disinformation (CCD) had Robert Fico on its hit list of enemies to be silenced since at least April 2022. Fico, then an opposition figure, was publicly fingered by the infamous CCD as “an information terrorist” on April 9 of that year, accused of repeating Russian propaganda for “at least the last 8 years.” When the CCD first publicly issued a centralized hit list of so-called “Kremlin propagandists” in July 2022, Fico’s name was on the list.

Investigating the CCD connection opens the door to the broader apparatus where the answers to those urgent strategic questions lie. The CCD is the chief “information warfare” unit of the Ukrainian government, operating out of President Volodymyr Zelensky’s National Security and Defense Council (NSDC) and tasked with feeding the names of targets to the Ukrainian security apparatus and Ukraine’s “international partners.” It is staffed by fanatic neo-Nazis, proud defenders of Ukrainian nationalist hero and Hitler ally, Stepan Bandera (1909–1959). The CCD is no mere “Ukrainian” matter, however. Since it was established in March 2021, the CCD has been financed and directed by the U.S. and UK governments, NATO, and the European Union.

After the CCD issued its first master list of “enemies” in July 2022, with nearly half of the names included being either leaders of the Schiller Institute or having participated in one or another of its conferences, with Schiller Institute founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche right up front, EIR assembled a dossier, “Kiev’s ‘Info Terrorist’ List: ‘Global NATO’ Orders a Hit on Advocates of Peace,” documenting the international control over the CCD, and its intent. The dossier, released on September 2, 2022, demanded that “rapid, decisive international action” be taken, including by the U.S. Congress, to cut all international funding and backing for the CCD, in order to shut it and the apparatus behind it down, to protect the lives of those it was targeting, and restore freedom of thought and speech, including the promotion of peace, in the West.

That did not happen, and Slovakia’s Prime Minister Fico had to fight for his life in hospital, where he remains. Ukraine’s Center for Countering Disinformation was not only protected by Washington and London, but, as we detail below, NATO parties, working with the CCD, now insist that it is urgent to replicate in the rest of Europe—and then in the United States—the Ukrainian model of multiple public and private “anti-disinformation” agencies. These agencies would then act in a coordinated fashion to search out the opponents of the Anglo-American drive to crush Russia (and then China), to silence those opponents, one way or the other.

Other European heads of state and government are in the crosshairs of this operation. Right before Fico was first publicly targeted by the CCD, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán had been also fingered for the same “crime” of arguing for peace. The CCD reported on April 7, 2022, that its “experts” had met to “analyze” Orbán’s refusal to go along with the drive for war against Russia. The day prior to that report, on April 6, Orbán had been labeled “an accomplice of Russian war criminals” and added to the public database maintained in Ukraine by the avowedly neo-Nazi Myrotvorets (“Peacemaker”), to notify “Myrotvorets volunteers” and “law enforcement authorities and special services” where hits are needed. Since that time, the CCD has labeled Orbán as the “main weapon of the pro-Kremlin disinformation system for ‘shaking’ the EU,” and otherwise repeatedly slandered him.

But Orbán is only the most visible of the individuals and governments targeted. Investigators take note: “countering disinformation” is also the official, stated mission of the majority of the NGOs being financed by the State Department and other government agencies to promote color revolutions and regime-change in Slovakia, Hungary, Georgia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Slovenia, Moldova, and many other countries. That is the stated mission, as well, of the entire complex of Ukrainian “countering disinformation” hit squads deployed around the CCD, also financed by the U.S. and British governments.

Let there be no mistake: The NGO-led destabilization apparatus and the “countering disinformation” hit squads are a single operation financed by the U.S., the UK, and the European Union; each one creates the conditions for another one to then act. This point became shockingly clear with EU Enlargement Commissioner Olivér Várhelyi’s brazen admission on May 23 that he had “reminded” Georgian Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze in a phone call, that “the latest tragic event in Slovakia” was an example of what could happen in Georgia, should the Prime Minister insist on implementing its new legislation requiring such NGOs, which receive significant funding from foreign governments, to register as foreign agents.

The EU Commissioner had been forced out into the open after PM Kobakhidze reported to the press, “for the purpose of prevention,” that he had received a “horrific threat” from “an EU commissioner…. The parallel drawn with the attempted assassination of Robert Fico reminds us that in the form of the Global War Party, we are dealing with an extremely dangerous force that will do anything to bring chaos to Georgia,” Kobakhidze noted.

EIR insists: This “anti-disinformation” warfare operation inside Ukraine and the Anglo-American-EU-NATO war party apparatus that created it must be shut down, before others among the hundreds of European and American political, military, and civic leaders on those NATO-Ukrainian lists get the “Fico treatment.”

To further that effort, EIR provides the following roadmap as a guide for international investigators, updating its earlier, groundbreaking dossier on Global NATO’s so-called “anti-disinformation” apparatus in Ukraine. Two new elements are added: how the Ukrainian “countering disinformation” apparatus is intended to be replicated in every European country; and an in-depth profile of another key player in the West’s Ukrainian hit list apparatus, the “private” intelligence agency named Molfar-OSINT.

The Strategic Setting

It is no secret to anyone that Fico, along with Orbán, is viewed as an obstacle to the drive to militarize all Europe for a war to crush Russia. Fico told London’s The Telegraph while campaigning for the September 30, 2023 elections, that, “it is better to negotiate peace for 10 years and stop military operations, than to let the Ukrainians and Russians kill each other for another 10 years without results.” His party won the election on that basis, and in his inaugural speech as Prime Minister on Oct. 25, Fico announced that Slovakia would henceforth send only civilian and humanitarian aid to Ukraine; Slovakia’s military aid would end.

As Prime Minister, he urged others to look at where this policy was heading. He told Slovak radio broadcaster RTVS in January 2024, before meeting his Ukrainian counterpart, Denys Shmyhal, that he would tell Shmyhal that Slovakia would veto and block Ukraine’s NATO bid, “because that is exactly the basis of the Third World War and nothing else.”

It was Fico who first blew the whistle on French President Emmanuel Macron’s scandalous proposal to send NATO troops into Ukraine. A visibly distraught Fico revealed to the press before heading into the Feb. 26 special European Summit on Ukraine called by Macron in Paris, that a “restricted document,” circulated prior to that meeting, showed that “a number of NATO and EU member states are considering sending troops to Ukraine on a bilateral basis.” This is an idea which “sends shivers down your spine,” he exclaimed. He came out of that summit and denounced the “purely martial atmosphere” that had dominated the discussions, where “not a single word was said about any peace plan.”

Coverage of Fico’s near-assassination by the leading organs of the Anglo-American press has been virtually identical to the CCD’s slanders against him. The message in the British media, “conservative” and “liberal” alike, is that Fico got what he deserved for “polarizing” the country by opposing NATO’s war. None missed the opportunity to name Orbán in their next breath.

“How Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico Turned His Country into One of Russia’s Only Allies,” The Telegraph headlined a May 15 story even before Fico was out of danger. “The Slovakian prime minister who was shot on Wednesday, has presided over a shift from pro-Western values to growing sympathies with Russia since his election victory last September…. Since the invasion of Ukraine, he has grown much closer to Viktor Orbán, the increasingly Putin-friendly leader of Hungary,” it asserted. The Guardian wrote the same day: “The veteran politician, shot and wounded on Wednesday, is a fan of Viktor Orbán and has embraced ever more extreme positions to retain power.” The Guardian provocatively headlined its piece: “ ‘He Is Borrowing from Trump’: The Rise of Robert Fico, Slovakia’s Populist Leader.”

Anglo-American outlets generally sought to portray Fico and Orbán as “isolated” voices in an otherwise unified Europe. “With European parliament elections only weeks away … America hopes that new governments in Poland and the Czech Republic will bring Slovakia and Hungary back into the fold, to produce some kind of political unity at NATO’s 75th birthday summit in Washington in July,” The Times of London reported. The Times’ own view, however, is more cautious, pointing to the “obstructionism” seen in a number of countries to the full EU-NATO narrative. Georgia, Bulgaria, Serbia and Moldova are named as centers of concern, along with Slovakia and Hungary. The Times announced, that with Fico’s shooting, “the battle is on.”

Many security and intelligence experts are increasingly alarmed about where this is all heading. With the policy of double standards becoming so clear to the whole world, the legitimacy of the entire Western system is being called into doubt. And history has proven that once a system loses its legitimacy, that system quickly comes to an end.

What Is the CCD? To Whom Does It Answer?

EIR’s 2022 dossier, “Kiev’s ‘Info Terrorist’ List: ‘Global NATO’ Orders a Hit on Advocates of Peace,” documented that the CCD:

• is a wholly-owned creation of the governments of the United States and the United Kingdom, NATO, and the European Union bureaucracy, funded and closely advised by the U.S. State Department, British intelligence, and NATO in every step it takes;

• is tasked to produce hit lists of international personalities to be silenced—one way or the other. Targeted are those who are urging diplomacy to end the Ukraine-Russia conflict, rather than sending yet more weapons to Kiev; who question whether Ukraine can succeed in delivering a strategic defeat against Russia; or even just express concern that trying to do so will likely lead to global nuclear war and the end of the human species;

• is demanding that “information terrorism” be classified as an international “crime against humanity.” Information terrorism is defined as any deviation from the proposition that Russia must be destroyed. Those on its lists can then be charged, tried and sanctioned as “information terrorists” and “war criminals,” with all the penalties which thereby apply; and

• turns over the lists it compiles to Ukraine’s notorious Security Service (SBU), to Myrotvorets, and to Ukraine’s allies and partners, for counter-measures to be taken against those individuals—i.e., physical assaults and assassinations.

Myrotvorets was set up in 2014 by activists in the neo-Nazi 2014 Euromaidan coup, and is known for its role in fingering “enemies,” domestic and foreign, and then bragging when any of those “enemies” is “terminated,” including through car-bombings and assassinations on the street. It is the best-known of the multiple Ukrainian hit lists, because, unlike the CCD and the entire complex of overlapping hit lists fostered by the Anglo-American war party in Ukraine, there have been calls for investigations into its deadly operations from international institutions such as the UN Human Rights Commission (2017) and the German Foreign Ministry (2018), with the Documentation and Research Division of the French Office for the Protection of Refugees and Stateless Persons (OFPRA) issuing an 11-page report on the Myrotvorets operation in 2018.

The EIR 2022 dossier provides the necessary overview of the British and U.S. governments’ role in standing up, training, and directing the overall “cybersecurity” apparatus in Ukraine. Counter-disinformation operations and hit lists are supervised by that apparatus. While the UK’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) and intelligence operations are well known as the “brains” of such censorship operations (for example, the Integrity Initiative, the British Army’s 77th Brigade, et al.), it is the Americans, as usual, who provide the “muscle.” The leading public faces of NATO’s disinformation apparatus in Ukraine continue to be the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which reports to the State Department, and the Civilian Research and Development Foundation–Global (CRDF-Global), a U.S.-headquartered Anglo-American “quango” involved in international security and logistics. Molfar-OSINT, which we describe below, is also supported by both agencies. (See CRDF-Global’s summary of its central role in putting together Ukraine’s national cybersecurity strategy.)

Centralizing Hit Lists, Preparing for Expanded War

On Feb. 8, 2024, Ukraine’s Center for Countering Disinformation (CCD) announced that its new head, Lt. Andriy Kovalenko, had signed a Memorandum of Cooperation with Artem Starosiek, CEO of Molfar-OSINT, the open-source intelligence company dubbed “Ukraine’s biggest private intelligence agency” by its fans at London’s The Independent. The two agencies agreed “to join forces” out of recognition of the importance of state agencies coordinating with civil society “to strengthen the fight against disinformation,” the CCD reported. The same day, Molfar added 28 names to its public “Russian Propagandists” list, and including U.S. Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) among them. (See Appendix.)

On Feb. 9, VoxCheck, the “fact-checking” project of VoxUkraine, an outfit in USAID’s network of “countering-disinformation” operations, posted an article, with an accompanying flowchart, which purported to identify “a network of pro-Russian disinformation” practitioners formed by 26 “Western ‘experts’ ” whose activities are a “danger.” Each of the experts named in this so-called “network” had been fingered individually in a series of 26 videos produced in October and November 2023, in Ukrainian, by a joint project of VoxCheck and the CCD. Now this article, published Feb. 9 in English, asserted that the CCD/VoxCheck team had identified the alleged “connections” between those individuals, for the purpose of “restrain[ing]” their voices in the West, as well as in Ukraine.

The lists of personalities targeted by VoxCheck, Molfar-OSINT, and the CCD heavily overlap. Several (if not more) of those targeted in those three lists are also found on the Myrotvorets kill list. Schiller Institute founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche figures prominently on all of those lists, as do several other leaders of the Schiller Institute.

Note that the moves to centralize Ukraine’s various strike forces against foreign opponents of the war policy were taken in tandem with the stepped-up drive to militarize European society and governments preparatory to the larger war with Russia which NATO treats as inevitable. This is the same timeframe in which France’s Emmanuel Macron sent “shivers down the spine” of Slovakia’s saner Fico with his proposal that NATO countries send troops into Ukraine “bilaterally.”

In that same timeframe, the First Kyiv International Cyber Resilience Forum 2024 was convened in Ukraine on Feb. 7–8, 2024, bringing together “the whole gang.” Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry reported that the Forum was co-initiated by Ukraine’s National Coordination Centre for Cybersecurity (NCCC, also operating under the NSDC) and the ubiquitous CRDF-Global. It was co-organized by Ukraine’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, its Security Service (SBU) and its Defense and Digital Transformation Ministries; and is “supported by”—i.e., financed by—the U.S. Department of State.

Top international speakers included, among others:

• NATO Cooperative Cyber Defense Center of Excellence (CCDCOE) Director, Mart Noorma;

• U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security (CISA) Director Jen Easterly and her sidekick, State Department “Cyber Ambassador” Nathaniel Fick;

• European External Action Service Director for Security and Defense Policy, Joanneke Balfoort; and

• European Union Agency for Cybersecurity (ENISA) Executive Director, Juhan Lepassaar.

On the Forum’s agenda was consolidating international efforts on the cyberwarfare front by extending NATO’s cybersecurity pilot project in Ukraine to the rest of Europe and, after that, elsewhere internationally. The invitation announced that “Ukraine’s unique experience in the first world cyber war,” and, “countering disinformation by means of OSINT tools,” were among the leading topics. Molfar’s Starosiek was a speaker on a panel on the latter subject. A CCD official spoke on another panel.

NATO’s Noorma asserted, in the introduction to a report prepared for the Forum (“A Decade in the Trenches of Cyberwarfare”), that the world is “at a crucial point in history,” and “Ukraine’s unique cyber conflict experience offers invaluable insights for global defense strategies…. This forum, a hub for collaboration, has been significantly shaped by [NATO’s] CCDCOE contributions.”

Scarcely concealed plans for hits were discussed. Illia Vitiuk, who heads the SBU Cyber Security Department, spoke aggressively of how “intelligence collected by cyber methods helps the SBU conduct unique special operations,” such as “elimination of war criminals.” Serhiy Demediuk, Deputy Secretary of the National Security and Defense Council, insisted that a “new international order of confrontation and cyber resistance” requires international “joint response groups” to enforce “cyber protection” worldwide.

Case Study: Germany

A CCD deployment into Germany in early April exemplifies the operations underway. On April 8, 2024, the CCD published a new “analytic report” of a “large-scale Russian disinformation campaign” it alleged to be ongoing in Germany. As EIR reported at the time, the CCD report featured the claim that they had “established that the Schiller Institute, under the leadership of Helga Zepp-LaRouche, is a platform for promoting narratives consonant with Russian propaganda,” with her “narratives” supporting “the so-called peace camp.” The CCD cited equally specious grounds for labeling the national ZDF public TV channel, the Berliner Zeitung daily, and Anti-Spiegel, along with journalists and bloggers Thomas Röper, Kim Dotcom, Alina Lipp, and Armin Körper, as allegedly also serving Russian purposes.

The very next day (!), on April 9–10, the CCD, with the support of the European Union Advisory Mission in Ukraine, sent a team to the Federal Republic of Germany to present its report to representatives of government institutions “responsible for media literacy and ‘countering disinformation.’ ” They met with representatives of the German Ministry of the Interior, as well as the Federal Agency for Civil Education, where the issues of further joint work on “countering disinformation” about Ukraine in the German information space were discussed. “International standards for monitoring and analyzing information and legislative support for countering disinformation and harmful information influence were discussed.”

Agreements were reached to hold consultations at the operational level, “which will help improve the speed of response to current threats and develop joint mechanisms of resilience to hostile information influence.” All of this was reported by the CCD itself on April 17, 2024, on its website, under “Events.”

NATO Pushes Ukraine Hit Lists as Model for Europe

Such CCD deployments are precisely the kind of action being pushed by NATO. In January 2024, the European Centre of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats (Hybrid COE for short) published a Special Report titled “How Ukraine fights Russian disinformation: Beehive vs mammoth.” Prepared jointly by Jakub Kalenský, Hybrid COE’s Deputy Director of the Community of Interest on Hybrid Influence [sic], and Roman Osadchuk from the U.S.-based Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab), “Beehive” was written to “inspire” European and U.S. “counter-disinformation professionals” to study what Ukraine is doing and replicate it.

Hybrid COE is not the “autonomous” organization it purports to be. Headquartered in Riga, Latvia, it is one of 29 “NATO-accredited Centers of Excellence” which “maintain functional relationships with NATO’s Strategic Commands … [and] also assist in implementing NATO’s Warfighting Capstone Concept, through actions that support the Warfare Development Agenda.”

Hybrid COE, in other words, is an arm of NATO’s war machine.

The January report presents “ten lessons that the West could learn from the unique Ukrainian experience.” Two dozen Ukrainian “information warriors,” in government or from civil society, were interviewed (most names supplied in the report). “Multiple interviews” were conducted with the CCD and the Security Service of Ukraine, along with the likes of the notorious neo-Nazi, former Interior Affairs Ministry advisor and Deputy Minister Anton Herashchenko, known for his ties to Myrotvorets’s kill list.

The first and foremost lesson to be learned from Ukraine, “Beehive” reports, is that everybody and every communication must be monitored, by as many agencies as possible, and all “disinformation” detected must be met with a response. The report argues for “exhaustive monitoring … including in peacetime,” and warns that Western professionals have failed to understand what Ukraine does, “that it is necessary to act rather than hesitate.”

Lesson 6 is key. It is bluntly titled: “Punitive measures are a must.”

“Countering disinformation” is not just about “naming and shaming” those who argue for a different policy. Ukraine shows that, “efforts to punish and deter their activities” are likely “the most important” work in countering disinformation. “Every single interviewee,” government and civilian alike, strongly backed the decision by successive Ukrainian governments since the 2014 coup to ban more and more TV channels, websites, social media channels, and direct messaging platform channels, “including those that did not directly belong to the Russian state but still spread the same messages.” The CCD’s compilation of a “list of international influencers who amplify Russian propaganda” is cited.

Lesson 10 is that, “the West should do what Ukraine has been doing for the past few years.” Aggressive action is needed in the West against Russian disinformation and propaganda channels, and against “the witting or unwitting agents who are helping them to spread it in their own countries.”

Ukrainian “information warriors” want to see the creation of an “Information Ramstein,” modeled on the Ukraine Defense Contact Group, known as the Ramstein group, to support Ukraine “in the information space.” (This idea is reported to have already been discussed with Brussels.) They assert that investigations of “Russian influence agents” are needed; it is necessary “to de-platform … all those who use or try to use disinformation as a weapon.” Another action they propose is to establish “a special criminal tribunal” for “top Russian propagandists.”

The report sums up the message for Europe and the U.S.: The time has come to do as Ukraine has done: dedicate “considerable resources” over a sustained period of time, to shutting down all channels of “malign influence,” and to prepare to continue doing so long after any war with Russia might end. The sooner the better.

Appendix

I. What Is Molfar-OSINT?
A Summary Profile

Molfar-OSINT is an Anglo-American “open-source intelligence” (OSINT) agency which maintains private and public hit lists against prominent people in the West who call for a peaceful resolution of the Ukraine-Russia conflict, or who oppose NATO’s promotion of that conflict. It operates out of Ukraine, but has its corporate headquarters in London. More than the other hit list operations mentioned above, Molfar-OSINT is distinguished by being deeply embedded in the Western Establishment.

Its list of foreign “partners” includes:

• The Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), the British monarchy’s leading defense thinktank;

• USAID and CRDF-Global, with USAID hosting seminars with Molfar and CRDF-Global paying for Molfar to instruct Ukraine’s public servants and its Security Service (SBU) in OSINT methods; and

• The European Endowment for Democracy (EED), an organization named after, and inspired by, the infamous U.S. National Endowment for Democracy, and financed by the European Commission and EU member states. It was founded in 2013 on the initiative of the scandalously Anglophile Foreign Minister of Poland Radoslaw Sikorski.

Molfar’s website lists the crème de la crème of Western Establishment media as its clients and recipients of its intelligence reports: The Times of London, Reuters, The Economist, Financial Times, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, PBS, CNN, Foreign Policy, Newsweek, Forbes, Deutsche Welle, Canada’s Globe and Mail, and Israel’s business daily Globes, to name a few.

The first media outlet to publish Molfar’s war investigations as a reliable, credible source on the Ukraine-Russia war was The Times of London, Molfar CEO Starosiek told Ukraine’s Detector Media. According to Molfar, the “operational investigation” referred to by The Times in its March 22, 2022 article was, in fact, commissioned by thetimes.co.uk, “one of the world’s most respected publications.” (The Times had turned to Molfar to cook up a refutation of an article by American investigative journalist Max Blumenthal which demolished a critical piece of Ukrainian war propaganda.)

European media magazine The Fix reported that Molfar has “a base of around 1,000 journalists from all around the world who published work about Ukraine using information sent by the agency. Most journalists use the agency’s reports as a source for their own material. However, there are also joint investigations with media organizations.” As an example: In a Jan. 16, 2024 story citing a Molfar-OSINT report, Newsweek explained that “Molfar, which closely analyzes the war in Ukraine, provides regular in-depth reports on the war”—and satellite photos, too.

II. Targeting Individuals and Military Sites

Molfar’s site reveals that, like the CCD, its team is part of the hardcore Banderite, neo-Nazi apparatus in Ukraine. This is seen most clearly in two postings defending the openly neo-Nazi Azov Brigade as being “highly motivated patriots” from the moment of its founding as the Azov Battalion in 2014 and subsequent incorporation into Ukraine’s Ministry of Internal Affairs that same year. One, posted in August 2022, brazenly explains “Why Azov are heroes, not terrorists”; and a similar piece labeling anyone who points out Azov’s proud self-identification as neo-Nazis, as a “Russian propagandist.” (See EIR’s British Imperial Project in Ukraine: Violent Coup, Fascist Axioms for more background.)

Molfar does not hide that its investigators have used the Myrotvorets kill list as the starting point for some of its investigations (e.g., this Kherson “traitors” story).

Since February 2022, Molfar military investigations for the war have become a major focus of its work. By its own account, Molfar is assigned investigations by Ukrainian state and military agencies, as well as Western media and intelligence agencies. Foreign Policy’s March 2, 2023 profile of the “pioneer” role played by Molfar in providing military targets, reports that Molfar “claims to provide an average of 15 actionable intelligence reports to Ukrainian intelligence per month.” That article, like others in its Western media network, plays up Molfar as excelling in developing precise targets for the Ukrainian military to hit inside Russia and its new territories.

In parallel, Molfar develops hit lists against alleged “Enemies of Ukraine.” It compiles personal information on its targets and their families, where they live, with whom they associate, etc., only some of which is made public.

As of this date, it has made 11 such lists public. They range from lists of personnel from Russian agencies (FSB, GRU, etc.); to those of Russian pilots who fly out of Russia’s “Engels-2” air base near Saratov, home to Russian strategic bombers; to a “Registry of Individuals Involved in the Production of Russia’s ‘Shakhed’ and ‘Lancet’ Drones”; to businesses around the world which they claim are “probably” serving as intermediaries in trading which violates sanctions against Russia.

Another Molfar hit list of Enemies of Ukraine is a list of high-ranking clerics of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. Although it calls for the banning of that church, a picture of a brutalized cleric of that church posted to its X account suggests that other methods should also be applied. We give “people hope for revenge,” Molfar CEO Starosiek told Detector Media. Ukrainians see that criminals “will pay for everything in the near future,” he bragged.

III. ‘Foreign Propagandists’

One of its 11 lists comprises alleged “Foreign Propagandists of the Russian Federation’s Terrorist Regime.” As of this date, Molfar’s public “Register of Russian Foreign Propagandists” names 153 political leaders, journalists, businesspeople, and analysts, ranging from Presidents Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil and Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa, to Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orbán; U.S. Senator Rand Paul and U.S. Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY); German citizen, Schiller Institute founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche; former Slovak Prime Minister Jan Carnogursky; American journalists Tucker Carlson, Jimmy Dore, and Max Blumenthal; former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter, and 27-year CIA veteran analyst Ray McGovern; among many others. Sixty-three of those named were added just in 2024, in separate batches. (See full list.)

“Our task,” Molfar states, “is to use evidence and draw the maximum attention of state authorities to the activities of these persons.” This list is available in English, for circulation “to the competent authorities” of the EU, the United States, Canada, or other Western countries where the majority of the “Russian foreign propagandists” are from. Molfar objects that “the international community has not responded to their [the alleged propagandists’] activity properly,” which requires, Molfar writes, their “removal from public positions, the introduction of sanctions, and investigations into personal involvement in crimes.”

Molfar feeds smears of its targets to its extensive media network as well. UK’s Morning Star daily exposed, in a July 28, 2022 story, that its reporter had received a press release, sent out as a “mass e-mail,” offering purported background on Max Blumenthal’s alleged financing by the Kremlin.

Molfar’s Telegram posting on Feb. 9, 2024, in response to Tucker Carlson’s interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin, showed its more sinister aim: It released links to pictures and personal information about Tucker Carlson’s children.

New targets are developed. On February 23, 2024, Molfar posted a broadside against Rafal Mekler, a leader of the Polish trucker blockade, at the time against imports of Ukrainian wheat, and the Konfederacja Party, of which he is a member. The piece happily reported that “Rafal Mekler and numerous [Konfederacja] party members have already been added to the Myrotvorets list.” Meklar and the Konfederacja Party are painted as “hatemongers” for daring to remind the world of the massacre of Poles carried out in Volhynia by the Ukrainian self-proclaimed “nationalists” serving in Hitler’s Waffen SS.

Molfar did not stop there. The names of Meklar’s wife and children, along with his bio and address were not only published on the site, but Molfar sent that profile to Polish media, accusing him of being a Russian agent. Meklar came back fighting, telling Poland’s TV MN, “The political activity that I or other politicians conduct is my exclusive domain. Including the family as an element of pressure is a terrorist move.… Providing full details of my children, including which schools they go to, detailing what awards they received from whom, is pure barbarism.”