The EU’s headquarters in Brussels. The documents raise questions about national security concerns just days before the European parliamentary elections.The EU’s headquarters in Brussels. The documents raise questions about national security concerns just days before the European parliamentary elections.
More than 40 Pravfond documents, obtained by the Danish public broadcaster DR from a European intelligence source and shared with a consortium of European journalists including the Guardian, showed that the organisation has had a number of documented former intelligence agents among its leadership.
In a 2020 national security report, the Estonian security services called Pravfond a “pseudo legal protection system” that “in reality is an influence operations fund”, and have said the FSB uses the groups to recruit collaborators abroad, including among supporters of the 2014 annexation of Crimea, many of whom had ties to the group.
The documents showed that Pravfond sponsored the legal defence of Krasikov, an alleged FSB agent who was given a life sentence for thein Berlin’s Tiergarten in 2019. The documents indicated that the lawyer Robert Unger received €60,000 in legal fees paid out by Pravfond’s budget in 2021 as approved by Udaltsov.
The documents also indicated that Pravfond had spent hundreds of thousands of euros to maintain several websites that purported to fight against “Russophobia” and the “defence of the Russian language” in Europe. It also has funnelled money to a number of fringe publications throughout Europe.