9:25 am: A Russian politician charged in the United States for “propaganda”
A Russian politician, Alexander Babakov, already targeted in the past by international sanctions, and two of his collaborators were indicted on Thursday by American justice for illegal operations of influence and propaganda hostile to Ukraine on the soil of the UNITED STATES.
Alexander Babakov, deputy to the Duma, and his two accomplices are suspected of having acted under cover of an NGO, the “Institute for Studies for International Integration”, to carry out their operations since 2012, before the war in Ukraine. Concretely, they are for example accused, in March 2017, of having tried to contact “at least one member of the American Congress” to offer him a free trip to Yalta, a part of Crimea controlled by Russia, for a conference. organized by pro-Russian leader Sergei Axionov, who was under US sanctions.
