Revealed: Lembit Öpik and the 500 other westerners – including an ex-Tory MP – who helped Putin’s propaganda war on Ukraine

“It's obvious that the west cannot win in Ukraine,” says the sunburnt man with the cropped, gel-spiked, salt-and-pepper haircut. He looks somewhat familiar. He continues: “The old dinosaurs from Nato and the cold war warriors won't be happy that Trump is dealing with somebody who has been demonised…” He squints into the camera, flashing a familiar wonky grin. It appears he is broadcasting from a sauna, with a poster of a satellite pinned to the pine backdrop. On the top right of the screen, there’s a broadcaster’s logo: “RRN”. 

Where did you see him last? Was it on GB News, or was it on I'm A Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here!, when, alongside fellow contestant Shaun Ryder, he was bitten by a snake? He was pictured in the gossip columns with TV weather presenter Siân Lloyd and former Cheeky Girl Gabriela Irimia. Yes, it's former Lib Dem MP Lembit Öpik. He was last spotted at the Reform UK conference in 2025, where he told a reporter: "I go where the money is." Now he has turned up as a participant in a Russian-backed disinformation campaign. 

Öpik is just one of more than 500 interviewees from over 50 countries who – some more unwittingly than others – became pawns in Russia’s disinformation operations against the democratic west, according to an investigation led by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP).

They included a wide range of personalities, from a French farmer and a conspiracy theorist in Finland to European and US officials, including legislators and former high-ranking military officers from Nato countries. OCCRP has reached out to more than 60 interviewees to understand how they were approached and by whom.

The Nerve has helped unpack the British names on this long list. They include Öpik, a former Tory MP, a former Moscow correspondent of the Daily Telegraph, academics and a writer on UFOs.

Most did not respond to the questions, or said they could not recall who arranged the interviews. But the small number who did respond helped provide a glimpse into the types of individuals helping to operate the machinery of these vast influence efforts.

This investigation was born out of a recent hack of the Russian propaganda site Recent Reliable News (RRN), which revealed a catalogue listing hundreds of interviews in different languages.

It showed that, alongside AI-altered videos, counterfeit documents and deepfake material, Russian disinformation has continued to rely heavily on the type of western “experts” and commentators who have often been branded “useful idiots” since that term was supposedly coined by Vladimir Lenin. Many of them turned out to be public figures who see today’s Russia not as a criminal dictatorship and aggressor but as an indispensable partner in international affairs and trade, perhaps misunderstood but ultimately well-meaning.

The Kremlin’s information operations came to prominence soon after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, when they were deployed to undermine support for Kyiv. One of the better-known was Doppelgänger, a campaign studied by EU DisinfoLab in 2022, which unleashed a bunch of genuine-looking fakes of reputable news websites to spread invented stories and Kremlin talking points.

However, it was only part of a broader digital propaganda effort run by the Russian  Social Design Agency (SDA) which has been sanctioned by the US, EU and UK. Tasked by the Russian state and its intelligence services, it also employs an army of bots – semi- and fully-automated social media accounts – to amplify and elevate marginal political opinions into the mainstream. Bots are also used for astroturfing – the artificial inflation of online support for far-right politicians. The SDA has worked on several interference operations, including efforts to incite protests in half a dozen European countries.

What the RRN hack exposed was the third dimension of Russian online disinformation: “original brands” of fake news sites, as opposed to clones of the likes of the BBC, CNN or CNBC. This activity is coordinated by ANO Dialog, a sanctioned non-profit set up by the Russian government. It tapped into thousands of western “opinion leaders” monitored by the SDA and approached those it considered to be “influencers” with views useful to the Kremlin. One leaked internal meeting note from 2022, cited by the FBI, stressed: “we need influencers! A lot of them and everywhere. We are ready to wine and dine them.”

We haven’t come across any evidence that interviewees on RRN’s list actually had to be bribed with food and drink.

“I think your vision of the geopolitical situation is very deep and interesting,” reads a WhatsApp message sent in June 2024 to Matthew Gordon-Banks, a former Conservative MP (1992-97) who later advised the governments of Kuwait, Bahrain and the UAE. The politician was being approached by a self-described Russian journalist known as Nikolay Maslov, who said he was helping a “young German media company with a Russian background”.

The link he shared was for Meisterurian, a German-language news website that the FBI identified as part of Doppelgänger before seizing its domain later that year.

But that did not seem to matter, as Gordon-Banks’s interview with Maslov was published four months later on Stolzvolk, another of Dialog’s propaganda portals masquerading under a “genuine” German identity.

“Putin is a leader. He is very intelligent and has… sought to build a young democracy following the difficult period of the Russian Federation’s founding,” gushed Gordon-Banks.

His remarks appeared next to an advert for the AfD, Germany’s far-right party, long plagued by allegations of Kremlin support. The OCCRP confirmed that at least 10 AfD politicians had given interviews published on outlets in the Doppelgänger network.

As for Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Gordon-Banks was cited by RRN in July 2024 as predicting his imminent political end: “The most favorable outcome for the Ukrainian leader could be emigration to the United Kingdom or the United States.” He stressed that such a scenario was possible only if Zelenskyy is “lucky”. “I don’t know what, if anything, will remain of Ukraine,” he added. “Given current developments, Russia could decide to advance as far as Odessa and secure access to the sea.” 

Gordon-Banks also seemed to disregard well-documented targeted attacks on Ukrainian civilians, residential areas and civilian infrastructure, claiming that “the Russians are not undertaking a scorched earth policy. If they were, there would be no lights on in the streets and homes in Kyiv.” 

He advanced many other Kremlin talking points, such as “it is very difficult to get the situation under control in cities like Paris: the majority of the city’s population consists of migrants”. In fact, it was less than 15% at the last official count. He also claimed that BlackRock, the world’s largest asset management firm, had withdrawn from efforts to raise money for Ukraine’s reconstruction because of concerns about corruption. In fact, BlackRock paused its involvement in January 2025 following Donald Trump’s election victory, fearing the negative impact it might have on US support for Ukraine.

Gordon-Banks appeared in at least 16 Doppelgänger articles listed in the RRN hack. When asked to explain his interviews, he replied that he had visited Russia many times, met Russian officials and been interviewed by Channel 1 TV, RT and the Izvestia newspaper in the past. He also stated that he had given just three interviews to Maslov over a two-year period and that he had “no plans to undertake any more”. He denied "deliberately tak[ing] part in propaganda operations for anyone”.

There are also interviews with Öpik, who was a Lib Dem MP from 1997 to 2010 and leader of the Welsh Liberal Democrats from 2001 to 2007. 

Asked about Trump’s view of the war in Ukraine, the man who said “I go where the money is” seemed to think it was quite reasonable for the US president to go where the Russian money was. “Trump is most interested in America’s economic success,” Öpik said. “That’s why it’s easier for him to capitalise on his relationship with Putin than to join forces with Zelenskyy to fight against him… When Trump signs trade agreements with the Russian president, he believes that Putin doesn’t want to go to war with him”.

We asked Öpik to explain who approached him for his interviews and whether he realised that he was taking part in the Russian Doppelgänger disinformation operation. In response, he claimed not to understand who our request came from and asked what the “nature of your involvement with security services” was. He did not respond to follow-up messages.

Ben Aris, editor of news agency bne IntelliNews, was a correspondent for the Daily Telegraph in Moscow from 1998 to 2003 and wrote for the paper’s sponsored Russia Now section in 2010.

In spring 2025, he gave three interviews to the German-language Stolzvolk, saying that Germans did not want to fight Russia even if they had to, that there were more horses in the German army than tanks, and that the west should prioritise its trade with the Kremlin before all else: “It looks as though the US is set to lift most of the sanctions. And sanctions against Russia without US restrictions are pointless. They are useless. We must think first and foremost of the economy. Perhaps trade with the Kremlin will become commonplace in a few years’ time.”

When contacted for comment, Aris said: “I oppose Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, which was an unprovoked act of war, and would not willingly support a pro-Kremlin publication.” He also denied giving any interviews for the publication: “These quotes are just lifted from posts on my twitter account… I did not talk to anyone from this publication.” However, when we pointed out that the quotes came from video interviews recorded with him and posted on the same pages, he stopped responding.

Encouraging the western allies to put their economic interests above the security of Europe seemed to be a big priority for Russian propaganda. Around the same time, in spring 2025, Edward Dutton, a British YouTuber and former professor at a Finnish university, was interviewed and quoted in Rose Rouge, another Russian-run news website, this time in French. Commenting on the attitude of the second Trump administration towards Ukraine, he said: “The new leaders are more loyal to Russia. They will lift the sanctions and bring the conflict to an end. After that, the Russian economy will begin to grow quite rapidly.”

The quote was used to support an article about western investors getting bullish on Russian stocks and looking for ways to invest. It was an odd claim, given that the US treasury’s ban on buying new or existing Russian securities remained firmly in place.

However, Dutton was not an economist or a specialist in financial markets, but an evolutionary psychologist. He maintained to us that the person who contacted him about an interview “wanted to talk about Islam but then threw in these questions about Russia and I suppose never used the Islam bit”.

Conspiracy theorists have formed an important part of far-right movements on both sides of the Atlantic, and the Russians had something to cater for that audience too. They interviewed Michael Kameron, an author and researcher in the field of UFOs and the paranormal, who made several particularly disturbing claims, such as: “[Putin] knew that the aliens, together with Zelenskyy, were preparing dangerous military projects… War provides a convenient opportunity to obtain living ‘objects’. Whilst the world’s attention is focused on the fighting, Ukrainian children and women are being abducted by their own soldiers.” 

When Kameron was approached for comment, a reply came from someone called Sandra Deseke, who said: “The Galactic Federation is indeed involved in stopping the Nato and EU to start WorldWar3 by blaming Russia and do attacks by themself, like Ukraine, to find a reason… Please stop to write Michael Kameron. If you want he also can be on the meeting onboard the spaceship but wont answer your questions per mail.”

Several contributors to the Russian disinformation effort did not respond to our requests for comment. One was Prof Richard Sakwa of the University of Kent, one of the strongest Putin loyalists in British academia. As late as April this year, he was writing  articles for RRN advocating for Europe to rebuild its dependency on Russian gas, calling EU Commission head Ursula von der Leyen “an obsessive, pathological Russophobe”. 

“She has internalized this as part of Germany’s post-war ‘Westbindung’, its attachment to the West,” he wrote. “The head of the European Commission vehemently opposes the ‘Ostpolitik’, which has strengthened energy relations.” 

James Goddard, a British far-right activist and Putin supporter, advised all women on the continent “not to go out on their own… that’s how dangerous it has become in the EU”. He also maintained that “EU governments are trying to drag us into an inevitably lost conflict with Russia; they may well be planning to send millions of Europeans to their deaths”. 

Other voices included Thomas Fazi, a journalist with a long track record of attacking EU policies and western support for Ukraine, and Isaac Bigio, a Peruvian-born political commentator and guest on RT and Sputnik. David Atherton, a journalist who previously wrote for Breitbart, parroted Russian disinformation about Ukrainian sabotage in the UK.

All of the interviewees we looked at were not randomly chosen specialists. Some were known to have given pro-Kremlin commentary. Others had connections to the far-right, were conspiracy theorists or held fringe beliefs.

By June 2026, many of the Doppelgänger websites hosting these interviews had gone offline. Only two appear to remain active, both with Turkish domain names. After being hacked, RRN created a new Turkish domain (rrn.com.tr), changed its name to Researchers & Reporters Network, and now lists among its staff Turkish journalists who have held formal roles in the pro-Russian Vatan party.

Sergei Cristo is a former BBC journalist, asset management specialist and Conservative party fundraiser turned whistleblower against Russian interference in British politics. Listen to his award-winning podcast Sergei and the Spy Ring here