Simple soldier of disinformation or king of Russia’s trolls?

He emerged from anonymity in the West in the summer of 2023. Ilya Gambashidze’s name first appeared on the July 2023 Council of the European Union’s list of Russian nationals subjected to sanctions.

The list – which transliterated his last name from the original Cyrillic text as “Gambachidze” – noted that he was the “founder of Structura National Technologies and Social Design Agency” and was a “key actor” in Russia’s disinformation campaign targeting Ukraine and a number of West European countries.

By November, the US State Department was citing Gambashidze in a media note on the Kremlin’s efforts to covertly spread disinformation in Latin America.

The tactics cited in the US and EU documents detail the disinformation strategies employed in a vast operation dubbed Doppelganger by EU officials, which clones and creates fake websites impersonating government organisations and mainstream media.

The Social Design Agency (SDA) and Structura were described by the US State Department as “influence-for-hire firms” with “deep technical capability, experience in exploiting open information environments, and a history of proliferating disinformation and propaganda to further Russia’s foreign influence objectives”.  

The SDA fulfills a dual role, according to Coline Chavane, threat research analyst at Sekoia.io, a French cybersecurity company. “The SDA acted both as a coordinator of the various players involved in these disinformation campaigns, and as an operator, creating false content,” she explained.

Exploiting crises from Ukraine to Gaza war

In addition to being a prolific disinformer, Gambashidze is also an opportunistic one. Months after his name appeared on the European sanctions list, Gambashidze was busy trying to fan tensions between France’s Muslim and Jewish communities following the Gaza war launched by Israel in response to the October 7 Hamas attack.

The French foreign ministry has linked an anti-Semitic Star of David graffiti campaign in the Paris region to Operation Doppelganger. Viginum, the French government agency for defence against foreign digital influence, has accused the SDA of seeking to amplify the surge in anti-Semitism in France by using bots to proliferate Star of David posts on social networks.

The Kremlin has even cited Gambashidze as the chief organiser of a new anti-Western propaganda campaign in Ukraine, according to documents detailing a disinformation plan signed by the SDA boss and leaked to Ukrainian media.

In the leaked documents, Gambashidze is presented as one of the main shadow advisors to “The Other Ukraine”, a massive Kremlin propaganda operation targeting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

“One reason for talking about Gambashidze is he looks very central. His name keeps cropping up including with respect to Ukraine,” said Andrew Wilson, a professor of Ukrainian studies at University College London.

When contacted by FRANCE 24, the Council of the European Union declined to comment on the importance that Brussels attaches to this Russian propagandist, citing the “confidentiality of preparatory work” in deciding whether to sanction an individual or a company.

Gambashidze is not the only Russian involved in Operation Doppelganger cited by the EU. Individuals linked to the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence unit, have also been sanctioned.

Nor is he the sole orchestrator of the new disinformation campaign in Ukraine. He is also said to have worked with Sofiya Zakharova, an employee of the Russian Department of Communications and Information Technology, dubbed “the brain” of Operation Doppelganger.

In the footsteps of Yevgeny Prigozhin

With the SDA and Structura cropping up in multiple Western investigations and news reports on Russian disinformation, Anton Shekhovtsov, a Ukrainian political scientist and director of the Austrian-based Centre for Democratic Integrity notes that his omnipresence suggests that “Ilya Gambashidze and the SDA are gradually replacing Yevgeny Prigozhin and his troll factory”.

Before the Wagner militia chief’s death in August 2023, Prigozhin ran a network of “troll farms” that conducted disinformation operations covering vast ground, from the 2016 US presidential elections and the Brexit vote to online anti-West campaigns in Africa and Asia.

Prigozhin’s death in a plane crash just two months after he led a failed mutiny in Russia has left the disinformation throne vacant, according to Shekhovtsov. “There’s a place up for grabs and the competition is fierce. For now, Ilya Gambashidze appears to be well placed,” he noted.

But Gambashidze has not yet reached Prigozhin’s disinformation stature, and his vast domain could be divided between several inheritors. “We are currently witnessing a restructuring of the propaganda ecosystem in Russia. There isn’t necessarily one player at the heart of the system. It’s more like a network that’s being set up,” said Chavane.

In the past, when Prigozhin was the tutelary figure of the Kremlin’s cyber propaganda, “disinformation was organised in a pyramid structure, whereas we seem to be moving more towards a spider’s web structure with several players linked together in a network”, explained François Deruty, Sekoia’s chief operations officer.

A discreet Rasputin of disinformation

Gambashidze and Prigozhin have a difference in style as well as stature. The middle-aged Gambashidze, with his rather stern Russian technocrat demeanor, has none of the bluster and media showmanship of the late Wagner boss. While Prigozhin was known for his public boasts and rants, Gambashidze’s modus operandi appears to be discretion.

Very little is known about his private life, and the Internet provides little information about him – not even basic details such as his age. According to Russian investigative journalist Sergei Yezhov, Gambashidze is 46 years old.

There are no details about his birthplace, education and family life either. The only available piece of information is that he comes under the fiscal jurisdiction of a Moscow tax office. Photographs of Gambashidze are equally rare, and one of the most recent shows an austere-looking man with thinning hair and no other distinguishing features.

On the European list of sanctioned individuals, he is described as having “formerly worked as a counsellor … to Piotr Tolstoi”. It’s a noteworthy detail. Piotr Tolstoi, commonly spelt Pyotr Tolstoy, is none other than the great-grandson of Russian literary icon Leo Tolstoy. The younger Tolstoy is the deputy chairman of the Duma, Russia’s lower house of parliament. He was also deputy chairman of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe before Russia was expelled from the organisation – which is distinct from the EU – following the 2022 Ukraine invasion.

The lack of information, discretion and cited ties to prominent Russian politicians paints a picture of a mysterious master of manipulation, a latter-day Rasputin of disinformation.

‘Third-rate political technologist’

But images can also be deceptive. “If there’s so little information about him, it may be simply because he’s not important enough in Russia,” noted Andrey Pertsev, a journalist with the Latvia-based independent Russian website, Meduza, and an expert on Moscow’s corridors of power.

Gambashidze’s case illustrates how the same individual can be perceived by two very different worlds. In the West, he is considered a threat, with Europe going so far as to include him on its list of sanctioned individuals. In Russia, on the other hand, he is at best “a third-rate political technologist”, according to Pertsev, using a Russian term for the professional engineering of politics.

While the term “political technology” is largely unfamiliar in the West, it’s well known to Russian and Ukrainian audiences acquainted with the state’s manipulation of techniques to hijack and weaponise the political process.

It’s also the subject of Wilson’s latest book, “Political Technology: The Globalisation of Political Manipulation”, and Gambashidze appears to neatly fit the definition of a political technologist. “His career looks super typical. A lot of these political technologists are entrepreneurial. They sell services, they come up with ideas,” explained Wilson.

Internationally, political technologists are most often associated with Prigozhin, who sent dozens of them to African countries to help Moscow’s protégés win elections. But most Russian political technologists are focused on domestic politics and local parties, according to experts. “We mustn’t forget that their main bread and butter consists of handling local elections, working for governors or parties,” noted Shekhovtsov.

“That’s where the money is,” explained Pertsev. A political technologist’s influence is therefore measured above all by the prestige of the election he or she is supposed to help win.

Gambashidze is no exception. He has handled elections in Kalmykia, one of Russia’s 21 republics, located in the North Caucasus, as well as in the Tambov Oblast, one of the least populated regions of central Russia.

“His [SDA] team often made mistakes and he was repeatedly called back to Moscow to avoid an electoral setback,” explained Pertsev, who says he cannot understand how such an individual ended up in Brussels’ crosshairs.

On the messaging service Telegram, anonymous accounts make fun of the questionable effects of Gambashidze’s advice to Batu Khassikov, governor of Kalmykia in 2019. Not only did Gambashidze fail to get Khassikov re-elected, but the incumbent’s popularity rating actually plummeted at the time.

A pig release backfires

In August 2023, a Gambashidze associate thought it wise to organise a release of pigs tattooed with the Communist Party emblem in Khakassia, a republic in southern Siberia.

The aim of the pig release was to discredit the republic’s Communist governor, Valentin Konovalov. But the plan backfired: Gambashidze’s associate was accused by a section of the local population of “ridiculing Russian history” and he was fined for violating campaign rules.

But the SDA’s most prestigious, if short-lived, client appears to have been Leonid Slutsky, who took over as head of the ultranationalist Liberal Democratic Party (LDPR) in 2022 after the death of Russia’s notorious, far-right populist, Vladimir Zhirinovsky.

The new LDPR boss, aware of his lack of charisma, needed a political technologist. He ended up with Gambashidze. But he was quickly dismissed “without a moment’s hesitation, which means that Ilya Gambashidze is not considered very important in the Kremlin”, explained Pertsev.

How did such an individual come to be associated with large-scale disinformation operations on the international stage? “Sometimes it’s not competence that counts, but loyalty, and in Russia the quality of the network is central for a political technologist,” noted Wilson.

In Gambashidze’s case, the man who knows the man who knows President Vladimir Putin is Alexander Kharichev, a Kremlin adviser. But most important, according to Pertsev, is the fact that Gambashidze is “a fellow traveler” of Sergey Kiriyenko, a former Russian prime minister and currently the first deputy chief of staff in Putin’s administration.

In late December 2023, the Washington Post identified Kiriyenko as the top Russian official who tasked Kremlin political strategists with promoting political discord in France by amplifying messages to strengthen the French far-right. These included such talking points as the Ukraine war was plunging France into its deepest economic crisis ever or that it was depleting France of the weapons needed to defend itself.

“People come to Sergey Kiriyenko for electoral or other questions, and he delegates to Alexandre Kharitchev the task of finding the right political technologists,” explained Pertsev.

Cannon fodder in the information war

This is how Gambashidze came to be involved in international disinformation operations, explained Pertsev. “The main reason is that he’s cheap,” he explained, noting that in the Kremlin’s order of budgetary priorities, getting the right candidate to win local elections is more important than launching a disinformation campaign in Western Europe.

What’s more, “the best political scientists would probably not be interested”, added Pertsev.  For the big fish, working on disinformation campaigns targeting the West is not worth the risk since the domestic political market is more lucrative and they don’t risk ending up on international sanctions lists. In a way, Gambashidze is simply informational cannon fodder.

Yet the Kremlin’s great ideological war against the West – in which disinformation operations play an important role – has always been presented as a priority for Putin. It may seem incongruous to make a relatively minor figure like Gambashidze a central part of the disinformation schemes targeting the West.

But Gambashidze is not the only master on board. “As the defence of Russian values has been elevated to a matter of national security, Russian spies are inevitably involved in this type of operation,” noted Yevgeniy Golovchenko, a specialist in Russian disinformation at the University of Copenhagen.

Nor does the Kremlin require elaborate cyber-propaganda campaigns. “The most sophisticated aspect is the diversity of media and means used. For Operation Doppelganger, the SDA called on local media, journalists and YouTubers to amplify their messages. They also set up a vast network of fake sites, some of which were only visible in a specific country,” explained Chavane.

The fake news sites set up were rather crude clones of major news sites such as the French “20 minutes”, Germany’s “Der Spiegel” or British daily, “The Guardian”.

“The important thing is that these operations are inexpensive. One costs less than a missile over Ukraine. So even if they’re not perfectly executed by Ilya Gambashidze, the bet is that by stringing them together over a long period, they’ll end up working,” explained Golovchenko.

In Moscow’s informational warfare set-up, Gambashidze is a key cog in the wheel, in an approach reminiscent of Russia’s military strategy in Ukraine: sending in wave after wave of troops, in the hope that the enemy’s defences will collapse under the sheer numbers.

(This is a translation of the original in French.)