Despite EU sanctions blocking Russian state media since 2022, an expanding network of clone websites and Telegram channels continues to deliver Kremlin narratives to audiences across Europe.
When the European Union banned RT and Sputnik from broadcasting across the bloc in March 2022, just days after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the message was clear: Kremlin propaganda would no longer have a platform in Europe. Nearly four years later, that promise has quietly unraveled.
The scale of Russia’s efforts to dodge EU media sanctions has drawn growing attention from researchers and journalists across Europe. As Mezha Media reported, Russian state media outlets have built an elaborate system of mirror websites and duplicate Telegram channels to circumvent EU restrictions. Using open-source web traffic analytics and Telegram monitoring tools, Insight News Media mapped the full scale of this operation across Europe and found that sanctioned Russian media is not just surviving. It is thriving.
The numbers are striking. Across more than 37 active clone domains and over a dozen Telegram channels, RT and Sputnik content reaches millions of European readers every month. Germany alone accounts for over 5.5 million visits to RT clone websites in a three-month period. Spain, Sweden, France, Italy, Belgium, and the Netherlands all show significant traffic to domains that were supposed to be blocked. And on Telegram, where the EU’s enforcement has been even weaker, RT’s Russian-language channel has over 1 million subscribers, its main English-language channel counts nearly 194,000, and clone channels are multiplying faster than regulators can track them.
This is not a story about a few rogue websites slipping through the cracks. It is a story about a systematic, state-backed infrastructure designed to keep Russian disinformation flowing into the heart of Europe.
To understand how RT evades sanctions, you need to understand mirror websites. A mirror is an exact copy of a website hosted under a different web address. When European internet providers block rt.com, a user can simply visit freedert.online or rtde.me and find the same content, the same layout, the same articles. For all practical purposes, it is RT, just with a different URL.
The scale of the cloning operation is staggering. An earlier Insight News Media investigation identified at least 37 domains linked to RT, spanning multiple languages and regions. These include clusters of German-language clones (freedert.online, dert.online, rtde.live, rtnewsde.online, rtde.me, rtde.xyz, rtde.tech, and many more), Spanish-language mirrors (actualidad-rt.com, esrt.site, esrt.space, esrt.press, es-rt.com, esrt.online), French-language domains (rtenfrance.tv, rtenafrique.tv), and English-language alternatives like rurtnews.com and swentr.site. RT also operates dedicated domains for Arabic (rtarabic.com), Brazilian (rtbrasil.com), and Balkan (rt.rs) audiences. Each of these domains hosts content that mirrors RT’s primary platform, effectively multiplying the reach of Kremlin narratives across the continent.
Our traffic analysis reveals just how effective this strategy is.
Germany is the primary battlefield for RT’s clone operations in Europe. Despite German internet service providers being the most compliant in the EU when it comes to enforcing sanctions, RT maintains a massive network of German-language mirror domains that collectively draw millions of visits.
The largest is freedert.online, which attracted 2.35 million visits between November 2025 and January 2026, with 99.5% of that traffic coming from Germany. According to a study by the Alliance for Securing Democracy, RT Deutsch’s official X account linked to this single domain more than 3,000 times in 2024, openly directing audiences to the clone.
But freedert.online is far from alone. The clone dert.online pulled in over 1 million visits, entirely from Germany. Then rtde.live with 510,000 visits (99% Germany), rtnewsde.online with 482,000, rtde.me with 343,000 (95% Germany), and rtde.xyz with 326,000 (92% Germany, with the rest from Austria and Spain). The list goes on: rtde.tech (147,000), test.rtde.tech (80,000), rtde.team (64,000), rtnewsde.pro (60,000), dert.site (59,000), rtde.site (56,000), rtde.website (55,000), rtnewsde.com (49,000), rtde.world (39,000), gegenzensur.rtde.world (20,000), fromrussiawithlove.rtde.world (18,000), rtde.life (12,000), and dert.tech (11,000).
Add it all up and German RT clones generated over 5.5 million visits in just three months. Almost all of this traffic comes from inside Germany.
What makes this particularly striking is that German ISPs are actually the best in Europe at blocking sanctioned domains. According to a comprehensive investigation by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue published in August 2025, German ISPs blocked between 43 and 57 percent of sanctioned domains, the highest rate of any country tested. Yet millions of visits still get through because RT registers new domains faster than authorities can block them.
The ISD investigation also revealed a telling detail about one German ISP: it blocked the main domain rtde.world but left its subdomains gegenzensur.rtde.world and fromrussiawithlove.rtde.world fully accessible. The names translate roughly to “against censorship” and “from Russia with love,” and they function as open doors into content that is supposed to be sealed off.
Germany gets most of the attention when researchers discuss Russian disinformation in Europe, but our data revealed something that deserves far more scrutiny: Spain has become a major target for RT’s clone network.
The clone domain actualidad-rt.com attracted 1.47 million visits over three months, and 91.5% of that traffic came from Spain. This is not a global RT portal that happens to have some Spanish readers. This is a website built specifically to reach audiences inside an EU member state, and it is succeeding on a massive scale.
The Spanish-language clone network extends further. The domain esrt.site drew 1.33 million visits, esrt.space had 1.07 million, and esrt.press reached 293,000. While much of the traffic to these domains comes from Latin America, significant shares reach European audiences: esrt.space gets nearly 14% of its traffic from Spain, esrt.press about 10%, and esrt.website receives almost 6% from France. The smaller clone esrt.online attracted 90,000 visits with 7% from France, and annurtv.com, a lesser-known RT-linked domain, had 8,700 visits with 59% from Spain.
Spain’s vulnerability makes strategic sense for Russian information operations. As a major EU member with significant political influence, shaping public opinion there serves Moscow’s broader goal of fracturing European unity on issues like support for Ukraine and EU sanctions policy. Research by Insight News Media has documented how RT specifically designs its Spanish-language clones to appeal to local audiences, presenting Kremlin narratives in culturally relevant framing.
French-language RT operations are smaller but still present. The domain fra.mobileapiru.com, a pre-existing site that was updated after sanctions, received 57,000 visits with a curious geographic split: 44% from Spain, 33% from Belgium, and 23% from France. The dedicated French clone rtenfrance.tv had about 12,000 visits, all from France. Some Spanish-language clones also bleed into francophone audiences, with esrt.website drawing about 6% of its traffic from France and esrt.online about 7%.
The Centre for Democracy and Rule of Law found that RT France remained accessible to European audiences through alternative domains and mirror sites even after sanctions. Their research also documented how the French edition of Sputnik, after being blocked, simply renamed its Telegram channel to “Fil à Retordre” (roughly meaning “a hard time”) to avoid detection before eventually relaunching as Sputnik Afrique, targeting French speakers in Africa and by extension the francophone diaspora in Europe.
Sweden and Norway emerged as surprising hotspots in our data. The English-language clone swentr.site (which is “RT News” spelled backwards) drew 643,000 visits, with Sweden accounting for 41% of that traffic. Even more significantly, sputnikglobe.com, Sputnik’s main rebranded domain with 3.47 million total visits, gets 12.75% of its traffic from Sweden and 7.3% from Norway. That translates to roughly 442,000 visits from Sweden and 253,000 from Norway over three months. For countries with relatively small populations, these are not insignificant numbers.
If mirror websites are the front door of Russia’s sanctions evasion, Telegram is the back door. And for a long time, it was wide open.
As EUvsDisinfo documented, the migration of Russian state media to Telegram began well before the 2022 sanctions. RT and Sputnik had been building their Telegram presence since 2021, when content moderation on mainstream platforms like YouTube and Facebook started tightening. When EU sanctions hit, Telegram became the primary “rescue platform” for Russian propaganda, a place where blocked content could flow freely to European audiences.
The scale of the official Telegram operation is substantial. RT’s Russian-language channel (@rt_russian) has approximately 1 million subscribers. The main English-language channel, RT News (@rtnews), has 193,590 subscribers. Sputnik International (@SputnikInt) has 39,344 subscribers and is growing steadily. RT Balkan (@rtbalkan) has 17,242 subscribers, along with a Russian-language Balkan version (@rtbalkan_ru) with 7,718. Sputnik Africa (@sputnik_africa) has 53,579 subscribers and is expanding.
In December 2024, Telegram began restricting access to some sanctioned channels for EU users. But as research by the Centre for Democracy and Rule of Law revealed, the enforcement has been riddled with holes.
Of 27 Russian propaganda resources currently under EU sanctions, only 16 have at least one Telegram channel blocked. Nine sanctioned resources remain fully accessible without any restrictions whatsoever.
And then there are the clones. Our research identified multiple duplicate channels that reproduce RT and Sputnik content for European audiences. The channel sweN TR (@swentr) has 9,018 subscribers and is mentioned by 88 other channels, creating a web of amplification. RT en español sin censura (@RTnoticias_uc1), which translates to “RT in Spanish uncensored,” has 1,249 subscribers but is growing rapidly, adding 93 subscribers per month, and it publishes an astonishing 118 posts per day. The channel was created in August 2024 and explicitly describes itself as an “uncensored mirror.”
Other clone channels include RT & Sputnik (@rtnews_int) with 2,796 subscribers, RT Newsroom (@rtdeutsch) with 980, and Rt France (@rt_france), which describes itself as a “mirror by a volunteer” and has 106 subscribers. There are also automated forwarding channels like RT News UNCENSORED (@RTnews_unc3) that automatically repost everything from the official @rtnews channel in real time.
The Alliance for Securing Democracy found that Telegram had more accounts replicating RT and Sputnik content than any other social media platform. Some channels even featured links that automatically subscribe users to alternative RT channels, eliminating the need to search for them manually.
None of this is accidental. The infrastructure behind RT’s clone network points directly to the Russian state.
According to EDMO’s investigation, domain registration records show that German mirror sites are hosted on servers belonging to two Russian companies: ANO TV-Novosti, which is RT’s legal entity founded by the Russian state news agency RIA Novosti, and PJSC Rostelecom, Russia’s largest telecommunications provider, majority-owned by the Russian state. The German mirror domains were registered on March 5 and April 6, 2022, immediately after EU sanctions took effect, a clear indication they were created specifically to circumvent the ban.
The Diderot Committee identified 52 websites operated by ANO TV Novosti. Correctiv, a German investigative outlet, found over 20 RT DE mirror domains freely accessible from Germany as of early 2026. The ISD mapped 58 domains across 26 sanctioned entities. And the operation keeps expanding: ISD found that 13 German mirror domains consistently available across all major German ISPs were registered between July 2023 and September 2024, meaning new clones are being created more than two years after the original sanctions.
RT Editor-in-Chief Margarita Simonyan has publicly declared: “We spit on your sanctions,” as Bloomberg reported. On Telegram, RT Deutsch mocked EU enforcement efforts using a Soviet cartoon meme showing a wolf (labeled “censorship”) hopelessly chasing a hare (labeled “mirror pages”), according to the Alliance for Securing Democracy.
The EU’s sanctions against Russian state media were a necessary response to what the European Commission called a “significant and direct threat to the order and security of the EU.” But implementation has been left largely to individual member states and internet service providers, and the results have been uneven at best.
The ISD’s six-country audit found that fewer than 25% of attempts to access sanctioned domains were effectively blocked across the 18 ISPs tested. Slovakia performed the worst, with zero domains blocked after its legal mandate to enforce restrictions expired in late 2022. Poland was the second worst. Even in the best-performing countries, users could bypass blocks simply by changing their DNS settings to use third-party resolvers like Google or Cloudflare, or Russian-owned services like Yandex.
A core problem is that the European Commission sanctions specific media outlets but does not maintain a list of their domain names. When RT registers a new mirror domain, it can operate freely until someone notices and ISPs manually add it to their blocklists. As Pablo Maristany de las Casas, the ISD report’s author, told France24: the Commission sanctions “Russia Today, Sputnik, etc.” but does not list “what domain falls under this entity,” leaving ISPs without the guidance they need.
On Telegram, enforcement faces different but equally serious challenges. The Centre for Democracy and Rule of Law documented how sanctioned channels use modified names to avoid detection. Content from blocked channels can be freely redistributed via Telegram’s forward function to any accessible channel. And Telegram’s built-in publishing service, Telegraph, allows users to post articles that bypass domain blocks entirely.
Four years after the EU moved to shut down Russian state media in Europe, the wall it built is less a wall and more a fence with gaps wide enough to drive a propaganda truck through.
The numbers from our investigation tell the story clearly. Over 5.5 million visits from Germany to RT clones in three months. Nearly 1.5 million from Spain through actualidad-rt.com alone, with millions more flowing through esrt.site, esrt.space, and esrt.press. Over 700,000 from Sweden. Hundreds of thousands more from France, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, Austria, and Norway. On Telegram, a network of official and clone channels with more than 1.3 million combined subscribers, many of them accessible to EU users despite sanctions.
Russian disinformation is not a theoretical threat. It is an active operation, funded by the Russian state, run through state-owned infrastructure, and designed to influence public opinion in European democracies on issues ranging from the Russian-Ukrainian war to immigration, energy policy, and trust in democratic institutions.
The European Commission has acknowledged the problem. In its recommendations, the ISD urged the Commission to maintain a continuously updated, publicly accessible list of domains linked to sanctioned entities and to require platforms to comply with their obligations under the Digital Services Act. These are practical, achievable steps.
But until they are taken, every new mirror domain registered and every new Telegram clone channel created sends the same message that Margarita Simonyan delivered with characteristic bluntness. The sanctions exist on paper. On the internet, Russian state media remains very much open for business.
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