Follow the money: Network of Russian operations in the Czech Republic uncovered

A six-month investigation by a Czech media outlet has revealed how the Kremlin quietly funds its influence machine in Central Europe, from a fake London office to a Seychelles ghost company.

When the journalist from the Czech outlet Voxpot walked up to a nondescript building just a few hundred meters from the British Museum in central London, he was looking for a company called Enika LLP. According to the British companies register, the address is where it was supposed to be based. The receptionist inside had never heard of it.

That moment, captured on camera and published by Voxpot in February 2026, turned out to be one small but telling piece of a much larger puzzle. After six months of digging through business registries across four countries, following money from the Seychelles through Britain and Slovakia into the Czech Republic, Voxpot mapped out what appears to be a carefully constructed financial pipeline built to fund Russian influence operations in Central Europe while making sure no one can trace where the money actually comes from.

The emerging picture does not depict shadowy Kremlin agents dressed in trench coats. It is something far more mundane and, in many ways, more unsettling: a web of broke middlemen, nursery school addresses, shell companies, and a defunct e-shop selling wellness books that nobody can actually buy anything from.

The website that should not exist

The investigation targeted CZ24.news, one of the most active pro-Russian disinformation websites operating in the Czech language. According to Voxpot’s earlier analysis, the site publishes over a hundred articles every single day. Around ten per cent of them are direct translations from Russian state media outlets that are currently under European Union sanctions. Putting out that volume of content, even with AI-assisted translation, takes serious resources. It does not happen because a few volunteers feel passionate about it in their spare time.

Yet that is exactly what the site’s registered owner, Jitka Entlichová, claimed. She told Voxpot the site was run by three or four volunteers living abroad, funded by reader donations. When pressed on how the operation actually worked, she seemed, in the journalist’s words, to barely understand it herself.

The company formally behind CZ24.news is called Slovanský svět, which translates to ‘Slavic World.’ Its financial statements did not show the kind of money flows you would expect from a news operation of this scale. Something was clearly being kept out of sight.

A separate investigation by Insight News Media, which mapped the broader Czech pro-Russian media landscape, identified more than twenty websites operating in a similar way—pushing narratives straight out of the Kremlin playbook, cross-linking each other, quoting the same sanctioned Russian sources, and coordinating around the same core messages.

The dominant themes across all of them are consistent: that Russia was provoked into the war, that Western support for Kyiv is pointless, that NATO is the real aggressor, and that Zelenskyy’s government is illegitimate. The Insight News Media research found that a handful of these sites, including CZ24.news and Aeronet, still draw between 40,000 and 50,000 unique visitors per month.

Follow the straw men

After Voxpot published its first investigation into CZ24.news, something intriguing happened. Entlichová transferred ownership of Slovanský svět to a man named Miloš Duč, from the Slovak city of Banská Bystrica. Duč has a handful of small construction and development firms to his name. He is not, by any visible measure, someone who would have a reason or the means to take over a Czech disinformation portal.

But Duč connects, through several companies, to a Croatian man named Marko Horovec, whose main firm, TRM s.r.o., owns the Slovak foundation also called Slovanský svět. The Slovak foundation and the Czech company share the same name, and both push Russian interests hard. There is a line worth remembering here, which Voxpot quoted in its investigation: Russians like to call everything Russian “Slavic”, so they can then call everything Slavic “Russian”.

The Slovak Slovanský svět foundation was set up in September 2022. The timing matters. That was the moment Ukraine’s Armed Forces had just driven Russian invading troops out of three occupied regions; it was becoming obvious the war would not end quickly, Western countries were expelling Russian intelligence officers working under diplomatic cover, and the EU had imposed sanctions on key Russian propaganda outlets. Russia had just lost a significant chunk of its information warfare infrastructure in the region. Within weeks, this foundation appeared in Slovakia.

The foundation, on paper, looks almost invisible. It has no public-facing services, no findable contacts, and no visible activities. But its financial statements tell a different story. Its revenues grew from around one million Czech crowns in 2023 to more than 2.5 million in 2024. It carries no debt and reports a profit. Its stated business? IT consulting and programming services, which happen to be among the easiest categories to use when you want to disguise where money is really going, because no one can easily verify whether the work billed actually happened or what it was worth.

When Voxpot tracked the people officially listed as running these structures, the pattern was consistent. A Serbian national listed at an address that does not exist. A Slovak woman registered at a half-collapsed house in Banská Bystrica. Her other firm is managed by Vojtěch Huserek, a former winemaker from the Pálava region of South Moravia who, according to public records, has outstanding debt enforcement orders against him and a house under lien. He is, to put it plainly, not someone who would finance anything, let alone an international media operation.

Huserek, along with a Slovak man named Martin Dňurčány, whose official registered address is a nursery school in a small town near Znojmo, are listed as co-founders of Enika LLP, the London company with no real office. Both are also connected to a second British shell company called Lavel LLP, for which Voxpot found no traceable activity at all.

When the Voxpot journalist called Huserek, he hung up the first time, claiming it was a wrong number. The second time, he said to stop calling because he had never set up any such structures. When the journalist finally sent him written questions, Huserek called back and was, in the journalist’s description, openly irritated.

The former owner of TRM s.r.o., who sold the company to Ponoš and Horovec, told Voxpot plainly: if you are looking for a source of funding here, you are looking in the wrong place. These men, he said, were not creditworthy. What the investigation suggests is that they are something else entirely—what Czech investigators call bílí koně, literally “white horses”, meaning people whose names appear on company documents while someone else completely controls what happens. They probably received a few hundred euros each for the privilege.

The island nobody visits

In October 2023, a new shareholder entered Enika LLP. It was a Seychelles-registered company called Upex Corp, incorporated on February 22, 2023, exactly two weeks after Huserek and Dňurčány set up Enika LLP in London.

The Seychelles is a well-known offshore jurisdiction that offers near-instant company registration, no meaningful questions asked, and complete anonymity for the real owners. You cannot even confirm a company exists without physically travelling there or paying someone on the ground to check. Voxpot did exactly that, hiring a local contact for $100 to verify Upex Corp’s existence and obtain a registration certificate. It is active, registered under a firm called All About Offshore Seychelles Limited, and has been paying its annual registration fees without fail.

Upex Corp has a website. It appears to sell books, wellness products, and health items. Most of the text on it is ‘lorem ipsum placeholder content’. There is no functioning payment system. Nobody is actually buying anything. The only detail that stood out for the journalist was a small pin on the site labelled “Slovakia.”

Whether the website was built to create a paper trail of legitimate-looking revenue, or whether the Slovak foundation billed Upex Corp for building it and that is where some of those millions in IT consulting income came from, is something Voxpot was not able to definitively prove.

What is clear is the structure: an anonymous Seychelles company feeds money into British shell firms, which channel it to a Slovak foundation with millions in unexplained turnover, which then distributes funds across a network of Czech and Slovak companies run by people with fake addresses and no apparent personal resources.

That money, the investigation concludes, is what keeps operations like CZ24.news running. And CZ24.news is only one node in a much larger network.

The network behind the network

At the centre of the Czech end of these operations sits an address: Chudenická 30 in Prague’s Hostivař district. Slovanský svět s.r.o. is registered there. So is the Czechoslovak Peace Forum, a strongly pro-Russian civic association that calls for peace in Ukraine, but specifically on Russian terms, meaning Ukraine would effectively cease to exist as an independent state. Enika LLP used the same address in some of its job advertisements, where it was recruiting people to post content on Telegram and manage WordPress websites at salaries of 250 to 300 euros per month. The job description was, as Voxpot noted, almost identical to the recruitment ads once run by Yevgeny Prigozhin’s troll farm operations.

The Czechoslovak Peace Forum is led by a woman named Vladimíra Výtová, who also heads the Alliance of National Forces, a strongly pro-Russian political party that dissolved in 2024 due to lack of voter support. Výtová was, until relatively recently, an advisor and spokesperson for the Czech Minister of Education. She is also a member of the Russian Club of National Unity, whose Telegram channel has posted that it is necessary to “remove the artificial idea of Ukrainian nationhood” and that the Russian-Ukrainian war is a “bloody chance” given by God to make “Ukrainianness cease to exist.”

The club’s listed members include Aleksandr Dugin, the Russian propagandist and ideologist behind Russian expansionism, Sergei Glazyev, who serves as secretary of the Russia-Belarus union state, former Donetsk separatist spokesman Eduard Basurin, notorious arms dealer Viktor Bout, and Apty Alaudinov, the commander of the Chechen Akhmat battalion. Výtová travels to Russia to attend club events in person. She declined to speak with Voxpot.

Also connected to the Chudenická 30 hub and to Banská Bystrica is Radio Svobodný Vysílač, a strongly pro-Russian radio station tied to the Czechoslovak Peace Forum. It is another piece of the same ecosystem.

What Voxpot describes is not a collection of independent actors who happen to share similar views. It is a coordinated structure where the same people, the same addresses, the same company names, and the same talking points appear again and again across different projects—websites, civic associations, political parties, radio stations—all amplifying Russian narratives and all apparently drawing from the same financial pipeline whose ultimate source cannot be legally traced.

Bigger than one investigation

The findings from Voxpot sit within a broader and well-documented pattern of Russian influence activity across the Czech Republic and wider Central Europe.

In March 2024, Czech intelligence uncovered Voice of Europe, a Prague-registered media outlet secretly run by Viktor Medvedchuk, a Ukrainian oligarch and close ally of Vladimir Putin, through his associate Artem Marchevskyi. According to the Czech daily Deník N and Germany’s Der Spiegel, the network funnelled hundreds of thousands of euros to right-wing and Eurosceptic politicians in Germany, France, Poland, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Hungary, with cash sometimes handed over in person at meetings in Prague.

The Czech government sanctioned Voice of Europe and both men in March 2024. The EU followed with its own sanctions in May of the same year, as reported by the Alliance for Securing Democracy. Marchevskyi, it later emerged, had been granted temporary protection status in Slovakia, the same country that plays a central role in the financial network Voxpot investigated.

The Czech Security Information Service, known as BIS, called 2024 one of the most challenging years in the country’s modern security history. Its annual report documented Russia’s growing use of so-called Telegram agents, people recruited through the messaging app with offers of easy money to carry out tasks ranging from filming military logistics hubs to committing acts of arson.

One specific case cited was the burning of a bus at Prague’s Klíčov depot, carried out by a Colombian national recruited online. Many recruits, hired through intermediaries, were unaware they were working for Russian intelligence. A Belarusian asylum seeker was separately paid in cryptocurrency to publish pro-Russian propaganda. BIS noted that these operations are not only meant to cause direct damage. They are designed to spread fear, erode trust in the state’s ability to protect people, and gradually reduce public support for Ukraine.

The system is the point

The money trail that begins on a tropical island in the Indian Ocean and ends in the accounts of indebted middlemen in Banská Bystrica is not accidental. It is a deliberate design. The whole point of the structure is that it looks like nothing. A Slovak foundation generates income through IT consulting. A British partnership with no staff.

The Seychelles company is engaged in the sale of wellness books to an unidentified target audience. Each layer is meant to absorb scrutiny and deflect it so that by the time anyone asks where the money actually came from, the answer is already buried under enough offshore paperwork to make the question unanswerable.

What journalists at Voxpot found, and what the broader investigation by Insight News Media helped put in context, is that this is not a fringe operation running on a shoestring. It is a professional system. The people whose names appear on the documents are disposable. The structure itself is what matters, and the structure, as both investigations show, has been quietly running for years, in plain sight, hiding behind the most boring paperwork imaginable.