Three of RIA Novosti’s most prolific columnists are personally sanctioned by the EU for denying Ukraine’s right to exist. Their work reaches Czech readers every day, translated and republished by CZ24.news — while eight other Czech websites amplify the same narratives without leaving any trace of where they came from.
Every morning, Czech readers who open CZ24.news find columns by Petr Akopov, Victoria Nikiforova, and Kirill Strelnikov arguing that America is “collapsing under its own arrogance,” that Ukraine is “an irreversibly failed state headed for extinction,” and that Russian missile strikes on Kyiv are “righteous responses to Ukrainian terrorism.” The authors write for RIA Novosti — a Russian state news agency under EU sanctions since May 2024. The authors themselves are personally sanctioned by the EU and Canada. None of that stops their work from reaching Czech and Slovak audiences, translated and republished daily by CZ24, with a source credit buried at the bottom of each article after all content and donation appeals.
CZ24 is not alone. As Insight News Media documented in its 2024 investigation into the Czech pro-Russian media landscape, more than twenty websites operate in a similar way — pushing narratives from the Kremlin playbook, cross-linking each other, and drawing on the same sanctioned Russian sources. A review conducted for this article of twelve Czech pro-Russian websites found that eight published content matching CZ24’s narrative categories in a single three-day window this week. None of them named RIA Novosti, Akopov, Nikiforova, or Strelnikov anywhere in their articles.
RIA Novosti operates under Rossiya Segodnya, the Kremlin’s state media holding. It was placed under EU sanctions in May 2024 alongside Voice of Europe, Izvestia, and Rossiyskaya Gazeta. Broadcasting or distributing its content within the EU is prohibited. Violations carry penalties of up to €2 million or eight years imprisonment under Czech law.
The agency’s most prolific columnists are not anonymous. They are named, sanctioned individuals documented in EU, Canadian, and French sanctions registries.
Petr Akopov has authored over 785 articles for RIA Novosti as of late 2025. The EU sanctioned him for being “a central figure in government propaganda” who has authored articles “denying Ukraine’s right to statehood and calling for the ‘denazification’ as well as the ‘de-Ukrainisation’ of the country.” His infamy predates the full-scale invasion: on the morning of February 24, 2022, RIA Novosti accidentally published his pre-written victory column — “The Arrival of Russia and the New World” — declaring that “Ukraine has returned to Russia” before Russian forces had secured any objectives. The article was pulled within hours but captured and republished internationally. He is sanctioned by the EU, Canada, and France.
Victoria Nikiforova is a RIA Novosti columnist sanctioned by the EU, France, and Belgium for denying “Ukraine’s right to exist” and describing Ukrainians as “brainwashed” and “taken hostage.” According to the EU sanctions framework, she “promotes a positive attitude towards the Russian aggression against Ukraine” and is listed in the Free Russia Forum’s “1500 warmongers” report.
Kirill Strelnikov is a RIA Novosti columnist and co-founder of the nationalist media project Politrussia. He is best known internationally for a July 2025 column published by RIA Novosti titled “There is no other option: no one should be left alive in Ukraine,” in which he described Ukrainian soldiers as “laboratory rats” and called for their physical extermination. Unlike Akopov and Nikiforova, Strelnikov does not appear to hold personal EU sanctions — but his outlet does, and that has not prevented his columns from reaching Czech readers through CZ24 every week.
Between May 24 and 26, 2026, CZ24 published at least six pieces translating or drawing directly from sanctioned Russian sources. The pattern is consistent: RIA Novosti publishes in Russian; CZ24 translates into Czech; a credit line reading “Translation by CZ24.news / Source: [Author], RIA Novosti” appears at the very bottom of the article. A reader scrolling through the headline and opening paragraphs has no indication they are reading translated Russian state propaganda.
On May 26, CZ24 published Akopov’s column framing the US-Iran negotiations as proof of American imperial collapse. The RIA Novosti original was unambiguous about its thesis:
“The States live in a parallel reality that has nothing to do with what is actually happening. The problem is not in the form but in the substance — no one will follow Washington’s instructions. The US is losing reputation, influence, and position.”
The Czech translation reproduced the argument intact: Washington dug a hole for itself, Trump needed a face-saving exit, and the nuclear threat that justified the conflict was always fabricated. The same day, Nikiforova’s column — translated by CZ24 under the headline “The US is falling into the pit it dug for others” — added an economic dimension:
“Washington no longer has the means to terrorise other countries. With sufficient solidarity, unity and determination, they are capable of repelling the former hegemon. The dollar strengthened after every global shock — after the Great Recession in 2008, after the coronavirus crisis in 2020. But now the American currency is weakening at a record pace.”
On May 24, Strelnikov published a column on RIA Novosti presenting Medvedev’s description of Ukraine as a “failed state” not as Russian propaganda but as scientific understatement. The framing was deliberate — adopt Western state-fragility methodology, run Ukraine through it, conclude the collapse is faster than even Medvedev claimed:
“Medvedev did not cynically embellish the situation — on the contrary, he categorically understated the speed and scale of the collapse that inevitably awaits Ukraine. Ukraine has already lost more than 20% of its territory and stands on the threshold of further losses.”
The column ended with a direct comparison to Hitler’s final days in the bunker — “the parallels with today’s convulsions of the Kyiv regime and its sponsors are obvious” — before declaring that capitulation is inevitable, but it will be Ukraine’s, not Russia’s. CZ24 translated the piece and published it the same day.
“At the head of this collapsed state stands a drug-addicted individual with all the signs of personal disintegration.”
That last line appeared not in the Strelnikov original but in CzechFreePress.cz, which published its own piece on the same Medvedev statement under the headline “THE END OF UKRAINE IS INEVITABLE — MEDVEDEV” — without naming Strelnikov, without naming RIA Novosti, and without any source credit at all.
Aeronet.news — one of the largest Czech pro-Russian portals, drawing 40,000 to 50,000 monthly visitors alongside CZ24 — amplified the same narrative through a different angle, arguing that Ukraine had brought its destruction upon itself:
“The policy of ‘fighting to the last Ukrainian’ and the constant refusal of diplomatic compromise brought Ukraine to a situation where it has nothing ahead of it except its own destruction.”
Following Russian Oreshnik strikes on Kyiv on May 24 and 25, Strelnikov published two columns in two days. Both used the Starobilsk incident — a strike on a dormitory in the Russian-occupied Luhansk region that Moscow blamed on Ukrainian drones, claiming 21 student deaths — as the pivot point.
The first column, translated by CZ24 as “Statement over — Russia ends negotiations with child murderers,” was deliberately visceral:
“Our enemies understand only one thing: blood, pain, fire, and death. When an Oreshnik missile strikes such a target, there is usually nothing to show — only craters remain on the surface, and everything deep underground, together with commanders, soldiers and NATO advisors, turns into molten magma.”
The second column named Western silence over Starobilsk as proof of active approval:
“They are not simply indifferent when our children are killed — they openly rejoice in it. That is why President Putin considered it impossible to limit himself to statements, and ordered the Ministry of Defence to present proposals for a response.”
The same narrative cascaded across multiple Czech sites without any trace of its RIA Novosti origin. Protiproud.info published a video segment headlined “Blood of children and flames over Kyiv: The Starobilsk massacre that is being silenced here. This crossed everything. Moscow presented evidence at the UN, but the West refuses to see the crimes of the Kyiv junta.” Pokec24.cz published “Simplicius: Russia calls on Western diplomats to leave Kyiv and announces a campaign of long-term systematic strikes on the capital” — drawing on the same anonymous blogger used by CZ24, with no institutional source identified. Infokuryr.cz ran the same Starobilsk story citing Rick Sanchez — a former RT anchor who moved to Moscow in 2025 and now hosts a show on the sanctioned Russian broadcaster — as its authority. Novarepublika.cz published a piece by Andrew Korybko, a Moscow-based American analyst whose systematic amplification of Kremlin narratives Insight News Media has previously documented, framing the Starobilsk strike as justification for Russia’s military campaign. Skrytapravda.cz ran the headline “Girls massacred by Ukrainian terrorist Zelensky will be buried in their wedding dresses.”
Every article pointed toward the same conclusion. None named the source.
One CZ24 article this week broke the RIA Novosti pattern — and replaced it with something more extreme. A piece titled “For your sins” expressed open regret that Zelenskyy’s offices were not struck in the Kyiv attack, celebrated the strikes as “surgically precise,” and warned Kyiv residents directly:
“You live well because they allow it for now. But tonight showed that it will not last forever.”
The source credit at the bottom read: “Source: Hlas Mordora / Telegraf / News Front.”
News Front is not a proxy outlet in the way that term is usually understood. It is a Crimea-based Russian disinformation outlet directly sanctioned by the US Treasury in 2021 and 2022, and placed under EU financial sanctions in February 2025. A former News Front employee told the US State Department that Vladimir Putin’s office gives assignments directly to the outlet. According to OpenSanctions, it “regularly provides a platform for Russian government representatives and spreads lies and conspiracy theories about Ukraine.” CZ24 treats it as a routine source — because, in practice, it is.
A fifth article on CZ24 translated content attributed only to “Simplicius” — an anonymous blogger on Substack with no institutional affiliation. The piece claimed that Oreshnik missiles struck only military targets near Kyiv, and pushed the claim that Zelenskyy deliberately provoked Russian strikes to make Russia appear as a civilian-targeting aggressor:
“The public version. While Kyiv was struck by a mix of ballistic and cruise missiles, the Oreshnik did not actually strike Kyiv itself, but the neighbouring Bila Tserkva airbase. This was confirmed by several sources, both Ukrainian and Russian.”
Analysts including Asia Times have characterised “Simplicius the Thinker” as a pro-Russian blogger “probably Russian himself.” Unlike the RIA Novosti columns, this article carried no outlet attribution — only the pseudonym. Pokec24 republished the same Simplicius content the same day, also without any source identification.
The use of Simplicius alongside sanctioned RIA Novosti authors reveals the full sourcing architecture of Czech pro-Russian media: Russian state outlets, Russian state-sanctioned outlets like News Front, and anonymous pro-Russian voices whose origins are untraceable — each layer adding distance from Moscow while delivering identical narratives.
Not all disinformation is imported from Moscow. Some of it is grown closer to home. A piece on CZ24 headlined “Sick Ursula will be replaced by Rothschild’s lackey Macron” drew on a YouTube interview and a Slovak newspaper featuring MEP Katarína Roth Neveďalová’s claims about EU leadership. No Russian source was involved — this was domestically produced content. Its presence on CZ24 illustrates that the site’s disinformation function extends beyond translating Russian material: it also amplifies local pro-Russian politicians’ conspiracy theories, giving apparent domestic legitimacy to narratives that serve Moscow’s interests.
What CZ24 does carries a name in EU law. The EU’s 20th sanctions package introduced specific measures targeting “mirror outlets that circumvent the broadcasting ban by spreading the same content as listed propaganda media outlets.” Whether a site that explicitly credits RIA Novosti in its source lines — and the wider network of Czech sites that reproduce the same narratives with no attribution at all — fall within that framework is a question Czech authorities have not publicly addressed.
The scale of the problem is not in doubt. A joint investigation by Czech outlet Voxpot and IT association Druit, which analysed 360,000 publications across 16 Czech platforms over 25 years, found that roughly 10% of articles on Czech disinformation sites were direct translations from sanctioned Russian outlets — with over 2,000 originating from RIA Novosti alone. Czech disinformation servers now publish more articles per day than the country’s largest legitimate media houses.
As the Institute for Strategic Dialogue’s March 2026 audit of EU sanctions against Russian state media found, sanctioned outlets remain “largely still active and accessible across Member States” three years after the initial restrictions — with pro-Russian amplifiers “covertly laundering content through fake news websites.” A Royal United Services Institute analysis from June 2025 noted that regulators “face difficulties keeping up with Russian disinformation actors’ circumvention techniques,” and that “domestic disinformation actors are seen as often more numerous and better-embedded than foreign actors.”
As DFRLab documented in April 2026, CZ24 functions as “a disinformation aggregator that disseminates content of sanctioned Kremlin outlets.” Insight News Media’s own investigation into the financial network behind CZ24 traced its funding pipeline from the Seychelles through Britain and Slovakia, finding shell companies, straw men, and financial structures designed to make the operation appear as a volunteer-run, reader-supported independent portal.
There is a reason Russia invests in translated propaganda rather than simply relying on VPNs to distribute RIA Novosti to Czech readers. Translation does more than change the language. It strips the content of its obvious Russian origin. It places Akopov’s arguments in a Czech editorial context, alongside domestic news. It allows narratives developed in Moscow to appear, to a casual reader, as Czech political commentary.
When eight other Czech websites then reproduce those same narratives without crediting any Russian source, the laundering is complete. By the time “Ukraine is a failed state headed for extinction” or “NATO advisors are turning to molten magma under Kyiv” reaches most readers, there is no visible trace of the RIA Novosti column it came from, the sanctioned author who wrote it, or the Kremlin editorial line it was built to serve.
Vojtech Boháč, editor-in-chief of Voxpot, has put the purpose of these operations plainly: “The goal is to feed and shape a specific audience that may be small but can have political influence. These portals are more focused on radicalising voters within an already existing political current. Many readers sincerely believe the lies written there, particularly about the war in Ukraine.”
The columnists whose work CZ24 translates each day are not fringe voices. They are sanctioned instruments of a state that has declared the destruction of Ukraine a national objective. Their words reach Czech readers every morning — translated, republished, and stripped of context, one article at a time.
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