DisinfoWatch’s Marcus Kolga testified at Canada’s Parliamentary Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security on Tuesday, October 1, 2024. Below are his opening remarks:
Mr. Chairman, members of the committee, thank you for the privilege and opportunity to testify before you today. I want to begin by expressing my gratitude for your recognition of the serious threat that Russian information and influence operations pose to our democracy and society.
For the past 15 years, I’ve dedicated myself to monitoring and exposing Russian information warfare and influence campaigns targeting Canada and our allies.
This is not a partisan issue. Safeguarding Canada’s cognitive sovereignty and the integrity of our information environment is essential to defending our democracy and maintaining social cohesion.
The September 4, 2023, indictment from the U.S. Department of Justice highlights the extent of this threat, but it is just the tip of a much larger iceberg. For over a decade, Canadians have collaborated with Russian state media outlets like RT and Sputnik News, and platforms like Montreal’s Global Research, which the U.S. State Department has identified as a key pillar of Russia’s disinformation ecosystem. They also enable and collaborate in Russian transnational repression targeting Canadian activists – like myself – and communities and even parliamentarians.
Furthermore, Canadians continue to engage with sanctioned Kremlin-aligned think tanks, such as the Valdai Club and the Russian International Affairs Council, which play pivotal roles in the laundering of disinformation and efforts to affect policy and opinions in Canada through influencers connected to them.
These Kremlin-controlled entities, including RT, are not merely propaganda tools. They are designed to weaponize information to manipulate our understanding of the world around us, to undermine our democracy and erode our social fabric. They are not bound by physical borders.
An FBI affidavit released alongside the DOJ indictment on September 4 provides detailed minutes of high-level Russian meetings and strategy documents. One of Vladimir Putin’s closest advisors, Sergei Kiriyenko, was involved in these meetings, underscoring the personal importance of these operations to Putin.
Among the documents in the affidavit are instructions to Russian propaganda agents to monitor Western information environments for domestic conflicts, friction points and crises, and to artificially create and intensify tensions in countries allied with the United States. The documents instruct agents to create false narratives to be delivered through Western influencers and state media platforms like RT to achieve this.
Global Affairs Canada has identified RT as an arm of Russia’s intelligence apparatus, engaging in psychological operations and disinformation while its cyber actors target Western nations, including Canadian critical infrastructure.
The US indictment exposes the significant involvement of Canadians in RT’s activities. It alleges that a company established by two Canadians received $10 million from RT to create a platform for transmitting these narratives to Canadian and American audiences. While this may seem like a large sum, it is only a fraction of the $3 billion Russia spends annually on information operations globally.
The indictment claims that Canadians were producing content for RT as early as March 2021 and that RT funnelled money to these individuals through UK shell companies as recently as this year. Since RT was added to Canada’s sanctions list in July 2022, this raises serious questions about potential violations of Canadian sanctions laws. This committee should inquire whether the RCMP is investigating these Canadians and others collaborating with Kremlin-controlled entities.
Both the DOJ indictment and FBI affidavit are smoking guns. They provide clear evidence of Russian operations targeting Canada, a threat that has persisted for nearly 90 years.
Perhaps the most alarming case of Russian intelligence operations in Canada, and one that’s been ignored, is the case of GRU Colonel Mikhail Mikushin. For over a decade, Mikushin attended Carleton University and the University of Calgary. He even wrote an article for the Canadian Naval Review journal and volunteered on a Canadian political campaign.
Shockingly, it wasn’t CSIS, CSE, or the RCMP that uncovered Mikushin’s identity as a GRU Colonel —it was Norwegian intelligence. Norway, not Canada.
The service that Mikushin provided to Russia’s intelligence operations was, so important to Vladimir Putin, that he was included in the August prisoner swap returning to Russia alongside Putin’s other GRU assassins and hackers.
It’s unlikely that Mikushin was the only Russian intelligence agent working in Canada. Nor are the Canadians behind Tenet media the only Canadians collaborating with RT and other Kremlin media.
If we seek to disrupt, stop and deter such operations, we must hold those behind them and their Canadian collaborators to account by investigating and exposing them, enforcing our existing laws, properly implementing new ones like the Foreign Influence Transparency Registry and simply ending our wilful ignorance of this threat.
Watch the testimony here:
