Thread by @alexzfinley

It sure looks like something similar happened in Italy with the Lombardy-Russia Cultural Association, which claimed to support cultural&other exchanges between Italy & Russia. It was run by Gianluca Savoini, a consigliere to Matteo Salvini, head of the political party La Lega16/

Savoini is currently under investigation by Italian prosecutors after he was caught on tape allegedly negotiating an oil deal with Russians that would provide kickbacks to La Lega, just in time for EU parliamentary elections back in 2018. 17/
buzzfeednews.com/article/albert…

What are some other cultural, academic, or business exchanges we’ve seen involving Russia? Well, this young lass comes to mind: Mariia Butina, who was convicted in 2018 of being a foreign agent and spent 18 months in prison in Virginia. 18/

Oddly, she received a lot of attention from Russian consular officials while she was there, much more than any other Russian citizen in prison in the US, as I wrote about here. 19/
politico.com/magazine/story…

Butina facilitated a number of exchanges with the NRA. Remember when Sheriff Clarke went to Moscow? Thanks, Mariia! 20/
nytimes.com/2019/09/26/us/…

Speaking of Mariia Butina, have you met Irina Osipova? She worked closely with Italy's Savoini and Salvini. 21/ buzzfeednews.com/article/albert…

According to media reports, Osipova is the daughter of the Russian Center for Science and Culture (Rossotrudnichestvo) in Rome. She went beyond political proxies and actually ran for political office in Rome, with the far-right party Fratelli d’Italia. (She lost 🙁) 22/

Let's get back to mundane cultural exchanges. Another example is CatRus, an organization that facilitates exchanges between Catalunya (in Spain) and Russia (although, oddly, it is based in London). 23/

It is run by Alexander Dmitrenko. He has been trying to get Spanish citizenship, but the Spanish government so far has refused, because they believe he has links to Russian intelligence. 24/

One of the exchanges CatRus helped facilitate was to send a top aide to Puigdemont, the leader-in-exile of Catalunya’s independence movement, to Moscow to seek financial backing for the independence movement (allegedly). 25/
nytimes.com/2021/09/03/wor…

Also, remember how Savoini, who did exchanges between Russia and Italy, allegedly got kickbacks for an Italian political party? Weird, right? Like, the same thing? Anyway… 26/

The bottom line is: these covert actions, although not sexy and in the news as much, do have an effect. They help bring Russia’s agenda to a Western audience through Western proxies, making the message much more palatable and thus more likely to be adopted.
27/

Or, maybe this is just a bunch of coincidences we shouldn’t worry about. 28/