Titled "Moscow's Mouthpieces", the article traces the sources of funding for three news portals in each of the Baltic states -- baltnews.lv, baltnews.ee, and baltnews.lt respectively.
It finds that the websites are actually owned and funded by the Rossiya Segodnya (RT, formerly Russia Today) Kremlin media machine, which also owns Sputnik, a propaganda wire posing as a news service.
The scheme was uncovered only via an investigation of tax evasion and forgery in which, as case documents reveal, the owner of the websites, one Aleksandr Kornilov, was being ordered by a Rossiya Segodnya employee on Skype as to what stories should be published.
➡️They said that they were independent. In reality, they were controlled by Moscow.⬅️
— Re:Baltica (@rebaltica) August 29, 2018
Skype logs and other documents obtained by Re:Baltica, @Postimees and @BuzzFeedNews offer a rare glimpse into the inner workings of the Kremlin’s propaganda machine: https://t.co/FgMaxiIVgH pic.twitter.com/cDUsaPgmTn
