Russian agents linked to the Kremlin spent much of 2024 working on secretive operations to infiltrate Argentina’s media to discredit the country’s new far-right libertarian president, Javier Milei, according to leaked documents seen by openDemocracy.
In the run-up to his election victory in December 2023, Milei began seeking favour with Joe Biden’s administration in the US. While the pair were unlikely to see eye to eye on Milei’s domestic politics – he famously appeared on stage brandishing the chainsaw he was going to use to “destroy the state from within” – Milei adopted US-friendly geopolitical positions, including support for Ukraine, even inviting Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky to his inauguration and hosting him in the presidential palace.
This support appears to have ruffled feathers in Moscow. A propaganda network backed by Russian foreign intelligence and internally known as ‘the Company’ began working to undermine Milei’s government and further divide Argentina’s already polarised society, according to a tranche of Russian-language documents obtained by The Continent, an African news outlet, and shared with a consortium of investigative newsrooms including openDemocracy, Dossier Center, iStories, All Eyes on Wagner, and Forbidden Stories.
The documents offer exclusive and unprecedented details of the operations and activities that the Kremlin’s agents at ‘the Company’ carried out in more than 30 countries across South America and Africa between February and November 2024.
These include commissioning surveys and polls and assembling briefings on subjects as varied as Argentina’s military-industrial complex, oil resources in the Antarctic, profiles of political leaders, political parties and worker unions and “expert interviews” with “politicians, opposition political scientists and economists”.
The Company even made plans to support opposition candidates in Argentina’s 2025 mid-term legislative elections.
Its most intensive campaign, though, involved creating “a network for the distribution of media content in Argentine mass media and the local segment of social networks”.
openDemocracy has identified at least 250 pieces of content – news, analyses and opinion pieces – that the Russians claimed to have placed in more than 20 online Argentinian news outlets from June to October 2024.
While the Company budgeted more than $280,300 for this content, we have been unable to verify whether the payments were made, and if so, whether they were made to the media, journalists or third parties. The comparatively large figures for Argentina’s cash-strapped media suggest that the Russian agents may have inflated the amount of money required to their superiors in St Petersburg.
The documents also provide clear links between the ‘The Company’, the Russian Foreign Intelligence SVR, and the Wagner group of the late oligarch and mercenary Yevgeny Prigozhin, as laid out in a previous openDemocracy investigation, which revealed how the Kremlin-backed ‘Company’s’ agents tried to prop up former President Luis Arce’s faltering government in Bolivia.
Diana Cariboni
The Company’s existence in Argentina was first publicly confirmed in a speech by Milei’s spokesperson in October 2025. Its operations, the spokesperson said, included disseminating content in social media, influencing local civil organisations, foundations, and NGOs, conducting focus groups with Argentine citizens, and gathering political information to be used in favour of Russian interests.
“This is the declassified portion of the information,” the spokesperson said, “Of course, there's a whole lot of classified information, which is a state secret.”
Now, for the first time, openDemocracy and its investigative partners are able to shed more light on the Russian operations.
Fake fees
In October 2024, an author called Manuel Godsin published a story about universities protesting Milei’s budget cuts for the Realpolitik news site. It was a topic relevant to his interests; the biography at the end of the piece says Godsin has a PhD from the University of Bergen and is a member of a Centre for Political and Strategic Studies.
What the editors at Realpolitik failed to notice, though, is that Godsin doesn’t exist.
His face belongs to a Russian man named Mikhail Malyarov, as was revealed by Africa Confidential last year and corroborated by an investigation by Code for Africa published last month, which found that Godsin is a “fictitious identity”, created to “whitewash Russian narratives in the mainstream media” using content generated by ChatGPT.
openDemocracy found that Godsin’s article is one of 20 published by Realpolitik that appears in the Russian files. Our analysis of the documents reveals the Russians reported paying $11,000, or $550 a piece, to host the articles on Realpolitik. The site’s director, Santiago Sautel, told openDemocracy he had not received any payments for carrying these articles, and that he didn’t know any of the authors of the 20 pieces.
“We publish opinion pieces all the time,” Sautel said. “We do not know the origin of these particular ones. We can confirm, however, that they were not the result of any underhanded manoeuvre hatched behind closed doors at a diplomatic mission. And if any of these pieces were orchestrated in the shadows to serve a specific agenda, we are unaware of it.”
Realpolitik was far from the only Argentine digital outlet fooled by the agents – we have confirmed that more than 20 outlets with differing audiences, resources and political outlooks published their articles. For the most part, this content was not unlike the day-to-day coverage of news and critical commentary about the state of the economy and the increased diplomatic tensions with progressive governments in the region.
Yet our analysis of the articles and the Company’s corresponding documents reveals they were unusual in two key ways. First, many of the pieces contained references favourable to Russia and critical of the US, as well as distortions, exaggerations and fake news.
Secondly, they were extortionate – if the Russian documents are to be believed. The Company reported spending between $350 and $3,100 on each article, figures that were shocking to Argentinian media representatives we spoke with; journalists in the country typically earn less than $700 a month. Our analysis indicates the payments must have been inflated in the documents, which were written for the agents’ superiors.
openDemocracy, Forbidden Stories and Filtraleaks, which partnered for this investigation, contacted all the media outlets mentioned in the documents and interviewed editors, directors or journalists from 15 of them. Many asked not to be identified.
Two sources told us that they had been paid for publishing some of the articles, but that the payments were far lower than those recorded in the documents. Both were approached by the same intermediary, who gave them different, yet similar, accounts of the origin of the articles and the money: a group of Argentine businesspeople concerned at the state of national industry, or angry at Milei’s cuts to public works budgets.
openDemocracy’s analysis of the leaked documents indicates the Russian agents attempted to exaggerate the scope of their operations in other ways, too, with some of the articles’ URLs listed twice in their spreadsheets.
All of the Argentine journalists we spoke to denied any involvement with the Company or any associated Russian influence campaigns. Most said the articles they’d published had been provided for free by a third party, described as a “news agency”, “consultant” or “intermediary”, but could not name the agency in question. Several admitted that the articles were published without much editorial oversight, and said they did not know the authors of the pieces.
Our interviews with the media representatives reveal the Russian disinformation operation in Argentina exploited an increasingly common global practice: PR agencies offer free or paid content to resource-strapped newsrooms to gain client visibility. Although media standards require that such arrangements be disclosed, this often does not happen. Our conversations with editors and journalists in Argentina indicate this may have been the case.
openDemocracy made contact with one such intermediary, who said he provided editing services for some of the articles mentioned in the documents and was paid the market rate. The intermediary expressed surprise that these articles were part of a Russian influence operation. He noted that editing was a legitimate profession.
“It is possible, but uncommon, for a journalist to publish content without their editor's knowledge; but if it is true that this network paid to place more than 250 articles, it is very unlikely that no editor any outlet did not know about this,” Martín Becerra, media expert and researcher of the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET) told openDemocracy.
“The increasing precariousness of the media, the excessive relaxation of editorial oversight create an environment conducive to disinformation campaigns and manipulative operations of all kinds and stripes,” he added.
In their press conference in October 2025, the Argentinian authorities identified two Russian citizens, Lev Konstantinovich Andriashvili and his wife Irina Yakovenko, as key members of the disinformation campaign.
Andriashvili and Yakovenko left Argentina for St. Petersburg days after their names were exposed by the government, but they returned to the country soon after, according to research published by the Argentinian Journalism Forum in January this year. At the time of publication, Andriashvili and Yakovenko still live in Buenos Aires.
In a written response to openDemocracy request for comments, Andriashvili said: “We have never contacted the media, journalists or Argentine political figures. Nor do we have any connection with the organisation mentioned in your description. Furthermore, no evidence has been presented to support these accusations, simply because none exists.”
Fake authors
Godsin was not the only fictitious analyst commenting on Argentina’s public affairs.
Gabriel di Taranto, a prolific commentator with a master’s degree in political communication from the Universidad Nacional de Avellaneda in Argentina, published 20 pieces for three different websites: Diario Registrado, C5N and Ámbito.
But the university doesn’t offer a master’s degree in political communication, and a person with that name was never registered as a student, according to a statement that it provided to consortium member Forbidden Stories. The face used on di Taranto’s author profile was generated using Nvidia AI software, according to a 2018 article by the Metro, a British newspaper, and it has been used on several social media profiles.
‘Juan Carlos López’ and ‘Marcelo Lopreiatto’ were other fictitious authors who ‘wrote’ articles for Diario Registrado. Juan Carlos López (a very common name in Argentina) published nine articles recorded in Russian documents and published in Diario Registrado; his face can be found in a photo bank and, again, on social media profiles associated with different names on Facebook and LinkedIn.
The face on the author page of Marcelo Lopreiatto, who penned 12 articles for Diario Registrado and the website C5N TV news channel, can be traced back to a 2019 article about a company giving away AI-generated headshots as a promotion.
In all, Diario Registrado published 26 stories that openDemocracy traced back to the Russian misinformation campaign. The documents claim the Company paid $28,600 to place these articles on the site. The outlet’s editor didn’t reply to our requests for an interview.
C5N published 17 articles that the Company paid $32,500 for, according to the Russian documents. Fourteen of these articles were under Lopreiatto and di Taranto’s fictitious bylines. C5N’s editors declined to comment.
The Russians also claimed to have paid $20,000 for eight articles in Ámbito, a traditional financial newspaper that moved online in 2024; $16,500 for 10 pieces in A24.com, the news website of the A24 TV channel; $40,700 for 37 pieces on Diario Con Vos, a news site that was at the time part of the Radio Con Vos media group and has since changed its name to Es Nota; $12,000 for 16 stories on Big Bang News and $6,300 for 18 stories on Dos Bases.
In a written response sent to openDemocracy following the publication of this article, Ámbito’s general director, Gabriel Morini, denied that his media outlet had received any money or had any connection to destabilisation campaigns originating in Russia. “Neither AMFIN SA, nor NEFIR SA [Ámbito’s publishers], nor any marketing agency representing these publishing companies has received any payment from any entity or nation to publish inaccurate, negative, or campaign-related information intended to favour or harm any government.”
Regarding the content, Morini added: “None of those disputed articles (8) can be classified as fake news.” He pointed out that several of the articles in question were written by a real person in Argentina, who was writing under their own name, while others had no author but were news based on facts. Regarding another of the articles, signed by the fake profile Gabriel di Taranto, Morini explained: “Ámbito acknowledges a flaw in its editorial process that led it to verify only that other publications existed under the same name in other media and assumed it must be a real person without verifying the details of his existence. The opinion piece in question referred to the conflict over oil in the war between Russia and Ukraine.”
Editors from A24 and Dos Bases didn’t answer our repeated requests for comments, while Es Nota (formerly Diario Con Vos) declined to comment. A source from Big Bang News denied any involvement with Russian campaigns or money, and claimed all its pieces we identified in the Russian documents had been assigned by the outlet’s editors to its own journalists.
openDemocracy also found stories planted by the Russian agents at Infobae, El Destape, La Patriada Web, En Orsai, Sección Ciudad, El Ciudadano Web, Política Argentina, Tiempo Argentino, El Cronista, Osorno en Vivo (Chile), Infocielo, Data Clave, Agenda Urbana, Ciudadano Agro, Contraste MDP and En la Mira del Poder.
El Grito del Sur, a leftist digital outlet founded in 2012, appears to have published six stories placed by the Russian network. The Russians claim to have spent $2,400 to place each article, a claim denied by the publication. El Grito del Sur denied accepting payment for content, though it said it does take “any information intended to discredit Milei’s government, provided it is based on objective facts”.
In an email, El Grito del Sur’s editor in chief, Yair Cybel, said he would not share information about their journalists or contributors with openDemocracy. “We’re not snitches or informers, certainly not for the British media”.
He added: “Our outlet wholeheartedly supports the Russian Federation in its conflict with Ukraine, Palestine in the genocide it is subjected to by Israel, and Argentina in its claim over the Malvinas (Falkland) Islands.
“Our entire editorial committee eagerly hopes that Putin’s Russian troops will advance to take London and will make its humble contribution through its reporting to ensure that this comes to pass”.
Fake news
On August 23, 2024, news website El Destape published a story about three Argentinians detained by the Chilean police while carrying an explosive device, a drone and “electronic maps” of Chile’s Ñuble region, near the Argentine border.
The piece was authored by Fernanda Velázquez, whose only digital footprint is her author page on El Destape, and picked up by two Chilean websites, which ran shorter and identical versions, Osorno en Vivo and La Razón.
But the story was fake news planted by the Russians “to create tension between Argentina and Chile”, according to the documents translated and analysed by openDemocracy, which reveal a plan to plant a “story about Milei sending a sabotage group to organise a terrorist attack on the Trans-Andean gas pipeline in Chile to disrupt a gas contract in US interests”. El Destape did not respond to openDemocracy’s request for comment, but the story was subsequently taken down.
Juan Luis Rubilar, the editor of the Chilean outlet Osorno en Vivo editor that carried a version of the story, told openDemocracy: “Someone copied the article and posted it online. We don’t know who. No payment was received. We’re very sorry if it’s fake, we can take it down from the website.”
Representatives of La Razón didn’t reply to our questions.
The Russian files also included ideas for other fake news stories to inflame tensions between Chile and Argentina – which were on the verge of a war in 1978 – such as publishing a “map of the partition of Chile after the war with Argentina” or false claims that Argentina was drafting recruits for a war with Chile. openDemocracy could not find these stories online, suggesting they were ultimately not published.
The Russians also sought to exploit the Argentinian president's obsession with his cloned dogs. Outlining one of the agents’ objectives, the documents say: “Goal and description: Injected a story about Milei purchasing five dog collars from Cartier worth $64,000 in the US.” A fake story on these same lines appeared in a news website from the Dominican Republic and an Instagram post.
Other aims were more sinister, though – particularly its plan to shape the Argentine narrative on Russia’s war in Ukraine.
Under President Alberto Fernández’s Moscow-friendly administration, Argentina maintained a neutral stance on the conflict. Milei, by contrast, joined the Ukraine Defense Contact Group, an international coalition launched by the Biden administration to coordinate humanitarian and military aid to Ukraine, although his administration later said it would not provide military support after the Russian embassy expressed “disappointment” over the decision.
The documents indicate the Kremlin did not stop at expressions of disappointment, though. The Company launched a covert campaign in Buenos Aires under the banner “Argentina doesn’t need a foreign war” – commissioning 89 works of graffiti across the city, hanging banners opposing Ukraine at football matches, and waging a so-called “anti-war campaign” on social media.
The agents also told their superiors that they were assigning articles to “popular” columnists – openDemocracy was able to identify pieces they published on this theme, but none were by well-known commentators, and most did not have bylines – and contacting politicians and writing their statements “on the harm of support of Ukraine for Argentine national interests”. openDemocracy could not confirm whether this took place.
In fact, the leaked documents include a biography of one Alexey Evgenievich Shilov, that states he joined the Company in 2016 and “organised and conducted a socio-political operation to discredit the pro-Ukrainian policy of the leadership of Argentina”. Yet despite these efforts, the war in Ukraine remained a marginal issue for the public in Argentina.
Donald Trump’s return to the White House in January 2025, and his inconsistent negotiations with Russian President Vladimir Putin, further complicated the politics in the region: A month into Trump’s tenure, the US voted against a UN resolution calling for an immediate Russian withdrawal from the Ukraine occupied territories. Argentina, which had previously been supportive of Ukraine, abstained.
Later that year, Milei’s party secured a narrow victory and won more seats in Congress – despite being embroiled in corruption scandals – after Trump made clear that a $20bn bailout for the Argentinian economy was contingent on Milei’s party winning the mid-term elections, leading to concerns that it was, in fact, the US that was interfering in Argentina’s elections.
“The outcome of [the Russian] investment was the opposite of what was theoretically intended, which also makes me question its true motives,” Becerra, the media expert, said. He suggested that the intention of Russia’s operations in Argentina could have been to deepen the sense of national crisis by undermining the credibility of its institutions.
“Wagner and Putin disinfo operations involve creating chaos and disorder, undermining the credibility of institutions that were once regarded as legitimate, including the media and journalists”, he said. The goal, ultimately, is “to take advantage of the turmoil”.
Becerra cautioned that Russian disinfo campaigns should not be read as single-purposed. “In one context, they may favour someone like Donald Trump and, in another, damage his reputation”.
openDemocracy has reached out to the Argentinian presidential office, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the intelligence service SIDE, the Russian embassy, Shilov and the SVR for comment. None of them answered our questions.
* Sofía Álvarez Jurado and Santiago O’Donnell contributed to this investigation.
Investigative team for this series: Lydia Namubiru, Youri van der Weide, Sabrina Slipchenko, Emmanuel Freudenthal, Kiri Rupiah, Ira Dolinina, Léa Peruchon, Édouard Perrin, Katya Hakim, Diana Cariboni, Eloïse Layanand, Sofía Álvarez Jurado.
Partners: openDemocracy, The Continent, All Eyes on Wagner/INPACT, Forbidden Stories, iStories, Dossier Center.
This story was updated on 9 April 2026 to include answers provided by Ambito media outlet.
