The summit was also visited by Gilles Arnaud, Guillaume Tastet and Joseph-Marie Joly, who represented Agence2Presse, a branch of the French association Groupe EDH Communication working in the media sphere. As the agency stated, “over 300 top managers presenting 213 media outlets from 102 countries”, including “the leaders of such major news agencies, TV and radio channels as Associated Press, BBC, Reuters, NBC, Al Jazeera, Kyodo, Xinhua and MENA” arrived in Moscow “to discuss pressing problems facing the media society”.3 President Vladimir Putin and Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, as well as UN Secretary General Ban ki-Moon via a video-link, greeted the participants of the summit. On 5-7 July 2012, Russia’s central state news agency ITAR-TASS held a summit titled “Global Media: Challenges of the 21st Century”. In the course of time, the Russian media also established structural relations with the EU-based pro-Russian media managed by far right activists, and this article discusses these relations with a special focus on France, Italy and Slovakia. To promote the message about the decadent West, the Russian media have engaged with activists and politicians coming from the fringes of socio-political life in the West, namely the far right, far left, conspiracy theorists and isolationists who would be ideologically inclined to corroborate Moscow’s line of argument. Thus, since 2008-2009, Russian state-controlled international media decided to change their tactics: they would still employ soft power instruments to try to convince external audiences that Russia’s policies were justified, but they would also start pushing the message that the West could not criticise Russia’s actions because it was decadent, plagued by same-sex marriages, moral crisis and failing multiculturalism. 1 But Moscow’s fiasco was also understood as a failure of its international, multi-language media resources, in particular, the TV channel “Russia Today” and the radio station “Voice of Russia” (VoR). Official Moscow understood this as a failure of its soft power which can be defined, in James Sherr’s terms, as “the ability to influence the preferences and behaviour of others through affinity or attraction”.

Pro-Kremlin “Re-information” Efforts: Structural Relations between the Russian Media and the European Far RightĪfter the five-day Russian-Georgian war in August 2008, the Russian authorities realised that they had easily won the war against Georgia, but had failed to convince the West of the alleged legitimacy of their actions.

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