Moscow Ever More Actively Subverting Non-russian Organizations – Analysis

Key Takeaways

• Moscow has long sought to disorder and destroy movements opposed to its control of the non-Russian peoples of the Russian Federation. Given these groups’ growing international prominence, the Kremlin is increasingly seeking instead to subvert and control them.
• Many groups that participate in meetings at the United Nations and other forums, ostensibly on behalf of these peoples, are not speaking for those nations. Instead, they promote the Kremlin’s line, undermining the national movements they claim to represent.
• This effort is sowing confusion among international interlocutors. Genuine activists are fighting back by exposing what Moscow is doing, an unequal struggle given the imbalance between the Kremlin’s resources and their own.

Moscow has long sought to disorder and destroy movements opposed to its control of the non-Russian peoples of the Russian Federation. Given the new prominence these groups have acquired internationally, they are increasingly seeking instead to subvert and control them, not only at home but abroad. That approach has its roots in the infamous Trust operation of the 1920s, launched by the Cheka, the first Soviet secret police, which is a direct institutional ancestor of today’s Federal Security Service (FSB), and an operation that has served as a model for many Soviet and even more Russian President Vladimir Putin-era actions (Simpkins and Dyer, The Trust, July 1989; Window on Eurasia, July 2, 2020; see EDM, September 15, 2022, September 30, 2025).

The consequence today is that many groups appearing at the United Nations and other forums, ostensibly on behalf of these peoples, are not speaking for those nations but rather promoting Moscow’s line, undermining the national movements they claim to represent, and confusing their international interlocutors (Indigenous Russia, July 12). Genuine activists are fighting back by exposing the practice, an unequal struggle given the imbalance between the Kremlin’s resources and their own (Batani; Indigenous Russia, July 8).

A century ago, Cheka founder Felix Dzerzhinsky set up Operation Trust, the first Soviet false-flag operation, to subvert, disorder, and discredit the anti-Bolshevik White Russian emigration. Putin’s Chekist successor state has launched Trust-style operations against the national movements of various peoples and, increasingly, against their representation in international bodies. The original Trust involved setting up a Cheka-controlled organization inside Russia that purportedly sought to overthrow the Bolsheviks and welcomed cooperation with the emigration, while insisting that it, not anyone abroad, control all decisions. (For background on the complex history of Dzerzhinsky’s Trust, see Simpkins and Dyer, The Trust, 1989.)

Many White Russian leaders accepted the organization as genuine, deferred to its decisions, and handed Moscow control of their own movement. When the operation was exposed in 1927, almost certainly as part of a Soviet plan, those leaders stood discredited in the eyes of the Western groups and governments with which they had cooperated. That final twist explains why Moscow has continued to use this approach. A Trust-style operation succeeds even when it is exposed and appears to fail, because exposure itself spreads suspicion across every organization, genuine or not. Putin, far less constrained ideologically than his predecessors and ready to deploy businesses under his control, has used the model with a vengeance (Window on Eurasia, February 11, 2009,January 10, 2017, October 26, 2018).

The clearest example of Putin’s Trust-style approach involves his operations against the Circassians, a North Caucasus people whose national movement has long pressed Moscow over the 19th-century expulsions, and their supporters abroad (Ekhokavkaza, June 30, 2020). Two developments remove any doubt about the campaign’s character. For example, Moscow has labeled The Jamestown Foundation “an undesirable organization” largely because it covered the Circassians (seeThe Jamestown Foundation, April 9, 2020).

Russian media outlets have meanwhile mounted scurrilous attacks on Western supporters of the Circassian cause, including the author of these lines, both to discredit them personally and to imply that the Circassian movement is not genuine but a creation of Western intelligence services (Window on Eurasia, July 2, 2020, July 28, 2024). The most dangerous feature of these efforts is that Putin’s security services prefer to capture existing organizations rather than build new ones, calculating that a takeover confuses supporters and divides movements far more effectively than any counterfeit could. That is what Moscow has done with Circassians, and more thoroughly with the numerically small peoples of the North and Siberia (Indigenous Russia, July 1).

Expanding on those efforts, the Russian security services and their allies in the business community have now moved to capture the representation of the non-Russian minorities of the Russian Federation in international forums, often using genuine institutions that arose in the 1990s as cover for substitutes promoting the Kremlin’s position. Such moves have attracted little attention in the international media. They have now been documented in detail by the authentic national movements of the numerically small peoples of the Russian North and Siberia. They merit close attention, as they reveal information about Moscow’s repression of non-Russians at home and how the Kremlin is subverting the principles of the United Nations and other international organizations from within (Arctida, July 7; Batani, July 8; Indigenous Russia, July 8 [1], [2]).

As these reports detail, the subversion of once-genuine and widely respected organizations—such as the Russian Association of Indigenous, Small-Numbered Peoples of the North, Siberia, and Far East (RAIPON; Ассоциация коренных малочисленных народов Севера, Сибири и Дальнего Востока Российской Федерации, АКМНССиДВ)—is carried out by a ramified and well-funded system that includes the School of Diplomacy of the Russian Foreign Ministry, the Federal Agency for Nationality Affairs, the Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO), and the mining giant Nornickel.

Backed by these resources and by the security agencies’ power to arrest anyone who opposes them, the Kremlin’s effort has replaced genuine representatives of these nationalities at international meetings with pseudo-representatives who parrot the Kremlin line. At ever more international meetings, it is Russian government officials with close ties to the security agencies or big businesses who speak, rather than the peoples involved. (For additional evidence of how active this combination of state and business structures currently is, see this news portal on the life of indigenous small-numbered peoples, KMNSOYUZ-NEWS, accessed July 16.)

The Kremlin’s effort deprives non-Russian groups of the ability to speak about their problems and hopes, and it leads many non-Russians to grow suspicious of any public activity conducted in their name, allowing Moscow to kill two birds with one stone. Such actions must be exposed. As the Trust’s history shows, Moscow has factored exposure into its planning and stands ready to profit from it. The powers that be in the Russian capital are likely convinced that revelation will not prevent them from using the same tactic again, as they have for more than a century, and that each cycle of subversion and exposure will lead ever more of the peoples they seek to control to abandon the struggle.

Steps can be taken to prevent the Kremlin from continuing these tactics. Moscow’s attack on the genuine representatives of the non-Russian nations must be recognized and exposed as a broader strategy rather than a one-time tactic. The international community, alongside the non-Russians, is the target of such Kremlin moves. Those who claim to speak for the non-Russians must be those who are not Kremlin creatures operating under a false flag.

• This article was published by The Jamestown Foundation