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A former sheriff from Florida, a member of the French military and a Swiss intelligence officer were among 12 individuals sanctioned by the European Union on 15 December.
The measures initiated by France also led a host of Russian nationals to be sanctioned, in light of Russia’s continued hybrid warfare targeting the EU’s member states and its partners.
The three Westerners have used their former careers in Western police forces, military or intelligence to gain credibility, according to experts.
“Their past careers in intelligence and the military conjure up ideas of secrecy, as well as the notion of the ‘deep state’ for the public,” Hervé Letoqueux, CEO at Check First, a company which monitors disinformation, told Euronews’ fact-checking team, The Cube.
“The fact these individuals have these past professions ultimately allows them to say pretty much anything, meaning that they don’t need to prove anything; it gives them a form of authority, so they can say whatever they want,” added Letoqueux, who previously headed France’s agency for foreign digital interference, Viginum.
Xavier Moreau
Xavier Moreau is a French-born former military officer and businessman, described as a disseminator of “Kremlin propaganda” in Europe by France’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Jean-Noël Barrot.
Moreau, who acquired Russian citizenship in 2013, has lived in Russia since 2000.
He has spread a host of disproven pro-Kremlin narratives, for instance, claiming that Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine was orchestrated by NATO, and that Kyiv was responsible for shooting down Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 in 2014.
In 2014, Moreau participated in Russia’s so-called referendums on the annexation of Crimea and later of the Donbas region — which were not recognised by the international community — as a “foreign observer”.
The same year, he launched his “Stratpol” website, presenting himself as a “political and strategic analysis expert”. Since then, Moreau has appeared as a guest on a number of fringe far-right YouTube channels, but also on mainstream media outlets, from Sud Radio to broadcaster LCI.
Outside of the French media ecosystem, he has also been interviewed on Russian-backed Sputnik and Russia Today France.
After being banned from posting on his YouTube account in 2022, due to violating the platform’s hate speech policies, Moreau became active on streaming platforms Rumble and Odysee.
Jacques Baud
Jacques Baud is the second Swiss national to be hit with sanctions related to Russian propaganda activities in recent months, after Swiss-Cameroonian influencer Nathalie Yamb was banned from entering the EU in April.
Baud, a former Swiss army colonel and strategic analyst, regularly makes appearances on pro-Russian television and radio programmes, suggesting, for example, that Ukraine had orchestrated its own invasion, as part of a plan to gain NATO membership.
“The sanctioned individuals, in a way, share a fascination with authoritarian power. Jacques Baud, for example, displayed sympathies for Bashar al-Assad, denying the abuses committed by his regime,” said Letoqueux.
According to Letoqueux, the impact of Moreau and Baud’s propaganda is relatively modest, as “they target or at least seek to convince a section of the population which is already largely won over, with affiliations to conspiracy theorists and ultra-nationalists”.
For Letoqueux, their media appearances can have a bigger impact, “until recently, a number of media outlets — particularly in France — were giving them airtime and allowing them to disseminate their pro-Kremlin narrative on a regular basis, reaching a segment of the population that is probably less equipped to detect these narratives.
John Mark Dougan
John Mark Dougan, a US citizen who worked as a former deputy sheriff in Florida and fled to Moscow in 2016, is also among those sanctioned.
Dougan has played a key role in pushing pro-Kremlin disinformation campaigns across Europe, supporting the activities of Storm-1516, a Russian propagandist operation which aims to discredit the West and Ukraine.
He has also been pushing the CopyCop network of fake news websites: online outlets which mimic the work of legitimate news organisations through videos and stories, with many produced using AI.
As part of this work, Dougan was suspected of operating a network of more than 100 AI websites ahead of Germany’s snap federal elections in February.
According to the EU, reports from Western authorities, as well as investigative reporting has tied Dougan to Russia’s military agency, as well as the Center Geopolitical Expertise, a Moscow-based think tank, which has been linked to information and manipulation operations targeting the West and Ukraine.
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