The year in leaks. What leaked documents revealed about the Kremlin’s activities in Russia and abroad in 2024

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As the Russian authorities increasingly remove information from the public domain to reduce exposure to international sanctions, discourage public discontent, and prevent journalists from publishing inconvenient stories, data leaks have become more important than ever for understanding the country. This year, leaked documents shed light on topics ranging from Moscow’s domestic and foreign propaganda campaigns, the death of opposition leader Alexey Navalny, billionaire Pavel Durov’s previously undisclosed trips to Russia, and Vladimir Putin’s rumored romantic partner, Alina Kabaeva. Below are a few of the things we learned from this year’s breaches.

In 2024, we learned that:

A Russian propaganda company worked to popularize far-right parties in Europe — and created at least one meme shared by Elon Musk

A set of leaked documents obtained in September by the German outlets Süddeutsche Zeitung, NDR, and WDR and shared with multiple international outlets contained details about a major Russian disinformation campaign seeking to increase support for far-right parties and undermine support for Ukraine in the West.

According to Schemes, an investigative project from RFE/RL’s Ukrainian Service that gained access to the documents, the propaganda campaign “included a diverse mix of memes, falsified videos and government documents, and a network of websites impersonating legitimate news outlets across Europe to disseminate fake stories aimed at undermining Western support for Ukraine after Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022.” The project notes that one meme disparaging Volodymyr Zelensky for seeking Western aid for Ukraine was shared by billionaire Elon Musk.

The entity behind the campaign is a Russian IT company called the Social Design Agency (SDA), which carries out projects on behalf of the Putin administration. According to leaked documents cited by the outlet VSquare, the company’s army of bots posted 33.9 million comments and created 39,899 pieces of content on social media, including thousands of videos and memes, in the first four months of 2024.

“In internal discussions, those involved do not shy away from admitting that they are producing fake news and disinformation. Elections in Europe and the U.S. are the primary targets,” VSquare wrote.

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Pavel Durov secretly visited Russia dozens of times after publicly swearing off the country

Just days after Telegram founder Pavel Durov was arrested in Paris in late August, journalists from iStories used leaked border crossing data from Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) to determine that the billionaire had traveled to Russia more than 50 times since moving away from the country in 2014.

That year, Durov sold his stake in the social media service he founded, VKontakte, and moved out of Russia, writing: “There’s no going back. Especially after I publicly refused to cooperate with the authorities.” But according to the leaked records, Durov traveled to St. Petersburg in 2015 — and he made at least 41 more trips to Russia over the two years that followed.

The documents show that these visits continued after Moscow passed the “Yarovaya law,” which requires companies to let the FSB access user messaging data, and even after the Kremlin launched a propaganda campaign against Durov’s app Telegram following its refusal to comply with the legislation.

Alina Kabaeva, Vladimir Putin’s rumored longtime romantic partner, traveled frequently to Switzerland starting in 2014, where she reportedly gave birth to their first child

The same trove of leaked FSB data shows that former Olympic gymnast and rumored presidential girlfriend Alina Kabaeva traveled to Switzerland repeatedly beginning in 2014. The documents, highlighted by Agentstvo Media, appear to confirm earlier reporting from The Wall Street Journal and other outlets that Kabaeva went to Switzerland in 2015 to give birth to Putin’s oldest son, which the Kremlin denied.

Alexey Navalny exhibited likely poisoning symptoms in the hours before his death — and the Russian authorities redacted this from documents given to his widow

In late September, the investigative news site The Insider said it had obtained “hundreds” of documents related to opposition politician Alexey Navalny’s death in a Russian prison in February 2024. According to the outlet, the documents suggested the Russian authorities “deliberately removed mentions of symptoms that don’t fit the official version” of events from their public statements.

The Insider published two versions of the authorities’ resolution stating their refusal to investigate Navalny’s death. Both differed from the “official” version of the document that had been sent to Navalny’s widow, Yulia Navalnaya. One of the documents, ostensibly the earlier of the two versions, mentioned that Navalny experienced symptoms including abdominal pain, vomiting, and convulsing shortly before his death. Alexander Polupan, a doctor who treated Navalny after he was poisoned with the chemical nerve agent Novichok in 2020, told the outlet that in his opinion, it’s “unlikely that these symptoms can be explained by anything other than poisoning.”

Leaked documents about Navalny’s death

• New leaked version of Russian authorities’ statement of refusal to investigate Navalny’s death includes list of injuries found on his body

Then, on October 3, the Telegram channel VChK-OGPU, which claims to have inside information from Russian security forces, published what it said was the “original version” of the resolution. This document included a detailed list of injuries purportedly found on Navalny’s body during his autopsy.

The same day, the investigative site the Dossier Center published a set of leaked documents that included a list of items seized by Russian state investigators in connection with Alexey Navalny’s death. The catalogue appeared to contain everything Navalny could plausibly have touched in the hours before his death, including:

• All of Navalny’s clothing;
• His mattress, sheets, and books (a Bible, War and Peace, Pushkin’s Life and Works, and an English-Russian dictionary)
• Samples of snow from the exercise yard where, according to the Federal Penitentiary Service, Navalny first began feeling sick;
• Vomit, nail plates from both hands, hair samples, and swabs from his lips, hands, nose, and mouth.

The Russian authorities take extensive measures to make abducted Ukrainian children forget about their home country, including digital surveillance

Meduza special correspondent Lilia Yapparova studied thousands of leaked Russian Defense Ministry documents and spoke to sources from inside the ministry to piece together a picture of Russia’s efforts to indoctrinate Ukrainian children who have been forcibly deported. She found that after these children are separated from their families and taken to Russia, the Russian authorities begin working to make them forget about their home country, telling them that their parents aren’t coming to get them and that Russia is their home.

The full investigation

• ‘They could start to resist’ How the Russian authorities are working to indoctrinate and digitally surveil deported Ukrainian children

According to the leaked materials, the ministry tasks teachers with “forming a Russian identity in members of the rising generation from the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics and the Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions.” According to a guide the ministry created for teachers, the process of “reeducating” Ukrainian children based on Russian “spiritual-moral values and historical and national cultural traditions” should continue until their graduation, with the final result being the “development of a Russian identity.”

The investigation also found that the Education Ministry uses a software called Profilaktika to track millions of social media profiles, monitoring them for the spread of “anarchism,” “Nazism,” and “other forms of destructive information.” One source told Meduza that Russian officials are genuinely afraid of the deported children: “The idea that Ukrainian children are potential terrorists looms over our conversations. We’re not morons — we realize that Russia didn’t come to Ukraine with ‘peace and kindness.’”

The Russian authorities use an online program called Clicker Pulse to track whether messaging from presidential speech resonates or falls flat.

In June, Meduza published an investigation based on leaked documents about an online program the Russian authorities use to target messaging to specific segments of society. The software, called Clicker Pulse, lets propagandists track which individual messages from the president’s speeches resonate with particular demographics. Using this information, the managers of Kremlin-aligned social media pages can then boost or suppress various sound bites from Putin’s addresses and press conferences to align with what regional audiences want to hear.

Read it in full

• Meet Clicker Pulse New leaked documents show how the Kremlin tracks Russians’ reactions to Putin’s speeches — and what it does with its findings

Clicker Pulse works by asking focus group participants to click “Like” or “Dislike” every five seconds while watching videos of Putin’s speeches. It then aggregates the data, showing Dialog employees the majority reactions of various categories of viewers to each point in the speech.

This allows the Russian authorities’ vast network of social media curators to “adjust the audience for the delivery of [Putin’s] messages.” In other words, the Kremlin’s “regional governance centers” (RGCs) — agencies throughout the country that were created at Putin’s request in 2020 to get “feedback” from Russians online — can decide in real time which messages from Putin’s speeches to promote and which ones to suppress on regional pro-government social media pages and Telegram channels.

Russia tasked a secretive government tech agency with creating a nationwide surveillance system using AI equipped cameras

In March 2024, Meduza published an investigation based on documents shared as part of the Kremlin Leaks project revealing that a secretive government tech agency had been tasked with creating a Russia-wide surveillance system using a network of cameras equipped with artificial intelligence.

The full story

• ‘These wonderful cameras’ Leaked documents reveal the Kremlin’s plan for a secretive government agency to build a nationwide surveillance network

The head of Russia’s Digital Development Ministry mentioned a “platform for processing and storing data from surveillance cameras” back in late 2023, but it was unclear who would be responsible for the project. The leaked documents showed that the Russian Presidential Affairs Department’s Scientific Research Computing Center (GlavNIVTs), a semi-covert agency led by ex-intelligence personnel that focuses on advanced tech projects to meet the authorities’ needs, is also involved.

The project will involve three categories of cameras, according to the documents: one intended for use in crowded places, one intended for roads and railway crossings, and one designed to “build biometric templates of people’s faces.”

A source close to the Digital Development Ministry told Meduza in March that GlavNIVTs’s proposal for a nationwide surveillance system had been “approved at the conceptual level” but was unlikely to go into operation before “2025–2035.”

The Russian Red Cross Society, which receives funding from the International Committee of the Red Cross, openly supports Moscow and violates the movement’s rules

Another investigation based on documents released as part of the Kremlin Leaks project concerned the activities of the Russian Red Cross Society (RRC), which receives funding from the Geneva-based International Committee of the Red Cross.

Leaked Putin administration documents showed that some of the funds the Russian government allocated to the RRC were earmarked for work in occupied areas of Ukraine, and a source familiar with the organization’s activities confirmed that the RRC became “interested in working with residents of Ukraine’s occupied territories” shortly after Moscow’s full-scale invasion. Other sources described RRC workers expressing support for the invasion and humiliating and abusing Ukrainian POWs.

Yuriy Taranyuk, a representative of Ukraine’s Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War, told Meduza that he believes the International Red Cross, which increased its funding for the RRC in 2023, had not spoken publicly about the issue for fear that the Russian government would ban its operations in the occupied territories altogether.

The full investigation

• ‘They called us Ukrainian pigs’ Kyiv says Russian Red Cross employees have mocked and humiliated POWs in occupied territories

Cover photo: Sergei Savostyanov / TASS / Profimedia