The Kremlin’s European Courtship — How Russia Courts the Extremes, and Why Europe Keeps Letting Her

Monday 16 February 2026

There is a persistent misunderstanding in European political life that Russian interference is a matter of crude propaganda aimed at the general public — a spray of falsehoods, a thicket of anonymous accounts, a few angry slogans amplified online. That exists, of course, and it matters. But the more corrosive strand is quieter — targeted influence aimed not at voters directly but at the intermediaries who translate public feeling into policy: parties, candidates, advisers, donors, media platforms and the small circle of operatives who sit between them.

Russia’s method is not, in essence, ideological. She is opportunistic. She seeks leverage wherever European politics is weakest — at the fringes where resentment is most easily turned into a political weapon, where institutional scepticism becomes institutional contempt, and where a longing for simple explanations makes complex realities feel like conspiracies. The far right and the far left are not identical — their emotional registers differ, their histories diverge — yet both can be made to rhyme with Kremlin objectives: weakening support for Ukraine, delegitimising sanctions, normalising conquest as ‘realism’ and corroding faith in the Atlantic alliance that has constrained Moscow for generations.

The result is not a single, centrally directed ‘capture’ of Europe, like a spy novel. It is something more modern and more plausible — a series of transactions, relationships and insinuations that aim to make pro-Russian positions sound domestic, indigenous and therefore legitimate.

Why the extremes are tempting targets

Russia is drawn to parties that already carry at least one of the following traits:

A moral narrative in which the West is always the prime mover and therefore always the prime culprit — even when she is responding to an invasion.

A taste for ‘anti-system’ performance — contempt for parliaments, courts, regulators, journalists, diplomats and intelligence services, presented as authenticity rather than nihilism.

A willingness to treat international law as theatre — and power as the only real currency.

A dependency on alternative media channels — where editorial standards are weak, financial opacity is common, and the line between opinion and paid messaging is easily blurred.

A romantic attraction to ‘strongman’ politics — whether framed as national revival on the right or anti-imperial defiance on the left.

These are not uniquely Russian vulnerabilities. But Russia exploits them with a particular talent — she does not need to persuade a party to adopt a fully pro-Kremlin worldview. She needs only to shift the terms of debate, to make doubt feel sophisticated and to make solidarity feel naïve.

Reform UK and the British case — influence through individuals rather than institutions

In Britain the most publicly documented instance of direct party-adjacent compromise in recent years has centred on Nathan Gill, a former Member of the European Parliament and former leader of Reform UK in Wales. In November 2025 he was sentenced to ten and a half years’ imprisonment after pleading guilty to multiple bribery offences. The Metropolitan Police described the case as involving payments made in exchange for pro-Russian statements, framed as his own, delivered in political contexts. 

The case matters for two reasons.

First, it demonstrates that influence does not always require the formal capture of a party machine — it can work through a single credible figure with access to platforms, networks and a sheen of legitimacy. Parliamentarians are particularly valuable in this regard because their speech has an institutional gloss: it is reported differently, archived differently, and repeated by other actors as ‘evidence’ that respectable people agree.

Secondly, the British case illustrates how Russian influence networks often route themselves through proxies — figures and structures that are not, on paper, the Russian state. The Gill case was reported in connection with Oleg Voloshyn, described by police and press reporting as a suspected Russian asset and linked in broader reporting to pro-Kremlin Ukrainian political networks. 

Britain has long comforted itself with the idea that her institutions are too old, too cynical and too well-lawyered to be vulnerable. Yet modern influence is not always a matter of bribing a party treasurer or buying a newspaper — it is often a matter of paying for content, underwriting travel, granting access, flattering egos and cultivating a slow dependency on attention.

And attention — in contemporary politics — is a form of currency.

The ‘Voice of Europe’ model — paying for narratives and laundering them through media

If one wishes to understand Russian influence in Europe since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the ‘Voice of Europe’ scandal is close to a textbook example — a media platform used as a conduit for money and messaging, allegedly designed to promote Russia-friendly politicians and narratives ahead of European elections.

Czech authorities sanctioned ‘Voice of Europe’ in 2024 as part of a pro-Russian influence operation, with subsequent investigations and political debate at European level focused on whether politicians were paid for interviews and statements. The European Parliament itself addressed these allegations in formal proceedings. 

German reporting and law-enforcement action placed figures linked to the Alternative for Germany (AfD) within the orbit of these allegations — including an investigation into Petr Bystron over suspected Russian-linked payments, which he denied. 

In the Netherlands, reporting linked the investigation to a staff member connected to Dutch MEP Marcel de Graaff, with raids and inquiries framed within the broader ‘Voice of Europe’ operation. 

The strategic elegance of this model is worth underlining. Rather than broadcasting propaganda directly — which can be flagged, rebutted and mocked — Russia uses an intermediary platform that appears European, sounds European and frames itself as dissent rather than influence. Then the messaging can be re-circulated by genuine domestic actors who may not even know — or may prefer not to know — who paid for the microphone.

France’s National Rally — finance as political gravity

France offers one of the most cited examples of Russian proximity: the 2014 loan to the then National Front, later Rassemblement National, from a Russian bank. The loan and subsequent debt arrangements have been widely reported for years, and the party has at times presented repayment as evidence of distance from Moscow. 

The significance of this episode is not simply that money changed hands. It is that finance creates gravity. A party financed through a Russian-linked channel becomes vulnerable to a story — that she is beholden, that she is compromised, that her ‘independence’ is performative. Even if individual policy choices are not dictated by Moscow, the association is politically useful to Russia because it breeds cynicism in the electorate: if everyone is corrupt, then nothing is worth defending.

That cynicism is one of Russia’s favourite exports.

Italy’s Lega — the seduction of energy money and the performance of geopolitics

Italy’s Lega has been associated in reporting with a different kind of influence attempt — less about formal party loans and more about the machinery of energy finance. Investigations and journalistic work have centred on a recorded 2018 meeting at Moscow’s Metropol Hotel discussing a proposed oil deal that would have channelled funds towards the party’s political activities, an allegation repeatedly denied by key political figures. 

Energy is not merely an economic sector in this story — it is a political technology. It creates intermediaries, commissions, offshore structures and plausible deniability. It offers the promise of money that does not look like money — money disguised as commerce. That is precisely why it attracts influence operations: it is easier to camouflage politics as business than it is to camouflage business as politics.

Austria’s FPÖ — institutional courtship and formalised proximity

Austria’s Freedom Party (FPÖ) illustrates yet another method: open political courtship dressed as sovereign diplomacy. The FPÖ signed a cooperation agreement with Russia’s ruling party, United Russia, in 2016 — an overt act that did not require secrecy because it could be defended as ‘dialogue’ or ‘non-alignment’. 

This is influence by normalisation. When proximity is formal, it becomes harder to criticise without being accused of intolerance — as though objecting to partnership with an aggressive authoritarian state is the same as objecting to a domestic political opponent’s existence. Russia benefits from this confusion because it reframes moral clarity as hysteria.

Austria also demonstrates how influence can spill beyond parties into the security sphere — with recent Austrian cases involving allegations of Russia-linked espionage and compromised networks. 

The far left — a different vocabulary, similar outcomes

The far left’s vulnerability is not, typically, admiration for strongman nationalism. It is a moral narrative in which the West is always the primary engine of violence — so that Russian violence becomes, at worst, reactive, and at best, invisible.

This can manifest as an obsessive focus on NATO as the origin of conflict, an allergic response to sanctions as ‘collective punishment’, and a habit of treating Eastern European states as mere pawns rather than moral agents — as though Ukraine could not choose her own future without being a Western marionette.

The most publicly documented recent cases with direct intelligence allegations have not been confined neatly to left or right, but one prominent example sits closer to the left-populist milieu: Latvian MEP Tatjana Ždanoka. In 2024 she was the subject of investigations and criminal proceedings in Latvia following media reporting that alleged she had cooperated with Russian intelligence, claims she denied. The European Parliament also initiated inquiries. 

Whether one labels such figures far left, nationalist-left, or simply pro-Kremlin is less important than the pattern: Russia seeks out politicians who can speak a language of moral protest while delivering outcomes that serve imperial policy.

What Russia actually wants — and why ‘softness’ is not neutrality

Across these cases — Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Austria, the Baltic region — Russia’s objectives converge:

To weaken Europe’s material support for Ukraine, so that she is forced into disadvantageous negotiations.

To erode sanction regimes, whether through formal votes or through cultural fatigue.

To delegitimise intelligence and security warnings as partisan smears.

To split Europe from the United States, portraying the Atlantic relationship as subservience rather than alliance.

To corrode democratic confidence, so that citizens stop believing that truth exists at all.

A party does not need to declare love for Putin to serve these aims. It is enough to call for ‘peace’ while refusing to name the aggressor — enough to treat territorial conquest as a regrettable but natural event — enough to demand ‘compromise’ solely from the invaded.

Softness in this context is not neutrality. It is asymmetry — a tenderness towards the aggressor’s stated fears, and a harshness towards the victim’s lived reality.

What can be done — without destroying democracy to save it

There is a temptation, when faced with foreign interference, to reach for sweeping bans and moral panics. Europe should resist that temptation. Russia would enjoy nothing more than a European overreaction that discredits liberal democracy as hypocritical.

But there are practical steps — prosaic, legalistic, and therefore effective.

Transparency of political finance — with real enforcement power, not polite reporting requirements.

Stronger rules on paid political content — including media platforms that function as influence laundries while posing as journalism.

Serious vetting and accountability for parliamentary staff — because staffers are often the hidden arteries through which influence circulates. 

Swift procedures for lifting immunity where credible evidence exists — immunity should protect democratic speech, not protect covert payment schemes.

Public resilience — not the vague slogan of ‘media literacy’, but the specific civic habit of asking, every time an emotionally perfect narrative arrives on cue: who benefits, who paid, and who wants me tired.

Europe will not defeat Russian influence by pretending that her own fringes are uniquely wicked. She will defeat it by admitting that political systems are porous — that vanity and money and attention are universal vulnerabilities — and by building a culture where foreign leverage is treated as a scandal regardless of whether it flatters one’s own side.

Russia will continue to court Europe’s extremes — because extremes are easy to flatter and cheap to use. The question is whether European democracies will keep confusing provocation with independence, and cynicism with insight — or whether they will finally treat sovereignty not as a slogan, but as a discipline.