‘No Random Actor’: Serbian Website Channels Kremlin, AfD Talking Points

Under President Vladimir Putin, Russia has used the law to target journalists, activists and critics of the Kremlin and, in particular, its war in Ukraine.

But Eagle Eye Explore did not stop there.

Since its first article, the website has published hundreds more parroting disinformation and Kremlin talking points and extolling the far-right, in particular the German party Alternative for Germany, AfD, all while flouting Serbian law requiring media outlets to name their publishers and editors.

According to the results of a BIRN open-source investigation, the site bears all the hallmarks of a Kremlin-backed propaganda channel, from hidden ownership and cryptocurrency donation options, to its collaboration with journalists employed by Russian media and the AfD itself, as well as its promotion via pro-Russian Telegram channels and Russian state-affiliated media.

“The pattern you identified represents a characteristic signature of Kremlin-backed media ecosystems that has been extensively documented,” said Ruslan Trad, a fellow at DFRLab, the Digital Forensic Research Lab of the Atlantic Council, a US NGO.

In a 2025 study published by the Friedrich Naumann Foundation and called Russia Paving the Way for Autocracies, researchers identified Serbia as a central hub for the spread of Russian influence in the Balkan region via Kremlin-financed Sputnik and the Balkan arm of Russia Today.

Sputnik and Russia Today have both been banned in the European Union, which Serbia wants to join, since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. 

In 2023, the EU’s executive arm, the European Commission, warned of Moscow’s influence on media in the Balkans, saying Kremlin propaganda was “particularly effective in Serbia, where part of the local media and some mainstream political forces disseminate pro-Russian narratives, including throughout the Western Balkan region”.

Imprint missing

Eagle Eye Explore does not contain an imprint, sometimes known as a legal notice or impressum, that would normally name the publisher, editor-in-chief and other editorial staff and provide contact details, despite this being required under Serbian law for all media outlets. 

Neither is the site registered in Serbia’s national media registry, which would otherwise provide insight into its ownership and finances.

Ana Martinoli, media theorist, producer, and professor at the Faculty of Dramatic Arts in Belgrade, said an imprint is “a key instrument of media transparency and accountability”. 

“It allows the audience to assess the credibility and possible interests – most often political or financial – behind the content.”

“It is not merely a formality, but identifies who makes editorial decisions and who the publisher is – which is important both for self-regulation (ethics) and for legal protection (e.g., the right of reply/correction, protection of personal rights, establishing responsibility),” Martinoli told BIRN by email.

In Serbia, media publishers who fail to include an imprint or whose imprint is false or lacks the required information can be fined between 100,000 and a million dinars, or between roughly 850 and 8,500 euros.

On several occasions, a journalist called Natasa Jovanovic has spoken publicly as ‘editor-in-chief’ of Eagle Eye Explore. Jovanovic is a journalist for Sputnik, RT Balkan and the pro-Russian Serbian newspapers Pecat and Vecernje Novosti; her byline appears on 14 texts on Eagle Eye Explore, but when contacted by BIRN she did not answer whether she is indeed the editor-in-chief.

“I expected journalistic questions, but instead received ones that only security forces and a prosecutor have the right to ask, and even they would have to act within the framework of Serbia’s current media legislation,” Jovanovic said in an emailed response.

Several months after the site’s launch, Jovanovic and two others whose work has appeared on Eagle Eye Explore, attended a ‘media school’ event in Belgrade organised at the Russian House with the support of the Russian foreign ministry.

“Russians are our brothers,” Jovanovic said at the event, according to the Telegram channel of Russian House. “When I say ‘brothers’, I do not mean the word in the usual sense. We are together; we share the same history, as well as spiritual and political ties. It is very important that Serbia is on the right side of history and that it is always with the Russians.”

BIRN was unable to track down the author of the site’s first ever article, Ratko Nikolic, whose byline has not appeared since.

AfD bylines and interviewees

Anton Friesen of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) has penned one article for Eagle Eye Explore. Photo: Hayoung Jeon/EPA

The Eagle Eye Explore domain is registered with Toronto-based Tucows, one of the world’s largest accredited domain registrars; Tucows offers an identity protection service that ensures all information about the domain owner – name, address, and email – is replaced with generic data, effectively ensuring anonymity. 

The practice is legal, and Tucows told BIRN that any information about who registered the domain can only be disclosed on the basis of an official order from the competent authorities of Canada, Denmark, Germany, or the United States.

Tard, of DFRLab, said it showed Eagle Eye Explore had gone to significant lengths to conceal its origins.

“The operational security profile of Eagle Eye Explore indicates sophisticated intent beyond mere legal evasion,” he told BIRN. 

“This configuration represents a deliberately constructed anonymisation architecture designed to prevent attribution, avoid sanctions compliance, and enable deniability while maintaining operational continuity. This specific combination is the hallmark signature of Kremlin-backed influence networks documented extensively by DFRLab and other researchers.”

The option of donations in cryptocurrency also “mirrors patterns identified in Russian influence operations”, he said.

Eagle Eye Explore has roughly 40 contributors, and features mainly op-eds as well as interviews with far-right figures from countries including Germany, Hungary, France, Italy, Romania, Georgia, and Moldova. These interviews have appeared in paid ads online and, according to data from Facebook Ads Library, were promoted among target audiences in Hungary, Germany, and Italy.

Roughly a quarter of the published interviews are with AfD politicians, including Bjorn Hocke, head of the party’s branch in the central German state of Thuringia and described by Der Spiegel as the “real boss” of the AfD. A former history teacher, in 2024 Hocke was convicted by a German court of knowingly using a Nazi slogan – ‘Everything for Germany’ – during a 2021 rally.

Among the bylines on the site can be found the names of AfD politicians Artur Abramovic and Anton Friesen.

Data from the website’s content management system (CMS) – the software used to create, manage, modify and publish digital content and whose metadata is publicly available – show that administrator access accounts were opened in the names of both men, but BIRN was unable to determine whether the log-in credentials were ever used or sent to them.

Both Abramovic and Friesen denied ever having access credentials for the site. Abramovic said he originally penned the article for the German newspaper Junge Freiheit, and that it was later translated by an acquaintance into Serbian.

“I‘m not even fluent in your language, why would anyone give me such access?” he said in a response to BIRN, written in English. “But most important, I do not and have never cooperate with Russian state organisations, officials nor media. I cooperate only with the Russian opposition.”

Abramovic stressed he has been “criticising the Russian government for years and wrote several articles against it, even demanding a NATO bombing of critical infrastructure in Moscow and Saint Petersburg”. 

He said he did not receive an author’s fee from Eagle Eye Explore and has no idea who runs it.

“I‘m a philologist and historian by training and have no clue about websites nor IT,” Abramovic told BIRN. “And I never got any login data or anything similar from those people I don‘t even know.”

Likewise, Friesen told BIRN he does not work “with Russian actors”.

“I am not planning to publish another article in Serbian media, and I have no access to administrative resources,” he wrote in English.

When asked who first contacted him regarding Eagle Eye Explore, Friesen replied: “Nobody.”

‘Ideological solidarity’

The AfD is Germany’s second largest party in nationwide polling and its largest opposition party.

In May 2025, it was designated by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, BfV – Germany’s domestic intelligence agency – as “certified right-wing extremist”, but at the end of last month, a court in Cologne issued an injunction on the use of the term pending a final ruling on a challenge lodged by the AfD.

The party’s political opponents regularly accuse it of working in the interests of Putin’s Russia, a charge the AfD denies.

Trad said that Eagle Eye Explore’s “strategy” of featuring exclusive interviews with AfD leaders and European far-right representatives, alongside Serbian national themes, “represents a deliberate implementation of what researchers identify as strategic narrative convergence”.

“The content mix isn’t random,” he said, speaking in English. “It’s architected to build ideological solidarity between regional and European forces that advance Russian geopolitical interests”.

“By platforming AfD and similar parties, Eagle Eye Explore positions itself as a node in a transnational illiberal network, where Serbian nationalism is framed not as isolated particularism but as part of a broader ‘resistance’ against Western hegemony.”

By publishing in both Serbian and English, the site targets audiences in Serbia, Kosovo, Montenegro, Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, while simultaneously positioning itself as a ‘Balkan source’ for international, pro-Russian, anti-establishment networks.

Dissemination via Serbian media

Eagle Eye Explore is far from alone in Serbia in borrowing from the Kremlin’s geopolitical talking points.

Besides Sputnik and RT Balkans, whose content is regularly picked up by Serbian media including the major dailies Politika and Vecernje Novosti and tabloids such as Alo and Informer, there is also a host of smaller, pro-Russian media outlets such as Vaseljenska, Novi Vesnik, Novi Standard, Odbrana i bezbednost, Pokret za odbranu Kosova i Metohije, Poredak and Srpski Ugao.

Eagle Eye Explore has profiles on Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and Twitter, totalling some 18,000 followers; the website also has a channel on Telegram with 1,634 members.

Links from the Telegram channel are regularly reposted by other pro-Russian media, including one of the most influential Russian military channels, Rybar (Рыбарь) and DD Geopolitics.

“The amplification of such channels is profoundly revealing,” said Trad.

“These are not random actors – they represent confirmed nodes in Russian state-affiliated influence operations.

“When these specific Telegram channels amplify a ‘small’ Serbian portal, it indicates the portal is integrated into centrally-coordinated Russian influence infrastructure.”

Eagle Eye Explore content has been picked up by Informer and Alo, the public broadcaster of Bosnia’s predominantly Serb-populated Republika Srpska entity, and Montenegrin website IN4S.

In November 2019, at a media literacy event, a diplomat from the US embassy in Podgorica, said IN4S was under the influence of the Kremlin.

Eagle Eye Explore articles have also appeared in Russian media, including state daily Rossiyskaya Gazeta, and the site has been promoted by Pravda, a network of sites identified in 2024 by Viginum, a French state agency that tracks foreign disinformation campaigns, as part of a major campaign to spread Kremlin-sourced “inaccurate or misleading narratives”.

Trad told BIRN: “Kremlin-backed propaganda sites operate through several recognisable features.”

Content is published in local media outlets and picked up across multiple media platforms and social networks, in multiple languages, to create “the illusion of independent local journalism while disseminating centrally coordinated narratives”.

The engagement of journalists who write for Russian media such as Sputnik and Russia Today is also a pattern that has been seen before, he said.

“Dual roles between Russian state media [RT and Sputnik] and supposedly independent local portals play a key strategic role,” Trad told BIRN. “They enable direct editorial guidance and coordination of narratives from Russian state media to local platforms while maintaining plausible deniability of formal links between them.”

The goal? “To undermine Western cohesion and integration into NATO and the EU, promote Euroscepticism, destabilise pro-Western governments, and create political bases favourable to Russia,” said Trad. “In targeted states, the objective is also to shape future political elites who will normalise pro-Russian narratives and promote Moscow’s strategic interests.”