Aleksandr Viktorovich Ionov

Aleksandr Ionov has long been seen as a freelance pro-Kremlin activist helping advance a government-backed war of attrition against perceived enemies. He’s hardly a stranger to the spotlight. In March 2019, The Atlantic magazine described Ionov’s group as an NGO “partly funded, but not directly controlled, by the Kremlin,” and noted that Ionov had been trying to promote fringe separatist movements in the United States since well before 2016. In 2015, the organization hosted a conference in Moscow called “Dialogue of Nations” which brought together separatist groups from the United States, Europe, and Ukraine. News reports said the conference was funded by the National Charity Fund, a charity started in the late 1990s that gets money from major state-owned and public companies and oligarchs.