The Kingdom of Lies

Ez a cikk magyarul is elérhető.

On January 11, 2017, Oleg Solodukhin, Deputy Director of the Russian Center for Science and Culture in Prague, literally woke up world famous. „The phone calls started early in the morning. I received calls nearly from all over the world – the Washington Post, the New York Times, the BBC, Radio Liberty, Czech Television, Euronews…  I cannot remember all of them now, but I had a feeling that everyone wanted me at once. That’s how I found out about Steele’s dossier and about the mention of myself in this dossier,” Solodukhin recalls in his conversation with Magyar Demokrata. 

According to the Steele dossier, Donald Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen met with Solodukhin, who is described in the report as a representative of Russian intelligence, in late August and early September 2016, at the height of the US presidential campaign. The meeting, as noted in the report, discussed the transfer of money to Romanian hackers for attacks on the servers of the US Democratic Party. 

Steele’s dossier was made public after Donald Trump was elected President of the United States, but shortly before his inauguration. 

The information from the dossier, which was widely picked up by the media from almost all over the world, primarily from the United States, did not just spoil Trump’s mood on the eve of his inauguration. The dossier and the information it contained have been repeatedly used as the basis for allegations about Trump’s ties with the Kremlin and the Russian intelligence and for attacks on him by his opposition throughout the first term of his presidency. 

“How and why did we get to this point?”

A special investigation was conducted into Steele’s dossier by Prosecutor Robert Mueller, but eventually he admitted that much of the information from the dossier was not confirmed. 

In particular, Michael Cohen, as it turned out, had neither been to Prague nor to the Czech Republic in general in his life. And even more so, he has never met Oleg Solodukhin. And Oleg Solodukhin, a PR expert, has never had anything to do with intelligence or hackers. There was only a grotesque distant connection with Romania – Solodukhin’s mother was an ethnic Moldovan.  

Even after Robert Mueller’s speech in the US Congress, media outlets were in no hurry to admit their mistakes regarding the publication of unconfirmed information from the dossier, but many of them were forced to do so. 

For example, the Washington Post removed parts of the materials and videos that were published in 2017 and 2019, from its website. 

The Voice of America website recalls that „CNN, which covered the Steele dossier in detail, published an article stating that many parts of the report were inaccurate and highlighting the ‘political nature of some key sensational allegations’.” 

The Steele dossier, albeit ultimately found to be largely fabricated, influenced the course of Trump’s election campaign in 2020 and eventually became one of the reasons for his defeat. 

The second term of Trump’s presidency began with a number of orders, among which was the decision to terminate all contracts of the General Services Administration (GSA) with the US media. As the Axios portal reported on February 6, 2025, his order was sent by email from the White House to the GSA. 

Trump’s conflict with a number of media outlets, which began during his first election campaign, is just gaining momentum. However, even before this conflict began, media experts, analyzing both Steele’s dossier and other media failures that did not consider it necessary, did not have time or did not want to check the facts, asked the question: „How and why did we get to this point?”

It’s not just about Trump and not only about the American media. The ease of labeling and unwillingness or inability to check the published facts leads to conflicts in another part of the world – in Europe. And here, too, a number of media outlets have to bear „responsibility for irresponsibility”.  

Inaccurate information as the basis for sanctions

In the European Union, EU sanctions against a number of Russian entrepreneurs, businessmen, public figures and their family members have become grounds for conflicts with the media. 

It turned out that the EU, when justifying sanctions, often uses not only editorial materials, but also articles from Wikipedia, opinions of anonymous experts, etc. 

For example, the dossier of Russian billionaire Vyacheslav Kantor allowed Politico journalists to familiarize themselveswith what the „evidence” for his EU sanctions case looks like. That evidence included, for example, articles marked as „advertising”. The Politico piece also reveals that the materials used to justify the sanctions include Wikipedia articles, cooking publications, AI-generated text, and notes by authors who write under aliases or are purely fictitious.

Violetta Prigozhina, the mother of the founder of Wagner PMC, Yevgeny Prigozhin, was included in the sanctions lists based on materials on Wikipedia, where she was listed as a co-owner of her son’s businesses. Violetta Prigozhina’s lawyers managed to prove the falseness of the information presented in the media and, accordingly, in the justification for the imposition of the EU sanctions. As a result, Violetta Prigozhina won the case against the EU.  

Russian-Uzbek billionaire Alisher Usmanov has become the leader in the fight against defamation in the media. The tycoon, who made his fortune through investments in metals and mining and communications (according to Bloomberg, his fortune was estimated at $17.5 billion in February 2025), found himself under the EU sanctions at the end of February 2022, immediately after the outbreak of hostilities in Ukraine. 

Usmanov, who immediately announced that he considered the sanctions against him unfair, is fighting on two fronts. On the one hand, he appealed the inclusion in the sanctions lists with the EU Court of Justice, on the other hand, his team is consistently and rigorously seeking to remove false and inaccurate information about the billionaire, primarily the information used as the basis for the EU sanctions. 

According to his lawyers, in the past 3 years they have obtained over 10 injunctions against the dissemination of false information about Usmanov by European media outlets. These are supplemented by some 40 cease-and-desist letters by mass media outlets and public figures.

The most high-profile litigations were Usmanov’s lawsuits against the Austrian Kurier, the US Forbes, and the German daily Tagesspiegel. 

As a result, Kurier was unable to substantiate its claim in court that the Russian president allegedly called Usmanov his „favorite oligarch”. Forbes could not prove that the billionaire allegedly „acted as Putin’s frontman” and „solved his business problems”. Tagesspiegel failed to provided evidence acceptable by the court that Usmanov acquired his assets through „services and cooperation” with the Russian authorities, or that he owned expensive real estate in Germany and the famous Dilbar yacht. 

The German Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) publicly claimed in its Twitter (now X) account that the yacht belonged to Usmanov’s sister Gulbahor Ismailova, a gynecologist from Uzbekistan. Later, at the request of Ismailova’s lawyers, the Federal Criminal Police Office deleted the posts and committed not to repeat such statements in the future. The other day, Germany’s largest news agency DPA withdrew a news piece based on the Federal Criminal Police Office’s statement about the yacht. Following that, reprints of the article were deleted from the websites of more than a dozen German media outlets.

All the allegations contested by Usmanov were reproduced in the reasoning part of the EU Council’s decision to impose sanctions against the billionaire. To this day, however, the sanctions status of Usmanov and Gulbahor Ismailova has not been affected by their success in the fight against defamation. After the courts found the allegations in the articles about the billionaire to be unlawful and banned them, the EU modified the wording of part of the arguments without revising whether or not they are still valid to be used. 

Usmanov’s representative considers this situation „outrageous, but no longer surprising. There has never been a juristic component to the EU sanctions against Alisher Usmanov and Gulbahor Ismailova – nothing but politics. Rumors, unverified information, trivial cliches: all these contents of EU Council sources was used as ”evidence„ in the indictments. Their debunking has no effect on the position of the EU, which further confirms the political rather than juristic nature of the sanctions,” the billionaire’s spokesman says.