When asked what unites the far-right faction Patriots for Europe, the newly elected Member of the European Parliament of the Přísaha and Motorists coalition from the Czech Republic, Filip Turek, replied, "An absolutely critical approach to all Green Deal policies." Turek first gained popularity as a car collector and later as an Instagram celebrity. And it was his efforts to "save" the combustion engine and Instagram that ultimately brought him to the European Parliament.
However, Filip Turek is also known for setting up a company that sold charlatan pseudo-medicines and devices. The company offered a wide range of goods: from frequency generators called zappers and plasma generators, to supposedly miraculous solutions like "Miracle mineral supplement - MMS". Zappers are devices marketed as part of a global fraudulent scheme around so-called bioresonance. While MMS, on the other hand, is in fact diluted toxic bleach that the “church” of the quack and former Scientologist Jim Humble recommends to drink under the false pretense that it will cure virtually all diseases.
Turek also published a book written by his mother, Eleni Turková, called "The Parasites Within Us," which spread panic about a massive (in fact, non-existent) parasite pandemic. These were then supposed to be eliminated by devices and products sold by Turek's company, when in fact they have no anti-parasitic effect. The book relied on a number of fraudulent figures such as Andreas Kalcker and Hulda Clarke, whom it presented as silenced scientists fighting the corrupt medical mainstream. The book contained recommendations that were downright harmful to people, leading scientists from the Czech Biological Centre Academy of Sciences, among others, to issue a warning against the book.
Regarding the business model of pseudo-medicines and devices, Turek played only an organizational role (founder of the company and publisher), and the day-to-day operations were handled by his sister and mother. However, he successfully used an equivalent model in his election campaign for the European Parliament. Instead of charlatans building fraudulent schemes in the field of pseudo-medicine, this time he relied on entities linked to the fossil fuel industry, which has successfully blocked climate policy through sophisticated deception and manipulation for decades. Hulda Clark and Andreas Kalcker have been replaced by people like John F. Clauser and climate deception-peddling organizations like Clintel and the NIPCC.
"Green Deal is one of the biggest scams in history," Turek ran a litany in the pre-election debate. "It needs to be repealed, repealed, repealed," Turek argues on the basis of discredited and misleading sources. This leads him to the completely erroneous conclusion that climate policies are meaningless because the impact of human activity on the climate is negligible. "Are we in a time of climate crisis?" YouTuber Šimon Žďárský asked Turek on another occasion. "No, we are not!" Filip Turek replied decisively.
A proven scheme from the quack medical device trade is being repeated. Only in the place of corrupt doctors who prevent the world from achieving health, climate scientists have found themselves in the position of those who are supposedly scaring the public with fraudulent statements while destroying European industry. By joining the far-right Patriots for Europe, Turek has found himself in a faction that is full of climate science deniers. But we can find one other topic where they all find common ground: a welcoming position towards Russia. A closer look shows that these two factors seem to be linked.
Patriots of Europe and Putin
Marine Le Pen's National Association has the largest representation in the faction, as she has long supported Vladimir Putin and called for a deepening of relations with Russia and the lifting of sanctions imposed on it, which she continues to do to this day. Le Pen, in fact, denied until the last moment the suspicion that Russia was preparing to attack Ukraine. At the time of the invasion, her National Association had already printed over a million election leaflets showing Le Pen shaking hands with Putin, which suddenly had to be shredded. It is not surprising that the electoral success of the National Association, which has received funding from a Russian bank in the past, is attracting attention among Russian propaganda channels.
The second largest faction is the Hungarian Fidesz. It has undergone a transformation in recent decades from one of Putin's harshest critics to one of his most loyal allies in the EU. The sudden break came after Orbán’s visit to St Petersburg in 2009. It is not clear what happened at the meeting, but Orbán’s criticism ceased after the visit and an era of close cooperation began. Orbán also began to promote the Russian authoritarian state as a model for Hungary.
Another important member of Patriots for Europe is Matteo Salvini's Italian League. Salvini and his fellow party members founded the "Friends of Putin" group in the Italian parliament after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014. Three years later, they signed a "friendship and cooperation" agreement with Putin, which Salvini described as a "historic agreement". Even before Russia's second attack on Ukraine, Salvini referred to Putin as "the best contemporary statesman" and routinely featured his image on his T-shirt.
This pro-Putin affiliation is typical of much of the far right on the European continent in recent decades. It is the result of active relationship building, which Russia has been working on for a long time. The Patriots for Europe faction itself is thus derisively referred to as 'Patriots for Russia'. It is not surprising, therefore, that one of the first speeches they made to draw attention to themselves expressed opposition to the pro-Ukraine declaration.
But how do pro-Russian positions relate to opposition to climate policy and the Green Deal?
Climate, Russia and economic modernization
Relatively independent of Western science, Soviet climatology understood that massive emissions from human activity would lead to significant climate warming some fifty years ago, primarily through the research of the eminent Soviet climatologist Mikhail Budyko. He came up with a forecast of global temperature trends that is still remarkably accurate today. However, disagreements have nonetheless developed between the Soviet and later Russian experts and the international scientific community, particularly over the estimated dangers of climate change.
The northern USSR saw cooling as more of a problem. Warming was seen positively because it would result in reduced heating costs and an extended growing season. The opening of the northern sea route, on the other hand, could greatly help the USSR and later Russia. The perception of risk is also changing in Russia, especially as more than 70 percent of the Russian Federation is permafrost, including cities such as Yakutsk and Norilsk, and melting threatens to collapse large numbers of buildings and infrastructure.
However, there is still a widespread conspiracy theory in the Russian debate that the climate issue is merely a West's ploy to marginalize Russia's power. This theory has considerable support in the trauma of the 1990s, which produced one of the deepest economic slumps in modern history. In addition to the neoliberal shock doctrine, widespread corruption and other problems that Russia faced, there is another factor that is not often mentioned: the fall in fossil fuel prices on world markets. This became one of the reasons why the USSR ran into problems that continued throughout the 1990s. After Vladimir Putin came to power, however, the price of fossil fuels began to rise and pulled Russia out of a massive crisis.
"Year after year, fossil fuels accounted for more than two-thirds of Russia's exports and financed more than half of the federal budget. (...) This money was crucial for the stability of Russia's currency, military spending, and for maintaining the luxurious lifestyle of its elite and consumer goods for ordinary people," observes analyst Alexander Etkind in Russia Against Modernity. He continues, "The lion's share of this financing has come from Europe, which in 2021 bought three-quarters of Russia's gas exports and two-thirds of its oil exports."
The EU's energy transformation would therefore mean a significant reduction in Russian revenues, without Russia having any plan for what to do about it. Beyond the economic problems, however, the abandonment of fossil fuels poses a significant threat to Russia's geopolitical power. Indeed, Russia has long purposefully used the provision of this critical commodity to build a relationship of dependency that allows it to dominate its own state's clients far beyond what would be equivalent to Russia's economic or military capacity.
In fact, Putin's advisor, Andrei Illarionov, declared in 2004 that the Kyoto Protocol, a treaty on reducing greenhouse gas emissions, was a de facto war against Russia. Although Russia is well-placed to become a leader in decarbonization, there is no sign that it is willing to move away from its dependence on fossil fuels. In short, conservative circles around Vladimir Putin have linked Russia's future to the future of fossil fuels, as described, for example, by Finnish analyst Veli-Pekka Tynkkynen.
The whole world is heading towards a fossil fuel phase-out, which poses an immediate threat to the stability of the Russian economy, while at the same time undermining Russia's international influence. It is therefore not surprising that we see a long-standing and systematic denial of climate science in Russian information networks. The NATO report identifies an effort by Russian actors in virtually every country in the North Atlantic Alliance to torpedo support for a low-carbon transition. Russia is using a vast and amorphous network of influence groups to try to influence public opinion or political and economic decisions.
A successful way to build these networks is to work with issues that touch on deep, unconscious phenomena such as sexual identity, nationality, religion and race. A popular strategy to gain attention is to spread conspiracy theories, build culture wars and reach out to frustrated groups on the fringes of the political spectrum. Russia has also long prepared an entire ideological apparatus and organizational infrastructure to create these conflicts.
And if you look at the pro-Russian actors, not only in the Czech Republic but across Europe, they are all attacking climate science, climate policy, or renewable energy in some way.
Russian footprints in the Czech Republic
Returning to Filip Turk, the newly elected member of the European Parliament, he identifies Václav Klaus as his political role model and has repeatedly expressed his support for him. Václav Klaus was an important figure in Czech post-revolutionary life, a long-serving prime minister and president. However, he was also one of the first to introduce into the Czech environment the disinformation campaigns against climate science developed by the fossil fuel industry abroad (mostly in the USA).
But Klaus also has long-standing contacts with the pro-Russian influence network. The Russian political elite may set strategic goals, but in the executive branch, various state and non-state actors have considerable freedom to experiment with different concrete forms. The network consists of a specific variety of "ideological entrepreneurs" who set up media outlets and think tanks, organize conferences, support local protest movements or radical political parties. One such "ideological entrepreneur" is Vladimir Yakunin, a Russian oligarch who did business with Putin in the 1990s, gradually became a member of his "inner circle", and, according to a number of sources, is a longtime KGB agent. But Yakunin is also one of the richest Russians, a former director of the giant Russian Railways, and head of the state police department at Lomonosov University in Moscow. Today, Yakunin is on the sanctions list of a number of Western states for supporting Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
In order to influence European public figures, Yakunin organized the Rhodes Forum, which Klaus repeatedly attended. At the same time, Klaus was also a member of the supervisory board of the Dialogue of Civilizations think tank. Yakunin founded the think tank in Germany with the aim of making it one of the 20 most influential think tanks in the world, with an intended financial injection of 20 million euros and about 20 employees. Although he did not succeed, the question is to what extent this was his real intention. Indeed, the think tank employed Ruben Vardanyan, who, according to the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, appears to be laundering billions of dollars for Putin's inner circle in a money-laundering scheme.
Klaus has also long cooperated with the religious far right, with people close to Roman Joch, Michal Semín and Petr Hajek. These men, for example, organized the World Congress of Families in Prague in the late 1990s, which later became massively supported by Vladimir Yakunin, as well as by Konstantin Malofeev, another man on the sanctions list for supporting Russian aggression.
The World Congress of Families is characterized by the creation of a "gender panic" that has become an instrumental tool of Russian propaganda used to split European society. Indeed, it pits the Western standard of equal rights for women or sexual minorities against the patriarchal notion of male supremacy and the so-called "traditional family". Signs of Malofeev's handwriting can be found above all, in the activities of Petr Hájek - a long-time close associate of Václav Klaus - and his conspiracy server Protiproud. On this server, which has long been in the red and is apparently linked to Russian funding, we see not only the spread of gender scaremongering but also anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about Jewish masons and the Illuminati. Russia is generally portrayed here as the last bulwark against the influence of these destructive elements.
Leaked documents from Belarusian Alexander Usovsky have also revealed that 'ideological entrepreneurs' like Konstantin Malofeev are paying for and organizing pro-Russian demonstrations all over Europe, including the Czech Republic. After all, Malofeev is already banned from entering Bulgaria because of political corruption and is on the sanctions list of a number of states for supporting the armed invasion of Ukraine.
The theatre of illusion that covers up the tragic state of Russia
In virtually all indicators of quality of life, Russia lags far behind Western countries. And this poses a problem for Russia's power elites. The country is struggling with alcoholism, drugs, domestic violence, family breakdown, corruption and nepotism, an increasing authoritarianism heading towards dictatorship, political murders of journalists and opposition politicians and activists, underfunded education and medical care, a lack of prospects for the people of the regions, and an economy based de facto on the export of mineral resources.
However, part of Russia's identity is also a messianic belief in its own greatness and irreplaceability. It is precisely because of this grandiosity that the Russian ruling classes serve up an ideological version of the world in which they create their own specific version of state identity, which they seek to delimit to the Western project. This is built on a strong authoritarian state that relies on a nostalgic fantasy of a traditional world, a rigid division of gender roles and a resistance to the rights of sexual minorities. And also in opposition to climate policy.
Author: Vojtěch Pecka
The author is a climate analyst at the Association for International Affairs and the author of “The Factory of Lies - Manufacturing Climate Disinformation".
Background illustration: Dontree
This piece was published in partnership with VIA Association
