PUTIN’S BRITISH USEFUL IDIOTS
This week an adoring crowd of over 20,000 hand-picked young delegates hailed the Russian war monger at a Nuremberg-style rally. Shockingly, several came from the UK. What ARE they thinking – and what poison might they spread?
EvERY self-respecting dictator loves a rally. Hitler’s took place at Nuremberg, Stalin paraded troops around Red Square, and North Korea’s pudgy despots like to salute colour-coded crowds in central Pyongyang. vladimir Putin is no different. His most recent opportunity to soak up the adulation of brainwashed masses came last Wednesday night, on a neon-lit stage at a packed indoor stadium in the Black Sea resort of Sochi.
Here, Russia’s president was delivering the ‘closing address’ at the World Youth Forum, a Kremlin propaganda event — with the theme ‘We Stand Together with Russia’ — that saw several members of his genocidal politburo deliver tubthumping speeches.
As an adoring crowd waved flags, screamed and, in some cases, wept, Putin waxed lyrical about his desire to overturn ‘the injustice in today’s world order’ and ‘make the world more transparent, just, democratic, sustainable, balanced and safe’.
Afterwards, 20,000 hand-picked delegates, all of them under the age of 35, were invited to take part in something called the ‘Immortal Regiment March’.
It saw them goose-step around an arena carrying sepia-tinged photos of soldiers who have died fighting for Mother Russia.
‘President Putin is hailed as the leader of the Great Awakening,’ was how a pro-Kremlin journalist described the event. ‘A hero and liberator to the youth of the world. Bold, revered, unstoppable!’
The sinister proceedings, which were broadcast across Russia, marked the culmination of a weeklong event designed to bolster the Putin regime’s tattered standing on the global stage.
Staged by ‘Presidential decree’, the World Youth Forum saw 10,000 young Russians joined by 10,000 of their contemporaries from other countries for a programme of so-called ‘cultural enrichment’.
Highlights included lectures by Putin’s predecessor Dmitry Medvedev, who unveiled a map showing what Ukraine will look like after his country’s ‘ glorious victory’, and children’s minister Maria Lvova-Belova, an indicted war criminal described in the official programme as ‘ a mother of many children’.
There was also a speech from foreign minister Sergey Lavrov, who raged about what he dubbed the current ‘ war of the West against Russia’.
Perhaps the ugliest propaganda could be found in the convention centre, where delegates were invited to attend an exhibition on Nato entitled ‘ history of deception, history of evil’ which accused the western military alliance of seeking to ‘methodically expand and bring its military infrastructure closer to Russia’s borders’.
IT INCLUDED a room decorated with a horrifically antiSemitic mural depicting various hook-nosed businessmen conspiring with trigger-happy cowboys to hoard a container filled with missiles.
‘World Youth Festival has shown to participants from the entire world the alliance’s cruelty and tyranny,’ was how one visitor summed up the whole thing on social media. ‘We, the youth, now understand that Nato is a weapon of war.’
So who were the ‘youth’ who contributed to this crude exercise in Kremlin brainwashing? Where exactly did they come from? And what will they be doing next?
Well, here’s where things get really interesting.
For, rubbing shoulders with delegates from Russia’s traditional allies (Iran, Cuba, and China) and its more recent chums (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, plus various African client states) was a collection of special guests who’d travelled all the way to Sochi from our very own Great Britain. I can reveal that this highly questionable delegation included a professional racing car driver, a smattering of hard-Left university students, various pro-Palestine activists, one IT professional, a musician and a cryptocurrency expert from Surrey who defected to Moscow after ending up on the FBI’s ‘most wanted’ list.
Perhaps most concerning of all was the presence of a senior official in the Workers Party of Britain, which recently gained a foothold in the Houses of Parliament with the election of George Galloway. He appears to have travelled to Mr Putin’s propaganda event with the explicit blessing of party bosses.
The official’s name is Jesse Winney, and he’s a former ‘defence officer’ for a Corbynite trade union called Acorn. A founding member of the Workers Party, he appears to have become its ‘recruitment officer’ in recent months. This was the capacity in which he decided to travel to Sochi last week.
Winney then popped up in a social media video filmed at the event by a pro-Kremlin journalist, and widely circulated in Russia, in which he’s described as ‘Jesse of the Workers Party’ and tells viewers: ‘I’m having an amazing time! It’s been one of the best experiences of my life,’ he adds, of the event. ‘I love Russia. I love the Russian people. It’s a beautiful country, especially here in Sochi.’ He finished by saying: ‘Cheers to George Galloway!’ The official Workers Party account on social media platform X responded to the clip, which has been viewed 30,000 times, by saying that was ‘great to see . . . Jesse having a great time at the World Youth Festival’.
That’s one way to put things.
Another take on his attendance at Putin’s event is offered by the UK Friends of Ukraine pressure group, whose director Alex Rennie tells me: ‘While a festival of 20,000 useful Kremlin idiots might seem harmless, these people coming back to the UK and spreading
Putin’s lies are effectively foot soldiers of his disinformation campaign. The attendance of a founding member of a party represented in Parliament is deeply concerning,’ he adds.
‘We know Galloway was opposed to arming Ukraine before the fullscale invasion and if we took his advice, a Russian flag would be flying over Kyiv. There should be no space in British politics for Putin’s useful idiots.’
Mark Dixon, of the Moral Rating Agency, which campaigns for sanctions against Russia, is similarly horrified: ‘This event is nothing more than a propaganda stunt to trick Russians into thinking their country isn’t a pariah state and to dupe young people coming from abroad.
‘No one there was a young leader, but either a young dictator or, at best, a young idiot. They remind me of the naive British apologists who travelled to pay homage to Hitler in the 1930s.’
Also in Sochi, to that end, was Christopher Emms, the aforementioned crypto-currency expert.
He boasts an intriguing backstory, having previously made headlines by winding up on the FBI’s ‘most wanted’ list after giving a speech in 2019 at a conference in Pyongyang. The U. S. authorities, perhaps unfairly, decided that his appearance at the event violated sanctions against North Korea.
As a result, he was arrested in Saudi Arabia in 2022 on an Interpol ‘red notice’. There followed a lengthy extradition battle, which eventually saw him released, and he subsequently took up residence in Moscow.
SINCE arriving in Russia, Emms has worked as a pundit for Russia Today, the pro-Kremlin TV news outlet. He has also acquired a wife, Alexandra Kashurnikova, a local TV journalist who has interviewed Putin in her capacity as an activist for Russia’s ‘Popular Front’ youth movement, described by one local commentator (possibly with some exaggeration) as ‘a sort of Hitler Youth without the swastikas’.
In recent months, Emms, 32, has begun using X to share Russia’s PR lines about the Ukraine conflict. In December, he told followers ‘Russia is victorious. It is only now a matter of time.’
A couple of months back, he circulated a post by the Russian Embassy in London describing the phrase ‘Slava Ukraini!’ [‘long live Ukraine’] as a ‘neo-Nazi slogan’.
His profile picture on WhatsApp has, meanwhile, become an image of the letter ‘Z’, a symbol used to denote support for the Russian armed forces.
Like many of the Brits who attended the World Youth Festival, Emms appears to have had a significant portion of his costs and accommodation paid for by the event, which was sponsored by an array of corporations with close links to the Putin regime.
They range from Sberbank, Russia’s sanctioned state bank, to Aeroflot, its sanctioned state airline, to VK, a tech firm who’s sanctioned CEO is oligarch Vladimir Kiriyenko, the son of Sergey Kiriyenko, Putin’s First Deputy Chief of Staff.
Contacted by the Mail this week, Emms claimed to have spent most of the conference in his hotel, ‘chilling by the pool’.
The same cannot, however, be said of two Britons who took part in the festival’s official programme of events.
One was Mark Reinski, a classical musician who (perhaps ironically, given the recent fate of Alexei Navalny) is the son of a major benefactor of a charity called Prisoners of Conscience.
A graduate of the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, Reinski moved to Moscow in 2019 to study at the Tchaikovsky Conservatory and came to Sochi to perform Vivaldi’s Four Seasons at a concert that formed part of the event’s cultural enrichment programme.
The other was Nicholas Gilkes, an Anglo-Canadian racing driver whose father Brent competed in Formula 2000 and sister Megan works as a ‘trackside support engineer’ for the Aston Martin F1 team. He travelled to Sochi to take part in a motor racing demonstration on the city’s track which, prior to the sporting boycott that followed the invasion of Ukraine, used to host Formula One events.
Asked why he travelled to Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Gilkes tells me he was representing Drivex, a Spanish racing team that employs him to drive in the Eurocup, a competition sponsored by Renault.
He claims to have been ignorant of the Kremlin’s involvement in the event, adding that he ‘spent my time predominately at the hotel or with my Spanish, Italian and Australian competitors’. Whether his sponsor Pirelli, the tyre comp a n y which is supposedly boycotting Russia, will be so sanguine about the whole thing is anyone’s guess.
Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the British involvement in the Sochi conference, however, was the manner in which it has already been weaponised to fuel Putin’s domestic PR agenda.
Several UK delegates were interviewed by local media outlets, which quoted them offering effusive praise to Russia.
One such talking head is James Wark. He’s a 32-year-old IT specialist from Hoddesdon, Hertfordshire, who studied at Cambridge University, spent five years working for professional services network PWC and, somewhat grotesquely in the circumstances, uses the networking website LinkedIn to list his interests as ‘civil rights and social action’.
He spoke to reporters during a recreational hike with other delegates in the Caucasus Mountains. ‘We went tubing in the snow,’ he said. ‘It was great . . . Now I want to become an ambassador of hiking tourism in my homeland. I had no prejudices before visiting Russia. Cool place, friendly people. Russians are great guys!’
Mr Wark appears to earn a crust working for SECR Tech, an IT firm which helps clients improve their ecological footprint.
Intriguingly, it’s owned by Maxim Maximovitch Demin, a Swissbased 22-year-old who controls a network of companies alongside Maxim Victorovich Demin, a secretive 54-year-old Anglo-Russian billionaire who made a fortune in the petrochemicals industry and used to own Premier League club Bournemouth. On its website, SECR calls Wark ‘ our carbon accountant and decarbonisation specialist’.
Or at least it did. Contacted by the Mail, the firm’s boss, Scott Hanson, said this week he was unaware that Wark had attended Putin’s PR event, and described him as an ‘independent consultant’ who worked as a contractor.
Wark subsequently vanished from SECR’s website, with Hanson telling me the company ‘has stopped using Mr Wark’s consultancy services. He stressed the business should not be associated with Wark’s actions ‘in any way’.
Also on Russia’s airwaves during proceedings was Elissaios Schulman, a grammar school-educated student from Birmingham who studies in Nottingham and is a supporter of Jeremy Corbyn’s Stop The War coalition.
A video of him speaking to the notorious pro-Kremlin TV presenter Vladimir Solovyov during his trip to Sochi went viral on the social network Telegram, where it clocked up half a million views.
‘I’m from England,’ said Schulman. ‘Obviously in the West there’s very much this antagonistic opinion [of Russia] but I think slowly, over time, young people have realised it’s not always true what state media are saying in the West.’
Speaking effusively about the World Youth Festival, he added: ‘Everything here in Sochi proves the fact that not everything you see in the news in the West is true. I don’t think that if Russia was not a democracy, not free, not powerful and wealthy, that it would be able to do something this grand, this amazing. It’s been a pleasure to experience that and see for myself first-hand.’
TELEGRAM forums also contain images of a prominent Russia Today host named Donald Courter posing with two young Britons who are activists for the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist).
One was Maximiliano Francisco Escudero Morland, a former PhD student in robotics at King’s College London.
He posed at the event holding a flag bearing an image of Stalin, a despot responsible for around seven million deaths.
The other was Eleonore M’bra, who also goes by the name Eleonore Koffi, and who was photographed drinking lager with Mr Courter.
Mrs M’bra, who lives in London, was also pictured in a Left-wing newspaper in December, proudly posing with a group of pro-Palestinian activists outside Sutton police station in South London.
Four of them had been arrested at a demo in the capital and were held at the station after police seized pamphlets bearing images of the Star of David and a swastika. Amid claims of spreading racist material, they were, however, released after 24 hours, without charge.
Having returned to our shores, Mrs M’bra can remain in contact with the Putin loyalists she met in Sochi via VK, a Russian version of Facebook where she opened an account this week.
‘Russia and China are not the enemy!’ she wrote on social media recently. ‘The enemy is our ruling class that we must overthrow if we want a chance to have a future.’
Like many of the useful idiots who secretly travelled from the UK to Sochi last week, this budding class warrior will doubtless be spreading further Kremlin propaganda on streets of a major city some time soon.