Introduction
In December 2025, a joint investigation by Maldita.es (Spain) and Verificado.mx (Mexico) traced a dozen Kremlin-sourced fabrications to a Catholic news outlet in Veracruz, Mexico — a site called Agencia Católica de Noticias, founded in 2019, that describes itself as a place “where Catholics are informed and express their opinions with reliable and timely information.” The fabrications included a fake stake in a South African platinum mine attributed to Volodymyr Zelenskyy, a fake purchase of “Hitler’s residence,” fake cocaine-trafficking allegations, and a recurring conspiracy theory claiming Brigitte Macron is transgender.
Every one of those claims originated with Russian state media or Kremlin-aligned outlets — Argumenty i Fakty, RIA Novosti, The Intel Drop, ZeroHedge. Every one of them ran on a Mexican religious news site with no obvious connection to Moscow. The investigators contacted the agency for comment. It did not respond.
That silence is the detail worth sitting with, more than any individual fabrication. This platform has already documented what it looks like when Russia pays for reach: journalists on retainer in The Mercenary Byline, a travel vlogger drawing a monthly RT stipend in The Vlog Was Never About Travel, a scripted memo reproduced verbatim by a real politician in The Authentic Proxy. Investigators went looking for that kind of arrangement here too — a contract, a wire transfer, an editor on someone’s payroll. They didn’t find one. What they found instead was simpler and harder to regulate: an outlet that republishes Kremlin material because it already agrees with what the material is for.
What Got Published
The claims documented by Maldita.es and Verificado.mx span roughly a year:
- April 4, 2025 — Agencia Católica de Noticias republished, the same day it appeared on Argumenty i Fakty, a claim that Zelenskyy had purchased a 51% stake in a South African platinum mine for $1.6 billion. SABC News and Northam Platinum both denied it.
- February 2025 — A claim that Zelenskyy bought “Hitler’s residence” for €14.2 million, sourced to Argumenty i Fakty and distributed through a fake-news site created two months earlier for the purpose.
- Undated, recurring — A claim that Ukraine paid Western celebrities, Angelina Jolie among them, to visit the country.
- Undated — Cocaine-trafficking allegations against Zelenskyy, sourced to The Intel Drop, a site researchers have repeatedly documented as a Russian disinformation vector operating behind a “false façade” of independent journalism.
- May 11, 2025 — A fabricated story about a bag of cocaine found on a train carrying Macron, the German chancellor, and the UK prime minister to Kyiv.
- Recurring across 2025 — A conspiracy theory that Brigitte Macron is transgender, sourced in part to RIA Novosti and amplified alongside Candace Owens’ “Becoming Brigitte” video series.
None of this required original reporting. Every story arrived pre-written from a Russian or Russian-aligned source; the agency’s contribution was translation into Spanish and a publish button. Investigators counted roughly a dozen separate Zelenskyy disinformation campaigns run through the site this way.
The Thing That Wasn’t There
Follow the money in The Mercenary Byline and it terminates in a per-article rate. Follow it in The Vlog Was Never About Travel and it terminates in a $2,000-a-month RT retainer plus a cultural-grant channel run through a sanctioned intermediary. Follow the money here and it doesn’t terminate at Agencia Católica de Noticias at all — because the investigation found no evidence the agency itself was funded by Moscow. What it found was something upstream and adjacent: Russian oligarchs Konstantin Malofeev and Vladimir Yakunin, according to research from the European Parliamentary Forum, funneled more than €160 million into anti-gender and anti-abortion movements across Europe between 2013 and 2018. Alexey Komov, a Malofeev associate, sat on the board of Hazte Oír — the Spanish anti-abortion, anti-LGBTQ+ platform whose international arm, CitizenGo, employs the agency’s most prolific Spanish contributor — until at least 2023.
That money bought influence inside a movement, not a byline inside a newsroom. Agencia Católica de Noticias doesn’t need a check from Malofeev to publish material that serves his cause, because it was already committed to the cause before either party knew the other existed. The Kremlin isn’t purchasing this outlet’s cooperation. It’s supplying ammunition to a fight the outlet was already in — opposition to reproductive rights, to LGBTQ+ protections, to feminism generally — and the outlet is picking the ammunition up because it’s aimed at the same targets. A payment can be traced, subpoenaed, sanctioned. An affinity can’t. There is no invoice for two organizations wanting the same thing to be true.
The Relay Needed No Dispatcher
The fabrications didn’t stop at one Mexican website. They moved through a specific chain, and the chain is the more instructive part of the story.
Luis Losada Pescador — deputy director of Spain’s La Gaceta de los Negocios, a founding member of Hazte Oír, and CitizenGo’s campaigns editor — has published more than 150 articles on the agency’s site since 2020, largely in a dedicated “Va España” section that runs political rather than religious content. Pedro Mejías, who leads a Spanish group called AcTÚa Familia and successfully pushed a “post-abortion syndrome” resolution through the Madrid City Council in September 2025, contributes columns and videos that get republished a second time — on Gateway Hispanic, a US Spanish-language outlet founded in 2024 and co-registered by the owner of Gateway Pundit. LifeSiteNews, a Canadian outlet banned from Facebook in 2021 for COVID-19 misinformation, republishes the Mexican agency’s content into a third audience. Infovaticana, a Spanish Catholic site that separately published an unsubstantiated report attacking Pope Leo XIV, picks up pieces too.
No one of these outlets had to instruct any other. Each one is doing what it already does — publishing content that serves a shared culture-war agenda — and the aggregate effect is a distribution network spanning Mexico, Spain, the US, and Canada that no single actor designed or centrally operates. Compare that to Matryoshka, the Russian network documented in The Borrowed Masthead, which fabricated 343 videos wearing stolen CNN and Reuters logos to fake institutional authority it didn’t have. This network doesn’t need to fake authority. Every outlet in the chain has its own real audience, built on years of genuine ideological alignment with its readers. The Kremlin material doesn’t arrive wearing a costume. It arrives as one more item on a site the reader already trusts, delivered by writers the reader already follows, in service of a cause the reader already holds.
Why the Silence Was the Correct Move
When Maldita.es and Verificado.mx contacted Agencia Católica de Noticias for comment, it said nothing. That’s worth treating as a decision rather than an absence.
A denial invites scrutiny of the specific claims — did you check this platinum-mine story before you ran it, do you stand by the Hitler’s-residence piece, who wrote the Brigitte Macron pieces and what did they know. Each answer creates a new fact for investigators to chase. A non-denial forfeits none of that ground and costs nothing with the outlet’s actual audience, who were never going to read a Spanish-language investigative site in the first place. The liar’s dividend works by casting doubt on everything so nothing sticks; this is closer to its quieter sibling — declining to engage at all, on the correct bet that an audience selected for pre-existing agreement won’t go looking for the rebuttal. Silence isn’t evidence of guilt to a reader who was never going to check. It’s evidence of nothing, and evidence of nothing is exactly the outcome the outlet needed.
Three Ways to Move Someone Else’s Message, Compared
It’s worth being precise about what distinguishes this case from the ones already on this platform, because the countermeasure changes with the mechanism.
The mercenary byline is a transaction: money moves, content follows, and the relationship ends the moment the payment does. The authentic proxy is capture: one real person’s voice gets occupied by someone else’s script, verifiably, memo to interview. The sanction-as-sale is genre laundering: political content hides inside a format — travel vlogging — that carries no expectation of persuasion. This case is none of those. Call it ideological laundering: no payment relationship needs to exist at all, because the outlet was never a mercenary or a captured voice. It’s a volunteer. Money explains why a mercenary writes what they write. It doesn’t explain why a true believer does — the belief was already sufficient, and Moscow’s material simply became available raw material for expressing it.
That distinction matters practically. A financial audit can eventually surface a mercenary byline; a document trail can eventually surface an authentic proxy. Neither approach touches a volunteer, because there’s no transaction to subpoena and no script to compare against a public statement. The only thing that surfaces ideological laundering is exactly what Maldita.es and Verificado.mx did: read the content, trace where each specific claim originated, and follow the byline network regardless of whether any money is found at the end of it.
What to Actually Do With This
- Trace the claim, not the wallet. If a specific fabrication — a name, a number, an event — can be found verbatim on a Russian state outlet weeks earlier, the funding relationship of whoever republished it in your language is beside the point. The claim’s origin is the evidence.
- Notice when a site’s politics run wider than its stated beat. A religious news outlet publishing recurring dispatches on a French first lady’s gender or a foreign president’s finances has stepped outside devotional coverage into geopolitical messaging — a scope shift worth registering on its own, independent of source.
- Map bylines across outlets, not just claims. A contributor publishing the same material across a Mexican site, a Spanish one, and a US one isn’t evidence of coordination by itself, but it is evidence of a distribution channel — and channels are what carry the next fabrication too, not just this one.
- Expect no comment, and don’t read it as an admission or a clearing. An outlet’s silence when confronted tells you it made a cost-benefit calculation, not that the underlying claims are true or false. Judge the specific claims against specific evidence, not against how the source reacted to being asked.
Conclusion
Every mechanism this platform has documented so far required someone to spend something — a salary, a script, a genre’s borrowed credibility. This one required nothing but two organizations wanting the same outcome and one of them having material ready to publish. That’s a harder problem than a paid influence campaign, because there’s no invoice to eventually find, no handler to eventually name, no payment to eventually sanction. There’s just an agreement that was never signed because it never needed to be.