Badanin Semyon

Head of Information Projects Department of ANO "Dialog"

Born in 1995. In 2017, he graduated with a bachelor's degree from the Faculty of Political Science of Moscow State University.

At ANO "Dialog"/ANO "Dialog Regions" he held the positions of deputy head of the information work department, deputy head of the information projects department. Currently (as of the beginning of 2024) he is the head of the information projects department of ANO Dialog.

It is known that with the help of the notorious ANO Dialog and ANO Dialog Regions, the Presidential Administration of the Russian Federation is trying to control social networks. ANO “Dialog” participated, in particular, in developing a campaign to vote for odious “amendments” to the Russian Constitution, and then the organization was entrusted with informing about the situation with the COVID-19 epidemic, including the fight against so - called “fakes”. At the same time, although the voting on the amendments took place in the midst of a pandemic, Dialog urged people “not to be afraid of covid and go to the polling stations.”

According to information in the media, ANO “Dialog” has created regional management centers (RMCs) - these organizations are essentially responsible for PR for the authorities of various Russian regions. We are talking about the creation and maintenance of public pages on social networks not only by administrations, but also by organizations reporting to them, including schools. According to the “Dialog” training manual, the school public should publish news about the decisions of the President and the government of the Russian Federation, about the work of the local governor, about “Russia’s successes in science and sports”, and with the outbreak of the war in Ukraine - about it, and one of the “Dialog” projects - this is “embedding teachers into patriotic themes” and turning them into “public opinion leaders” for promotion on social networks pro-government narratives.

The first test RMCs, in collaboration with the Ministry of Telecom and Mass Communications of the Russian Federation and ANO Digital Economy, were launched in six regions in April 2020. In the summer of 2020, a subsidiary structure “Dialog Regions” was established to work with the regions (it is responsible for the creation of RMCs). As of 2022, this organization employed more than 2.5 thousand people, and 6.5 billion rubles were transferred from the budget of the Ministry of Digital Development of the Russian Federation for its activities (for comparison: ANO Dialog itself received only 1.8 in 2022 billion). In total, as of the end of 2022, Dialog had RMCs in 93 regions and federal districts of Russia.

Representatives of “Dialog” several times visited the occupied territories – for example, Donetsk and the occupied part of the Zaporizhzhya region. The government decree on the rules for providing subsidies to Dialog states that RMCs should work in the “Donetsk People’s Republic, Luhansk People’s Republic, Zaporizhzhya region and Kherson region.” “Dialog” itself has already reported that it teaches Mariupol civil servants how to run “state publics .” And their “media workshop” is attended by residents of the occupied territories - the winners of the “Leaders of Revival” competition, invented by the PA to find reliable collaborators capable of occupying leadership positions in the “new regions.”

According to Dialog’s own reports, the organization distributed fakes about the war in Ukraine on social networks - for example, that servicemen of the Armed Forces of Ukraine allegedly began selling their awards on the eBay platform, that the mobilization of women has begun in Ukraine, or that in Poland Ukrainian refugees are offered “humiliating” vacancies. This area of work appeared in Dialog a few months after the start of the war, and at least 60 people were involved in it, and, according to the media, the topic of fakes was personally approved by Dialog’s director Vladimir Tabak.

The media claim that Dialog cooperates with the pro-Kremlin publication Readovka and with the network of telegram channels of Kristina Potupchik - it is known that in 2022, Dialog Regions transferred more than 50 million rubles to the Rokk Media company (owned by Elena Berdova, the mother of the former Potupchik ’s husband Anton Berdov; earlier Baza found Berdov and Potupchik’s house in Spain worth about 500 thousand euros).

Among the “partners” of the ANO “Dialog”, one of the largest tabloid telegram channels Mash is also mentioned, as well as the channels of “Z-military correspondents” Colonelcassad Boris Rozhin and “Unofficial Bezsonov” Daniil Bezsonov, as well as the telegram channels of propagandist Vladimir Soloviev (main channel “Soloviev" with 1.3 million subscribers and the unofficial channel "Soloviev Live" with 10 thousand subscribers).

Also, after the start of the war in Ukraine, “Dialog” took over the information support of the Russian Ministry of Defense (this is handled by Tabak’s deputy Tikhon Makarov in the organization), while also distributing posts criticizing the head of the Wagner PMC, Yevgeny Prigozhin, who was in conflict with the Russian Ministry of Defense. “Dialog”, represented by the same Tikhon Makarov, also oversees the propaganda telegram channel “War on Fake News ”.
In addition, already at the beginning of the war, “Dialog” had the “Tribunal” project - the website and telegram channel “Tribunal” (70 thousand subscribers), a kind of attempt to make “a pro-Kremlin analogue of the Ukrainian “Myrotvorets/Peacemaker”.

According to media reports, Dialog is also involved in the supervision of telegram channels that mimic Ukrainian ones, but act from a pro-Russian position. The Ukrainian media outlet Texty counted 120 such telegram channels of the same type created since March 2022, of which 68 were created in the first two weeks of the war. The publication noted that based on the regions that these channels “represented,” one can evaluate Russia’s military ambitions: Zaporizhzhya, Sumy, Mykolaiv, Zhitomir and Dnipropetrovsk regions, as well as Odessa, Luhansk, Donetsk, Kyiv and Kharkiv. Pseudo-Ukrainian channels are actively reposting “War on Fake News”.

It is known about the attempts of the ANO “Dialog” to censor content on Russian online information platforms, for example, on “Yandex.Dzen”: for example, employees of the organization asked to remove (allegedly “due to fakes”) three videos from the blog of opposition politician Ilya Yashin, recorded in the first month of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and as a result, Ilya Yashin’s blog was nevertheless blocked - at the request of Roskomnadzor.

Semyon Badanin teaches the course “Internet communications for government agencies: a guide to action” at the Higher School of Economics.

Ensuring the functioning of the state power system under the dictatorship of Vladimir Putin and assisting in the dissemination of propaganda for the aggressive war of the Russian Federation against Ukraine.

As described above, Semyon Badanin, holding one of the significant positions in the ANO Dialog, actively participates in the area of disseminating propaganda (including wartime propaganda) on social networks and monitoring them, which is important for the Kremlin (and in particular for Sergei Kiriyenko).

Representatives of the ANO “Dialog” visit the occupied territories, help develop government bodies there, and are actively engaged in propaganda and disinformation on the topic of Russia’s war against Ukraine.

Thus, as one of the functionaries of the regime, Semyon Badanin bears direct responsibility for the actions that are carried out by its state machine - especially for crimes related to the full-scale aggressive war unleashed by the Kremlin in February 2022.

In July 2023, the European Union added ANO Dialog to the sanctions list as a company responsible for conducting a campaign aimed at “distorting information and disseminating propaganda” about the Russian Federation’s aggressive war against Ukraine. Also included in the sanctions list was the head of the department of strategic directions of the ANO Dialog, Timofey Vasiliev (also known as Timofey V) .