Russian state propaganda outlets RT and Sputnik have been heavily promoting US presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., publishing dozens of articles about him and using his speeches to amplify pro-Kremlin, anti-US talking points. The timing of the propaganda push lines up with the lead-up to and announcement of Kennedy’s presidential candidacy, which raises some big red flags about potential election interference on the part of Russia.

On Sputnik News, a state-run outlet which was established by the Russian-government-owned news agency Rossiya Segodnya in 2014, a search for “Robert F Kennedy” yields 176 articles. Almost all of the coverage of Kennedy has been in the past two months. Prior to April 2023, Sputnik had only tagged four articles about Kennedy. The spike in coverage coincides with the kickoff of Kennedy’s presidential candidacy; the paperwork for his candidacy was filed on April 5.

The articles on Sputnik focus on several central themes, including supposed “censorship,” criticism of Ukraine and the U.S., and anti-vaccine sentiment. Kennedy runs an anti-vaccine organization called Children’s Health Defense, which is among the most prominent anti-vaccine groups in the country. On social media, the website for his anti-vaccine group is shared more than the websites of the CDC and WHO combined.

In the time since I created the first visual (one day), Sputnik published several additional articles about Kennedy, including the ones pictured below, both of which feature pro-Russia commentary targeting the U.S. military.

A similar pattern emerged on RT, Russia’s main outward-facing propaganda outlet, which has published even more articles about Kennedy. Like Sputnik, RT leaned into issues around “censorship” and highlighted Kennedy’s criticism of the US, as well as his pledge to “unwind the US empire.” Kennedy’s anti-vaccine activism and condemnation of the leadership of US health officials like Anthony Fauci were also the focus of numerous articles on the Russian state media outlet. RT additionally published a number of articles featuring Kennedy’s agreement with Putin on issues surrounding the war in Ukraine and NATO, and his promise to pardon Assange if elected president — a topic that has been a favorite on Russia propaganda outlets for years now.

Notably, RT also published an article announcing that Kennedy would be accepting Bitcoin donations, which opens up a potential channel for hard-to-trace illegal foreign campaign donations.

In one particularly notable article, RT cited Kennedy’s statements about Ukraine sustaining “huge losses” in an interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who also plays an important role — wittingly or unwittingly — in the Russian propaganda pipeline. According to a Russian government memo obtained by Mother Jones, the Kremlin has been encouraging its propaganda outlets to feature more clips of Tucker Carlson, who has frequently criticized Ukraine and consistently backed Russia in its war against Ukraine. At times, Carlson has also promoted anti-US talking points to defend Russia’s invasion of a sovereign nation.

The crossover of Kennedy and Carlson in one article by RT highlights how the propaganda outlet uses divisive figures to push talking points aimed at widening existing divides among Americans and further exacerbating polarization in the population. By quoting these figures, RT can claim that they’re “just reporting” on what others have said, when in reality they’re selectively choosing what to report in an effort to push an anti-American agenda.

The coverage of Kennedy is not just unidirectional. At times, he has given exclusive interviews to both RT and Sputnik, indicating some degree of reciprocity in the relationship.

Using the Global Database of Events, Language, and Tone (GDELT) tool to look at on-air coverage of Kennedy, I found that Russian propaganda outlet has covered Kennedy far more than any other news outlet, including CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, and BBC News. The graph below, which shows on-air coverage of Kennedy from June 2021 through the present, reveals that RT has consistently produced the most coverage of the anti-vaccine activist, with Fox News producing the second-most coverage.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that Kennedy is working with Russia or purposefully trying to undermine U.S. national security. However, it’s alarming that a U.S. presidential candidate would not understand how Russia uses its global media and social media infrastructure to target the U.S. population, which was at the center of Russia’s 2016 election interference campaign. It’s even more alarming if he does understand this but participates anyway.

Just this week, Kennedy appeared on a Twitter Space with Tulsi Gabbard and Elon Musk, where he and Gabbard advanced a conspiracy theory — originating in Russia — that the U.S. is using biolabs in Ukraine to produce ethnically-targeted bioweapons. This is par for the course for Kennedy, who frequently dabbles in conspiracy theories about a range of subjects, including vaccines, antidepressants and other pharmaceuticals (which he recently blamed for school shootings), and population control via tracking chips. He has claimed that COVID-19 is a genetically-engineered virus, that pharmaceutical companies are throwing money at Democrats to promote their products (despite data showing that Republicans are the primary recipients of donations from the pharmaceutical industry), that his uncle (JFK) was murdered by the CIA, and that vaccines cause autism, among other things. Last month, Kennedy claimed in an interview on New York City radio station WABC 770 that “there is overwhelming evidence that the CIA was involved in [JFK’s] murder,” adding: “I think it’s beyond a reasonable doubt at this point.”

As recently as 2022, Kennedy compared COVID-19 to the holocaust and has previously said that childhood vaccinations are “like the Nazi death camps.” And in 2021, Kennedy’s anti-vaccine group produced a movie targeting African Americans with misinformation about vaccines. Several people who were interviewed for the movie said they were deceived about the purpose, and that their statements were misrepresented in the documentary.

The style of conspiracy theory promoted by Kennedy echoes those promoted by Russia, and the impact — divisive rhetoric, polarization, declining vaccination rates, and undermining alliances and institutions — is just as harmful as the impact of malign foreign influence campaigns.

In 2019, Kennedy’s own brother, sister, and uncle authored an article for Politico in which they wrote that Kennedy’s “is part of this [anti-vaccine misinformation] campaign to attack the institutions committed to reducing the tragedy of preventable infectious diseases.” They also acknowledged that “he has helped to spread dangerous misinformation over social media and is complicit in sowing distrust of the science behind vaccines.”

At times, Kennedy has also demonstrated that he is willing to use the same type of disinformation tactics deployed by Russia in order to manufacture the appearance of evidence and scientific support for his conspiratorial vaccine claims. For example, he has been caught deceptively cutting and pasting together transcripts from CDC meetings and statements from WHO officials in order to create the appearance of evidence and scientific support for his false vaccine claims by leaving out entire sections of text, reversing the order of statements, and merging together sentences that didn’t appear near each other in the original text. He has also misattributed quotes and presented false accusations about vaccines containing toxins even after having corrections and retractions made to his writings.

Most alarmingly, on numerous occasions, Kennedy and his anti-vaccine organization have pushed falsehoods and conspiracy theories that have aligned with Russian propaganda narratives, suggesting at the very least that there is a significant degree of ideological overlap between Kennedy and the Kremlin. He has also shown that he is willing to lend his voice to Russian state media, and to promote anti-American Russian talking points to the US population. This would be bad enough if Kennedy were just another public figure, but as a presidential candidate, the alignment between Kennedy’s public statements and Kremlin propaganda represents a potential national security threat, particularly if the Kremlin decides to promote Kennedy as a way of interfering in the US electoral process — and based on the data presented in this article, it appears that they may have already made plans to do just that.