[2][3] With headquarters in Moscow, Sputnik maintains regional editorial offices in Washington, D.C., Cairo, Beijing, Paris, Berlin, Madrid, Montevideo and Rio de Janeiro.
[16] In early 2019, Facebook removed hundreds of pages on its social media platform passing as independent news sites but were actually under the control of Sputnik employees.
[21] Technology companies and social media services responded to the invasion by removing Sputnik from their platforms, while many versions such as the French, the German and the Greek ones have closed their operation.
Simonyan told The New York Times in 2017 that she choose Sputnik as the new name "because I thought that's the only Russian word that has a positive connotation, and the whole world knows it.
"[25] Sputnik was launched on 10 November 2014 by Rossiya Segodnya, which is itself funded through RT, owned and operated by the Russian government, and was created via an Executive Order of the President of Russia on 9 December 2013.
According to its editor-in-chief Dmitry Kiselyov, Sputnik was intended to reach a worldwide audience "tired of aggressive propaganda promoting a unipolar world and who want a different perspective".
Among the station's presenters are Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert who host the weekly talk show Double Down which concentrates on economics.
[39][40] According to a fake news story circulated by Sputnik,[41] President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton created ISIS; the website praised Trump, before he was elected in 2016, for making such an assertion.
[40][42] The website published an article entitled "Secret File Confirms Trump Claim: Obama, Hillary 'Founded ISIS' to Oust Assad", while tweets from Sputnik used the hashtag #CrookedHillary.
[43][45] Aspects of his story as it related to Trump were disputed at the time,[45][46] Sputnik then put up an article reputedly denying its control by the Kremlin and attacking Newsweek and Eichenwald.
"[36] The Washington Post stated that "many Sputnik hosts profess skepticism that Russia meddled in the 2016 presidential election," in contradiction to the assessment of the US intelligence community.
[50] On 26 May 2017, Andrew Feinberg, who had been Sputnik's White House Correspondent since the Trump administration came into office the previous January, announced on Twitter that he would no longer be reporting for the agency.
[62] Foreign Policy magazine has described Sputnik as a slick and internet-savvy outlet of Kremlin propaganda, which "remixes President Vladimir Putin's brand of revanchist nationalism for an international audience... beating a predictable drum of anti-Western rhetoric.
"[11] In January 2022, the U. S. State Department's Global Engagement Center (GEC) published a report titled "Kremlin-Funded Media: RT and Sputnik's Role in Russia's Disinformation and Propaganda Ecosystem."
Its case studies included one on "false narratives" published by Sputnik and RT justifying Russian military buildup on the Ukrainian border.
These two political figures have limited support in their countries; Korwin-Mikke gained slightly more than 3% in Poland's presidential election in May 2015, while Ždanoka is barred from holding public office for her opposition to Latvia's independence from Russia.
[65] Historical comparisons have been made to Pravda, the former official newspaper of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, in particular Sputnik's alleged apologia for Joseph Stalin and denial of the 1932–1933 famine in Ukraine known as the Holodomor.
[66] German journalist and author Michael Thumann describes Sputnik as being part of what he calls Russia's "digital information war against the West".
[67] Peter Pomerantsev, in an article for the London Sunday Times, wrote that in the 2017 German elections the Sputnik news agency was negative or neutral about the country's political parties, with the exception of the right-wing nationalist Alternative for Germany (AfD).
[68] Alexander Podrabinek, a Russian journalist who works for Radio France Internationale[69][70] (part of French Government's France Médias Monde) and Radio Liberty[71] (supervised by Broadcasting Board of Governors, an Independent agency of the U.S. Federal government) has accused Sputnik of disseminating Russian state propaganda abroad.
[77] In April 2021, The Times reported Russian sources had said Sputnik's London and Edinburgh offices were closing with the outlet's English language staff being concentrated in Washington DC and Moscow.
These findings were published by internationally recognized fact-checking platform Raskrinkavanje,[88] which wrote reports about Sputnik bias towards spreading disinformation,[89] in a 106-page document.
[90] With the intention of protecting democratic values and to combat Russian disinformation campaigns utilizing RT and Sputnik, the European Union established The East StratCom Task Force in 2015.
[96] Russia tried to increase its power and presence in the Middle East as well as reduce United States influence in the region, fight terrorism, and establish allies in Syria with Bashar al-Assad.
[96] After the massacre, Sputnik and RT widely questioned the cause and the history of the massacre through daily reports; false and missing information was frequently cited as the identities of the claimed "experts" were not shared, and alternative versions of the event were falsely reported as they claimed that the attacks were done by the White Helmets, a Syrian civil volunteer organization.
The development was thought to have been in response to comments by the Russian leadership critical of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and the Turkish government's record on human rights and freedom of speech.
[103] In November, Alphabet chairman Eric Schmidt announced that Google will be "deranking" stories from RT and Sputnik in response to "weaponised" content and allegations about election meddling by President Putin's government, provoking claims of censorship from both outlets.
[108] In July 2019, British Foreign and Commonwealth Office banned both RT and Sputnik from attending the Global Conference for Media Freedom in London for "their active role in spreading disinformation".
[109] European Union External Action East StratCom Task Force and separate fact-checkers have discerned reoccurrences of Sputnik and RT publishing false information.
Daniel Voda, the Moldovan press secretary, stated that Sputnik was "constantly dealing with informational attacks, lies, propaganda and disinformation."