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Russia's deputy foreign minister Grigory Karasinsaid in August 2008, in the context of the Russia-Georgia conflict: " Western mediais a well-organized machine, which is showing only those pictures that fit in well with their thoughts. We find it very difficult to squeeze our opinion into the pages of their newspapers." [ 12]In June 2007, Vedomostireported that the Kremlin had been intensifying its official lobbyingactivities in the United States since 2003, among other things hiring such companies as Hannaford Enterprises and Ketchum. [ 13]
In a 2005 interview with U.S government-owned external broadcaster Voice of America, the Russian-Israeli blogger Anton Nossiksaid the creation of RT "smacks of Soviet-style propagandacampaigns." [ 14]Pascal Bonnamour, the head of the European department of Reporters Without Borders, called the newly announced network "another step of the state to control information." [ 15]In 2009, Luke Harding(then the Moscow correspondent) of The Guardiandescribed RT's advertising campaign in the United Kingdom as an "ambitious attempt to create a new post-Soviet global propaganda empire." [ 16]According to Lev Gudkov, the director of the Levada Center, Russia's most well respected polling organization. Putin's Russia's propaganda is "aggressive and deceptive... worse than anything I witnessed in the Soviet Union"[17]
In 2014, Ivan Zassoursky, a professor of Media and Theory of Communications in the Journalism Department of Moscow State University, said that: " Today there are many complex schemes of influence in the world that can be labeled as soft power.