'A huge vanity project' - when Sputnik crash-landed in Scotland

Ten years ago, an alien object entered Scotland's airspace for the first time.

The website and internet radio station Sputnik News was named after the first man-made satellite which was launched into space in 1957.

The size of a basketball, the original Sputnik emitted a simple beep for three weeks before its battery died.

But the signal it sent the world's governments was much more significant. It showed that the Soviet Union was winning the space race, and that news jolted the west into action.

Almost 60 years later, its namesake was met with similar alarm.

Sputnik News is not like other media organisations. Wholly owned by the Russian government, it's widely recognised as a propaganda tool for President Vladimir Putin.

And in August 2016 it brought a new era of state-sponsored disinformation to Britain at a crucial time in its recent history.

Sputnik's Edinburgh operation lasted barely five years, and throughout that time faced accusations of stoking conspiracy theories to destabilise the UK.

A decade on, it's tempting to look back on its time in Scotland as a weird blip or just another failed media enterprise.

But that would be a mistake, according to former SNP MP Stewart McDonald.

"We are a society ripe for hostile disinformation," he says. "We're deeply divided, we're polarised politically, we're polarised socially. We struggle economically.

"That's perfect for hostile disinformation operations. And that's what Russian state media does.

"It's not there to report the news."

The Scotland in which Sputnik landed in 2016 was going through a turbulent time. In the wake of the 2014 referendum, a wave of new media enterprises were making the case for independence.

Established online outlets Wings over Scotland and Bella Caledonia were joined by digital news platforms CommonSpace and Broadcasting Scotland.

Subscription and supporter-led services, they offered an alternative to what was increasingly becoming known as the "mainstream media" - specifically corporate-owned newspapers, commercial broadcasters, and the BBC.

Carolyn Scott was one of the many young activist-journalists drawn to this new media landscape.

A folk singer and musician, she'd become increasingly politically active during the referendum, alongside a friend from the traditional music scene, Jack Foster. The pair ran a folk music podcast for a few years but had never managed to make money from it.

Then, according to Carolyn: "The day after the referendum, Jack contacted me about setting up a new media company and we got some crowdfunding to kind of see what was feasible. We did that for a year.

"We launched a weekly podcast that turned into four or five weekly podcasts and then some kind of YouTube TV stuff as well... but the whole time we had like zero income."

They had an audience, but not enough to make a living, and so towards the end of 2015 they were forced to wrap up the company

A few months later Carolyn learned Sputnik News was coming to Edinburgh and was advertising for journalists.

The Russian state-owned news agency Rossiya Segodnya set up Sputnik in November 2014 as a sister service to RT – formerly Russia Today – the Kremlin's global television news service. Both broadcast the Putin government's view of foreign affairs around the world.

Dr Ammon Cheskin is an expert on Russian politics at the University of Glasgow. He sees the Sputnik of 2016 as part of a strategy of projecting Russian might.

"It looked like the sort of thing a great power would do," he says.

"In the same way that the UK might have the BBC, they would have this network of journalists. I think it was a kind of a facade of great power status.

"Anybody that studies Russian foreign policy knows that one of the key priorities has been to prove that Russia is actually a great power on par with all the other great powers in the world."

Carolyn Scott was aware there were questions around Sputnik's editorial independence but believes the more established RT was not then seen as beyond the pale.

"Throughout 2014 and 2015, RT had managed to get itself into a place where it had an OK reputation, a fairly decent reputation in a lot of the circles that we were kind of active in," she says.

"There were a lot of political commentators from across Scotland and the UK hosting their own shows on RT. And it was very much billed to us as it's just a radio version of that."

She and Foster signed up as presenters.

"I certainly didn't go into the job singing and dancing and thinking: 'This is amazing, this is spectacular, it's going to be brilliant'," she says.

"It was: 'I need to pay my bills, and this is going to help wipe out some debt'. And we were going to have pretty much editorial freedom to just run our own show."

Sputnik launched from Edinburgh in August 2016 and the response from the native media was sceptical, even hostile. It was immediately suspected of coming to Scotland to create and amplify tensions within the UK.

The Daily Record dubbed it "Radio Gaga" and accused it of running stories that the independence referendum had been rigged.

The Herald called it "Putin's Sputnik" and an editorial in The Times said: "Those Nationalists who welcome the arrival of Sputnik are ignoring the Russian leader's record as an autocratic ruler."

Carolyn had signed up to co-present a daily radio programme. Immediately, she felt there were problems.

"It was an absolute chaotic mess. The idea that Sputnik could influence any election or referendum in this country was laughable. They wouldn't even influence a local dog show," she says.

"They had no idea what they were doing. The staff base was completely inexperienced. There was a woman who was basically brought in as an executive producer. Her background was that she was a hotel receptionist."

Nevertheless, Sputnik was seen as relentlessly anti-Nato, pro-Russian, and pro-Donald Trump. Later, it would be accused of peddling conspiracy theories about the Covid pandemic and the war in Ukraine.

It's important to remember the context in which Sputnik was operating in 2016.

The UK had just voted to leave the European Union and David Cameron had stood down as prime minister, to be replaced by Theresa May.

Brexit dominated UK politics, and in Scotland that, in turn, contributed to the SNP dominating the 2015 and 2016 Westminster and Holyrood elections.

Despite losing the 2014 referendum, the pro-independence movement appeared to be on the front foot.

Sputnik made much of the pro-indy credentials of its leading journalists. Looking back, Carolyn believes that was always the strategy.

"I realise now that I think their entire point was let these slightly left-wing progressive types do the show that they want," she says.

"They gave us free rein because that might build some legitimacy so that one day, when they've got an audience, they can just flip to their own agenda.

"And I see now in hindsight, that's kind of what I think their aim perhaps was."

Stewart McDonald was one of 56 SNP MPs elected in 2015. He would become his party's defence spokesman, and one of Sputnik's most high-profile critics.

From quite early on, he wanted to put "clear blue water" between it and the SNP.

"We very deliberately set about making RT and Sputnik as toxic as possible," he says.

"People knew that going on it, I would openly criticise them.

"I think that's partly why so few people did go on it, because they understood this is not a good thing for us to be seen to be engaging with."

But some were happy to get involved with the Russian outlets.

In 2017, former First Minister Alex Salmond was condemned for hosting a talk show on RT, denounced by one opponent as "Putin's puppet". His successor, Nicola Sturgeon, said: "His choice of channel would not have been my choice."

A year later, the former SSP MSP Tommy Sheridan began presenting and writing for Sputnik.

By then, Carolyn Scott and Jack Foster were long gone. They bailed in the spring of 2017 in the face, she says, of increasingly unacceptable editorial pressure.

But speaking to the BBC in 2018, Sputnik's UK editor Nikolai Gorshkov denied the company had an agenda.

"We're not trying to influence Scottish thinking, because being based in Edinburgh, we do now realise how fiercely independently minded the Scots are," he said.

"You can't influence a Scot."

The poisoning of former double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury in 2018, followed by allegations of Russian interference in the following year's UK election, saw relations between the two countries collapse.

That tension put Sputnik at the heart of the disinformation war, though not for long.

The company announced the closure of its UK operation in 2021, describing the move as part of a plan to reorganise its international presence more effectively.

The following year, Russia's invasion of Ukraine made it an international pariah. Nations across the world imposed economic and cultural sanctions.

In March 2022, the regulator Ofcom revoked RT's UK broadcasting licence and the European Union banned Sputnik and RT over their coverage of the war. Both services remain banned on many social media apps and websites.

Today, Sputnik's website says it continues to operate out of 17 countries in Africa, Asia and the Americas.

Putin's war in Ukraine marked the end of Russia's period of soft power, according to Ammon Cheskin.

"The whole network of it was just a huge vanity project that was ineffective. It cost lots of money and didn't reach many people, but it kind of looked good for those people that wanted to claim that Russia was a great power," he says.

"I preferred it to what came afterwards. It just highlighted the limits of Russian influence. Russia thought it could influence people and states through these mechanisms and it clearly couldn't.

"And it therefore moved to a different phase, which was much more aggressive, and militaristic. And that's where Russia's true influence was."

Stewart McDonald views Russia's disinformation programme as one part of a wider war that now sees drones flown over European airports, attacks on sub-sea cables, and cyber-hacks on institutions.

"The warning at the end is you've got to take any kind of foreign disinformation seriously," he says.

"This is a problem and a threat that is getting more sophisticated at a rate that we're just not at all keeping up with.

"You think about what that means in peacetime, but what does it mean in a time of crisis? Like a pandemic, or a kinetic war, or when your sub-sea cables get cut, or if there's a cyber-attack on Network Rail that brings the central belt to a halt.

"Or during an election campaign. Have governments even thought about how they deal with that sort of thing? No, they haven't."

Post-Sputnik, Carolyn Scott has built a new career teaching journalism at Edinburgh Napier University. She finds talking about that time painful but understands the criticism she and her colleagues faced.

"I think if you've got a foreign government launching a media company in your country that's got quite a controversial past, then it's fair game that the media is going to have a go," she says.

"I do feel physically sick talking today about it. I make sure to tell my students that we learn from our mistakes, and we take ownership of them, we don't shy away from them.

"But it's hard not to see it as one of the stupidest things I've ever done in my life. It is one of the biggest regrets I have."