A senior official who dismantled the US government’s Russian disinformation unit is married to a Russian woman with links to the Kremlin, The Telegraph can reveal.
Darren Beattie has provoked alarm within the State Department since being appointed in February for his ardent pro-Russian views and focus on destroying the agency tasked with tackling Kremlin propaganda.
Mr Beattie, the acting under-secretary for public diplomacy and public affairs, is married to a woman whose uncle has taken several roles in Russian politics and once received a personal “thank you” message from Vladimir Putin.
In the years before joining the government, Mr Beattie wrote social media posts suggesting Western institutions should be “infiltrated” by Putin, while he also attacked what he described as the “globalist American empire”.
Many of Mr Beattie’s social media posts also concern China, repeatedly calling on the US to surrender Taiwan to Beijing, and labelling Britain a “poor and pathetic kingdom” that would be “far better off under Chinese dominion”.
In May 2021, public records show, he married a Russian woman called Yulia Kirillova in a ceremony in Broward County, Florida.
Ms Kirillova, who according to her Facebook page was educated in Moscow before studying abroad in Canada and Washington DC, is the niece of Sergei Chernikov, a Russian drinks magnate who part-owns a flat with her mother, Natalia.
Mr Chernikov, whose net worth was estimated to be $150 million in 2005, reportedly received a letter of thanks from Putin for his help in the election campaign which first brought the Russian leader to power.
The same year, Mr Chernikov took his first step into politics, taking a role in the ministry of natural resources, before becoming deputy governor of the Nenets region in Siberia.
“The rise of non-woke (China) and anti-woke (Russia) geopolitical competitors to the Globalist American Empire is not a bad thing,” he wrote in October 2021.
He also said he looked forward to its “prestige and power” collapsing on the world stage and claimed that its “position in the global order [is] rapidly deteriorating”.
Two months before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, he said: “Imagine the whining from the Globalist American Empire if Putin ‘invades’ Ukraine… I love it when our national security bureaucrats fail!”
He has also praised Putin as “brave and strong”, and claimed the Russian leader had “done more to advance conservative positions in the US than any Republican”. He also declared: “Nato is a much greater threat to American liberty than Putin ever was.”
“The funny thing is just about every Western institution would improve in quality if it were directly infiltrated and controlled by Putin,” he wrote in September 2021.
Many of his posts focus on Britain, claiming it treats white people “far worse” than the Uyghur population that Chinese authorities have imprisoned in camps in Xinjiang.
He has labelled Britain a “sewage pit” and “the most utterly repulsive dystopia on earth”.
In a post more than two years after the outbreak of war in Ukraine, he criticised the UK’s policy of “antagonising Russia”.
All of these social media posts were still online at the time of writing, although Mr Beattie has deleted disparaging tweets about Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, having previously claimed his now-boss attended “gay foam parties”.
Trump official who shut down Russia propaganda unit has links to Kremlin
