The hackers made contact in and claimed they had been inside Politology’s infrastructure for years. The documents arrived in batches and mostly cover 2025 and 2026. Their stated motive is exposing Politology and their inner workings
, and they say they intend to target Media and groups like it until we slay them all.
Politology is the historical influence arm of the Wagner Group and is now fully controlled by Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), according to earlier leaks. In February 2026, INPACT/AEOW and a consortium of media outlets reported on 74 documents obtained by The Continent, which detailed the network’s 2024 campaigns in Africa and Latin America and the SVR takeover. Politology’s own security assessment later recorded staff arrests in Argentina, Angola and the Dominican Republic. Argentina’s presidential spokesman, Manuel Adorni, publicly identified network agents operating there. Two operatives were arrested in Angola in August 2025 and found guilty in July 2026, and Dmitrii Novikov was detained in the Dominican Republic in September 2025 over alleged links to the network’s disinformation and spying work.
Five Units and a Much Wider Map
The new files show Politology reaching well beyond Africa and Latin America. The network now runs five autonomous units covering the Mediterranean, Central Africa, the Western Hemisphere, a special project for France, and local stories. Its campaigns also aim to shape how audiences read international affairs. The documents point to these targets:
- Politics and conflicts: the Trump Administration, the war in Iran, Syria, Libya and Sudan
- Europe: France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom and Turkey, with themes including migration, colonial reparation and alliances
- Institutions: the European Union and the International Criminal Court
- India: a key Russian partner that has become a new country of interest for
The Company
A Security Overhaul That Did Not Hold
After the first breaches, Politology drafted memos in March and May 2026 laying out drastic organizational and IT changes. They included splitting departments, restricting access, isolating data, moving to a new office, replacing network equipment, resetting accounts, adding encrypted VPN tunnels and VeraCrypt, and coding all employee personal data. The same security assessment conceded there were risks in running AI models on its own hardware. Internal investigators also fixated on who leaked the first batch. They suspected an employee from the parent organisation
and implicated two senior figures, Dmitry Filatov and Alexander Molodiakov. The new batch reaching journalists confirms the measures did not stop further compromise.
INPACT/AEOW says it verified the documents by keeping an open line with the hackers, checking their material against leaks and knowledge gathered on Politology over the years, and examining file metadata and the public elements of campaigns described in the files. It noted four discrepancies. Some files have no metadata, notably screenshots showing the hackers on the system, which the group assumes was stripped to hide when the compromises happened. Other documents have names, emails or transactions redacted, which could be a new Politology security measure. INPACT/AEOW and its partners still assess the set as highly credible and authentic
and say it will anchor investigations over the coming months.
Hashlytics Take
The timing is the story. Politology wrote its hardening memos in March and May 2026, yet the leaked material still skews toward 2025 and 2026, which means the intruders were inside through the overhaul or got back in after it. Account resets and encrypted tunnels do little against an attacker who already holds legitimate access, and the internal hunt for a mole suggests Politology never pinned down how the first breach happened. The other point readers should keep in mind is that verification here depends partly on a live channel with the hackers themselves, who have a stated agenda and admit to scrubbing some metadata. The authentication comes from INPACT/AEOW’s cross-checking, not from the files proving themselves.
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