Butina Maria

Butina Maria Date of Birth

10 January 1988

Butina Maria Citizenship

Russia

Butina Maria Professional field/official position

Maria Butina is a Russian political activist, writer, and public figure, and a journalist for the government-sponsored TV channel RT.

Butina Maria biography

Maria Butina was born on November 10, 1988, in Barnaul. She became interested in politics at a young age. From 2006 to 2007, she worked as a youth-work specialist at the Altai territory branch of the Fair Russia party. She then became a member of the Public Chamber of the Altai Territory in 2008 and managed its press service until 2010. During this time, she also wrote articles for Altai regional newspapers and advocated for the legalization of arms trafficking, which became her main focus in the future.

In 2010, she graduated from Altai State University with a degree in political science and pedagogy. That same year, she founded the public organization Right to Arms, and from 2011, she studied political processes at university graduate school. She also won the Youth Primaries of the Young Guard of United Russia in 2010, marking her initial efforts to align with the authorities and become part of Putin’s system.

From 2012 to 2016, she worked as a special assistant to Alexander Torshin, the first deputy chairman of the Federation Council of the Russian Federation. She played a key role in the Right to Arms movement, and co-authored the expert report on reforming Russian arms legislation in 2012. She also traveled to the United States with Torshin, meeting with representatives of the Federal Reserve System (FRS) and the US Treasury Stanley Fisher and Nathan Sheets.

Butina Maria crimes

Activities involving lobbying and propaganda in support of the Putin regime, as well as corruption scandals with American officials, deliberate distortion, falsification of facts, and defamation against anti-Putin Russian opposition figures, particularly Alexei Navalny; and blurring the lines between journalism and propaganda.

In 2015, during a trip to the United States, Maria Butina began to connect with Republicans who shared her views on protecting gun owners' rights. She participated in a campaign rally of US presidential candidate Donald Trump in July 2015 and published an article in the American magazine The National Interest advocating for improved US-Russia relations through a Republican candidate winning the American elections.

Since 2016, she has been in the United States on a student visa. During her time in the United States, Butina, as reported by The New York Times, tried at least twice to arrange a secret meeting between Trump and Putin during the 2016 US presidential campaign. The American media published critical information about Butina; several senators called for an investigation of her activities. The American press found out that in the spring of 2018, Butina, with a lawyer present, "voluntarily testified to representatives of both parties in the special intelligence committee of the US Senate for eight hours in a closed session, and also provided them with thousands of documents."

In April 2018, a search was conducted in Butina’s apartment in Washington. By the summer, Maria, facing employment issues, began to get ready to return to Russia and pack her bags, and on July 15, 2018, on the eve of the Trump-Putin meeting in Helsinki, she was arrested by the FBI in Washington without prior notice to the Attorney General. The Russian Foreign Ministry saw Butina’s arrest as timed to coincide with the meeting of the Russian and US presidents in Helsinki and aimed at “minimizing its effect” and disrupting the results of the summit. Documents from the US Department of Justice indicate that Butina was in a relationship with the Republican political scientist Paul Erickson (on July 6, 2021, he was sentenced to 7 years in prison for fraud and money laundering), and through him, she obtained contacts of other American politicians. The FBI found letters and text messages to Butina, in which she regularly asked Erickson to complete homework assigned at the college, edit coursework, give answers to exam questions, etc. Based on these facts, the prosecutor’s office concluded that she was a fictitious graduate student at the American University in Washington. And the true purpose of her stay in the United States was espionage and lobbying for the interests of Putin’s Russia.

In July 2018, the US Justice Department charged Butina with conspiracy to act as a foreign agent without informing the US authorities, of “infiltrating organizations that have an impact on US policy to advance Russia’s interests.” In mid-August 2018, Butina was moved to Alexandria Prison, Virginia. On April 26, 2019, a court in Washington sentenced Butina to 18 months in prison and approved deportation to the Russian Federation after serving the sentence. On October 25, 2019, Butina was released from the Tallahassee federal prison after serving a partial 18-month sentence. On October 26, 2019, an Aeroflot plane took her off from Miami to Moscow, and Butina returned to Russia.

Shortly after returning to Russia, Butina solved her employment problems by joining a government-sponsored media empire. In December 2019, Maria Butina got a job at the propaganda TV channel RT as the host of the “Beautiful Russia boo-boo-boo” program (the video introducing her as the new co-host of the stream was called “Beautiful Maria Boo-boo-Butina”). Besides Butina, ex-FBK employee Vitaly Serukanov and RT producer Dmitry “Mitya” Leontyev are among the hosts of the stream programs. She also continued to work in government agencies. After returning to Russia, she joined the Expert Council under the Commissioner for Human Rights in Russia and became a member of the Public Chamber of Russia, where she designated her specialization “in protecting the rights and interests of Russian citizens abroad and in the Russian prison system.” Additionally, she founded the fund “We do not abandon our own,” which she presented on the air of the RT on March 18, 2021.

A new round of Butina’s propaganda activities began when on April 1, 2021, she (as a member of the Public Chamber of Russia) visited opposition politician and political prisoner Alexei Navalny in correctional facility IK-2 in the city of Pokrov. She filmed a report about this visit for RT (the story was shown on Russia Today for Western audiences, as well as on NTV for the Russian) and published an article on April 2. The plot of the story, in particular, repeatedly sounded accusations that Navalny refuses to clean the common area, “to wash the floor” (although even if we approach this issue from a purely formal point of view, according to the Internal Regulations, convicts should not independently wash the floor in the barracks, they should be cleaned by convicts who are officially employed as “cleaners of the premises,” receiving the minimum wage for this work, for which the penal colonies get money). Aleksey Navalny himself, who at that time already complained of health problems and the lack of provision of the necessary medical treatment from the management of the penitentiary institution (for this reason, he went on a hunger strike), greeted Butina’s visit to him in the colony with the following words: “Instead of a doctor, a wretched propagandist from the RT channel Butina arrived today accompanied by video cameras. She screamed that this is the best and most convenient prison.”

She continued her participation in political activities in Russia within the United Russia party. On May 31, 2021, Maria Butina won the primaries of United Russia, and then on June 19, 2021, at the 20th Congress of the United Russia political party, she was approved as a candidate for the State Duma from the Kirov region.