How Kremlin Religious Narratives Target Western Audiences
Faith and Influence in Moldova (Part 3)
This article is the third installment in a four-part Moldova Matters series based on a new report published in collaboration with WatchDog examining the role of religion in Kremlin-aligned Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (FIMI) operations.
In Part 3 we look at how the Salt and Light and other agents of Kremlin disinformation simultaneously worked to spread faith-based narratives attacking Moldova in English for Western audiences.
You can read the whole report online from WatchDog.
Part 3: Externally Facing Religious Themed FIMI
In January 2026 I authored a report for Watchdog titled “Externally Facing Influence Campaigns” that looked at case studies of Russian FIMI campaigns targeting western audiences. In it, Case 3: Bausman’s Bloggers, involved a previously unreported campaign organized by the Russian Orthodox Church to spread FIMI about Moldova in publications across the English speaking world.
Exposure of this campaign began on September 18th, when context.ro reported on the visit of American, Canadian and British “bloggers” who were being featured in Salt and Light publications. This delegation was organized by the Moscow Patriarch Department for the Church’s Society and Mass Media Relations so that participants could “get firsthand experience of our [Russian Orthodox] Church life—in Moscow, Moldova, and the Donbas.”
Here is a list of the participants listed by Salt and Light in their posts:
Charles Bausman - An American with a long history of working as a Russian propagandist. He publishes content called “Fascist” and “antisemitic” by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Bausman entered the US Capitol on January 6th and fled to Russia soon after according to the New York Times. He was the organizer of this delegation alongside the Russian Orthodox Church.
Conrad Franz - An American who hosts the “World War Now” podcast and Substack newsletter (24,000+ subscribers). Its tagline is “Covering the Third World War and political and religious realignment from the perspective of Christian prophecy and rising multipolarity.” Franz is a convert to the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia (ROCOR).
Buck Johnson - American from Texas, host of the Counterflow podcast. Also a convert to ROCOR, Johnson’s podcast combines Orthodox Christianity, masculinity and Libertarianism.
James Delingpole - A British far-right commentator and podcaster, former editor of Breitbart UK, known for conspiracy-driven culture-war content, climate change denial, and repeated alignment with pro-Kremlin narratives and Russian state-adjacent media themes.
John-Henry Westen - Canadian co-founder and editor-in-chief of LifeSiteNews. The site takes an ultra-traditionalist Roman Catholic approach to the news. The site is known for publishing mis- and dis-information and was permanently removed from YouTube in 2021 for promoting MAGA “stop the steal” content. Westen is close to the MAGA movement and was pictured visiting Mar-a-Lago in March 2025.
Thomas Herman Ertl Jr. - Unknown. I have been unable to find any writer operating under this name.
I reached out to all of those listed above for comment (except for Thomas Herman Ertl Jr) but none answered. Buck Johnson did not actually travel to Moldova because he dropped out last minute for unspecified personal reasons. He did interview other members of the group when they returned for his podcast “Counterflow.”
Claims and Narratives
Following the trip these men produced a series of podcasts, articles and interviews about what they saw in Moldova. You can find a list of the articles in the last report, today we’re going to look at the common themes and narratives and how they tie to wider messaging from the Kremlin. Different publications emphasized different narratives, but most included some version of the following:
Moldovan elections were rigged. Maia Sandu came to power via fraudulent mail-in ballots. PAS engages in voter suppression - e.g. Moldovans living in Russia had only 2 polling stations to go to.
PAS and the EU promote an LGBTQ+ agenda. The EU is forcing Moldova to legalize same-sex marriage. Government benefits are being unfairly given to “LGBT teenagers” for political reasons - excluding more qualified straight children. Illegal methods are being used to force pro-LGBT policies on the population. The EU is forcing Moldova to legalize adoption by same-sex couples. The Ministry of Culture and Minister of Education have plans for “incremental integration” of LGBTQ ideology into curriculums. Etc.
There is no religious freedom in Moldova. EU claims about religious freedom are lies. Moldova and the EU are purging the true church (often called the “canonical” church). Ordinary Moldovans are 95% orthodox but this foreign “globalist” ideology is being forced on them. PAS will ban the church within months if they win the elections, etc.
Moldova is a police state that oppresses Christians. Priests told the bloggers about how their phones were bugged and they are followed by the “secret police.” Priests sitting in churches would make a shushing motion and point to the supposed locations of hidden listening devices. They claimed that police cut the electrical cables to churches in the middle of the night if they refuse to defect to the Metropolis of Bessarabia. The secret police threaten to beat priests. In one interview Conrad Franz states:
“you start to realize this is like a gangster state. Many priests told us that what they are experiencing right now is worse than some of the worst Soviet times—which is shocking to hear”
There is no free speech in Moldova. Russian media is banned even when the “vast majority” of the population speaks Russian. Opposition media is banned and people are under physical and electronic surveillance. State security agencies blackmail opposition and priests and they are subject to arbitrary fines, travel restrictions and threats of physical violence constantly.
The EU is interfering in Moldovan elections through the church. Romanian funding for priests in the Metropolis of Bessarabia (referred to as “EU funding”) limits their abilities to speak out on LGBTQ+ issues or abortion. Conrad Franz claims that priests are paid “60, $70,000 yearly salaries, which like that makes you like one of the richest people in Moldova” to defect. They state that Moldova is too small and poor to stand up to the massive financial interference coming from… the EU.
Russia vs the EU globalists - a war of civilizations. The war, elections and all politics in Moldova and Ukraine is explained as ecclesiastical and civilizational with no concern for differing political systems, ideology, ethnic or linguistic differences, etc.
Moldova is Ukraine 2.0. The church schism in Moldova is just like Ukraine but worse in terms of government attacks on Christians.
Russia is awesome. Transnistria is awesome. Moldova is hell. Tiraspol is much nicer than Chișinău, there is no church oppression there and all experience freedom of speech and religion. Many participants traveled on to the Donbas and to Moscow leading to articles like James Delingpole’s “Believe it or not, Russia is great,” published in the Spectator. Speaking in a podcast Conrad Franz explained:
“If they [Moldovans] could only get good info they would see that staying in the Russian sphere of influence does not doom them to worse quality of life”
Franz was referring to how much nicer Tiraspol (allegedly) was than Chișinău and the need for all Moldovans to spend time in Transnistria in order to better understand the benefits of the Russian world.
Long-form - Not Social Media
Within Moldova, Russian FIMI focuses heavily on short-attention span scrolling platforms. TikTok, Facebook, Telegram - all rely on a compelling picture, short video and / or short text. The goal is to target a mass market audience that is already on these platforms with narratives and arguments tailored to make them stop scrolling and dive a bit deeper. The foreign facing FIMI from the Baussman’s Bloggers trip is structurally different. The output of this trip came in the form of articles in LifeSiteNews, the Spectator and other sites that dive much more deeply into these issues. The content and positioning differs based on the target audience but the assumption is that the readers are open to long-form arguments diving into issues of attacks on religious freedom or free speech, rigged elections or COVID / vaccine conspiracy theories. Moldova is slotted into this space as an example of the worst of the worst offender.
This is even more clear in the podcasts that came out of this trip. Many of these podcasts are very long - up to 3 hours in length. Moldova may not come up until 1-2 hours into the discussions or interviews. This content is targeting people who are already very much part of the community in question and inserting the idea that Christians in Moldova are under attack and that the Moldovan government is an arch example of their brand of political enemy.
Audience Analysis
While we don’t have listener or readership numbers or demographics from these publications, an analysis of the publications themselves and the arguments deployed in different places indicates that there are 3 main target audience groupings for this FIMI:
MAGA Leaders - specifically JD Vance
MAGA base voters and fellow travelers outside the US - specifically people focused on culture wars and former libertarians
Converts to the Russian Orthodox Church outside Russia (ROCOR) and people in their media ecosystem
Articles such as Charles Bausman’s “EU’s Shocking Push for LGBT in Europe’s Most Conservative Christian Country – Moldova” in LifeSiteNews frame Moldova in a political context designed to appeal to religious MAGA voters in the US. Narratives focus on globalism and promotion of LGBTQ+ “ideology.” Bausman writes of “widespread electoral fraud using mail-in ballots” in a clear callback to the Stop the Steal movement that led him into the US Capitol on January 6th and led to LifeSiteNews being banned platforms like YouTube.
While narratives like this exist in all of the produced content, it’s worth zooming in on appeals to MAGA leadership and to ROCOR.
“Get this to the desk of J.D. Vance”
A major figure in the delegation’s trip to Moldova was Archbishop Markell of Bălți. He met with the delegation while they were in Moldova and across their many podcast discussions he appears to be one of the key sources for many of the “facts” that they are sharing. On September 22nd, 2025 Markell shared a video on X where he makes a direct appeal to Vice President JD Vance saying:
“The whole world knows that you advocate for traditional values, the traditional family and traditional Christian upbringing (...) In that sense, we are absolutely identical to you. We advocate for the same values which is precisely why the Orthodox Church in Moldova is persecuted.”
The video then pans away from his direct appeal to show Charles Bausman, Conrad Franz, James Delingpole and others sitting in his office reviewing papers of some kind. They don’t seem to have been told that they are part of some appeal video and have likely been included simply as props - showing known American “journalists” and bloggers with Markell.
In subsequent podcasts the members of this delegation frequently refer to the need to educate JD Vance on what is happening in Moldova. In episode 95 of his World War Now podcast, Franz says:
“He’s [Archbishop Markell] been doing his best to raise awareness, and he himself even told me he really thinks that if word about this can get to J.D. Vance, specifically, who we know J.D. in the past Vice President has spoken out against the persecution of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, which is a good sign that if we can potentially raise some awareness, get this to the desk of J.D. Vance, maybe even get this on J.D. Vance’s timeline. We know he follows a lot of people on X that we are familiar with. So if we could get eyes on this, make sure we spread this around, it would really do a service to suffering Orthodox Christian brothers that are never going to get their day in court, both physically in their country illegally or in the media that of course is going to side with their oppressors.”
In April of 2024 Vice Presidential Candidate JD Vance gave a speech calling out the “assault on traditional Christian communities” in Ukraine. He stated:
“That will be … our shame for refusing to use the hundreds of billions of dollars that we send to Ukraine as leverage to ensure and guarantee real religious freedom,”
His remarks in the context of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church Schism drew the attention of church authorities and clearly made him a main target of efforts by Conrad Franz and others. In the same podcast Conrad Franz called on his listeners to contact their “local and federal representatives” to put pressure on Moldova, Romania and the EU.
Understanding ROCOR
Of all the participants of this delegation, the one who produced the most content before and after the trip was Conrad Franz. Following the full delegation’s trip to Moldova, he is the only one to speak or write about visiting Transnistria. He then traveled to visit churches in Russian-occupied Ukraine near the frontlines in Donbas, and then on to Moscow.
Franz and Buck Johnson are both recent converts to ROCOR. They are part of a huge wave of conversions to ROCOR taking place in the United States in the years since 2020 - particularly in Texas. Converts are overwhelmingly male and were initially drawn by ROCOR’s staunch anti-vax views. The phenomenon has been reported on by NPR, the BBC and the New York Times which wrote:
“Many of the young Americans new to the pews have been introduced to Orthodoxy by hard-edge influencers on YouTube and other social media platforms. Critics call the enthusiastic young converts “Orthobros.”
The “orthobros” are a growing part of the wider “manosphere” that drive their message with slick looking YouTube videos of priests pumping iron and discussing how converts can “increase their manliness to absurd levels?”
Orthodoxy in the United States has typically been limited to immigrant communities who build churches around those communities - for example, Greeks, Ukrainians and Russians. These new converts are massively swelling the number of Orthodox believers in the United States and bringing a very different flavor to the church. Even before this current wave, Orthodoxy drew a disproportionate number of White Nationalists including high profile figures such as Matthew Heimbach, the organizer of the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville Virginia. Heimbach converted to Antiochian Orthodoxy in 2014 but was excommunicated only a week later after he beat an anti-fascist counterprotestor with a large wooden Orthodox cross. He has since found a Romanian Orthodox group that accepted him.
It is worth noting that while ROCOR is not inherently antisemitic, more fundamentalist Orthodox converts in the US have a high level of overlap with antisemitic and Neo Nazi groups. That includes Charles Bausman (called a publisher of “Fascist” and “antisemitic” material by the Southern Poverty Law Center) and much of the content created following the blogger delegation in Moldova. Antisemitism, millenarian prophecy, talk of Satan (often as Maia Sandu) and similar themes run through many of the podcasts produced following this trip.
It is also worth noting that many of the ideas prevalent in this wing of ROCOR - including the slogan “Orthodoxy or Death” - are banned in Russia as extremist. Conrad Franz and many in this movement are monarchists who hope to see the return of a Russian Tsar after Vladimir Putin. It is ironic to note that some of their content, if produced in Russia and in Russian, would likely result in a close encounter with actual political, religious and speech persecution.
This article is Part 3 of a four-part Moldova Matters series. In the final installment, we examine how narratives developed in Moldova were repackaged for audiences in the United States and Western Europe — and what this reveals about a broader ideological alignment between Kremlin messaging and segments of the Western far right.
You can read the whole report online from WatchDog.