As evidence to impose sanctions against Russian citizens, the European Union uses machine translations of articles from Wikipedia, anonymous blogs and tabloid journalism materials. Politico came to this conclusion.
Journalists reviewed five working documents used as justification for imposing sanctions against Russian business leaders, officials and members of their families. Among them, for example, are documents on the case of Russian businessman Vyacheslav Kantor.
As the publication notes, despite the fact that the working documents are marked LIMITE, the evidence in them is most often taken from publicly available materials and consists of machine translations of articles from Russian and Ukrainian sources of varying degrees of reliability.
In particular, Wikipedia articles, political materials from tabloids and magazines that primarily feature cooking recipes, and publications marked as “advertising” may be used as evidence. Similar advertising articles were found in the Kantor case — these were materials posted on the Rambler web portal and in the Evening Murmansk publication. No attention was paid to the “Advertising” mark in the documents. As one EU country diplomat told Politico, decisions on sanctions and collection of evidence are being made at a “frenetic pace.”
In March, according to the publication, European lawyers who represent the interests of sanctioned Russians published an open letter complaining about the information used by the European Union. “Many people were listed only based on publicly available sources gathered through a simple Google search, including questionable articles in online tabloids or anonymous blogs,” they reported.
Politico writes that one of the lawyers of RBC owner Grigory Berezkin drew the attention of the European Union that articles created by artificial intelligence and materials from the website “Russian Crimes” written by , probably non-existent journalists. In mid-September, the European Union did not extend sanctions against Berezkin.