That the president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, has acquired Hitler's former property, the Eagle's Nest, in Bavaria; that he has bought 51% of a platinum mine in South Africa; or conspiracy theories suggesting that the wife of the president of France, Brigitte Macron, is a man. These are contents from Russian websites such as Argumenty i Fakty, Ria Novosti, and The Intel Drop, republished in Spanish by the Catholic News Agency, founded in Mexico in 2019 in the state of Veracruz.
This is a cross-border investigation by Maldita.es (Spain) and Verificado.mx (Mexico) that analyzes how the Catholic News Agency of Mexico not only amplifies the Kremlin's disinformation campaigns but also republishes content—sometimes misleading—from a network of websites or platforms against LGBTQ+ rights or the right to abortion in Spain, Mexico, or the United States.
Around a dozen disinformation campaigns have been launched against Zelensky in recent years
On April 4, 2025, the Russian website Argumenty i Fakty (Arguments and Facts) published a hoax claiming that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had purchased a 51% stake in a South African platinum mine for $1.6 billion. This was part of a widespread disinformation campaign launched by the Kremlin using multiple strategies: creating a manipulated video disguised as a broadcast from South Africa's state broadcaster (SABC News), publishing it on websites that regularly share Russian disinformation and propaganda, such as the Pravda network (also known as Portal Kombat), and using Twitter accounts (now X) for amplification. Both SABC News and Northam Platinum, the company from which Zelensky supposedly purchased the majority stake, confirmed that it was disinformation.
This same content was translated into Spanish and republished on April 4 by the Catholic News Agency, based in Mexico, which describes itself as “an agency where Catholics are informed and express their opinions with reliable and timely information.” Both publications, the one on the Russian website and the one on the Mexican website, are signed by Ekaterina Budyonnaya, a regular contributor to Argumenty i Fakty.
On April 4, the Catholic News Agency also published the falsehood that Zelensky had bought “Hitler’s residence for 14.2 million euros.” This content, originally published in February 2025, again by Argumenty i Fakty, was signed in both cases by Nadezhda Mikheeva, another name frequently found on the Russian web. Again, it was a disinformation campaign, this time distributed through a website that masqueraded as a news outlet to lend credibility to its content—a common strategy used by the Kremlin. The website had been created two months before the publication of the disinformation.
Both pieces of disinformation are part of a broader narrative claiming that Zelensky and his family squander the money they receive from the West on luxury goods. Furthermore, the Catholic News Agency also published disinformation claiming that Ukraine had bought the visit of Angelina Jolie and other celebrities—another disinformation campaign orchestrated by the Kremlin. Again, it was a republication of Argumenty i Fakty.
On two occasions, the Agency also spread disinformation linking Zelensky to cocaine use and trafficking. This content was published without any supporting evidence. One piece claimed that "the Ukrainian president's plane was smuggling 300 kg of cocaine when the head of the Kyiv regime arrived for the inauguration of Argentine leader Javier Milei," citing The Intel Drop, a website that regularly shares Russian disinformation and campaigns such as the one accusing Zelensky's wife of child trafficking through her foundation. As the Italian fact-checkers Open explained, this was a disinformation campaign disseminated through websites that masqueraded as traditional media outlets to lend credibility to the misinformation they spread. This Russian operation is known as a "false façade".
Another publication originated from the website ZeroHedge, which the United States has accused of publishing Russian propaganda. This website published the disinformation campaign accusing Emmanuel Macron (President of France), Friedrich Merz (German Chancellor), and Keir Starmer (Prime Minister of the United Kingdom) of hiding a bag of cocaine on the train to Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine, during a visit in May 2025. It wasn't a bag of cocaine; it was a tissue. The Catholic News Agency, however, published it with the headline "Were the President of France and the Prime Minister of Germany caught with cocaine?" Both pieces were published on the same day, May 11, and are signed by Tyler Durden, the pseudonym used by many ZeroHedge articles, a reference to the Fight Club character.
If there is a republication agreement between these Russian pages and the Catholic News Agency, it would constitute Foreign Information Interference and Manipulation (FIMI) by Russia in both Mexico and Spain, the other country to which it directs the content it publishes.
The LifesiteNews republications and the conspiracies against Brigitte Macron
The conspiracy theory against Brigitte Macron, Emmanuel Macron's wife, claiming she is transgender, has also been widely shared by the Mexican religious website through multiple posts. One such post was a disinformation campaign claiming that "the surgeon who supposedly knew the sexual secret of Macron's wife" had died. As Maldita.es explained, this was another baseless campaign spread by a website created a few days earlier that impersonated a French news outlet.
Regarding Brigitte Macron's alleged transgender status, the Catholic News Agency also published that "lawyers for the President of France do not directly deny that she is transgender," an original publication from the Russian state news agency RIA Novosti.
They also published that Brigitte Macron "appeared with a male name in the official tax records," referring to the BFMTV documentary broadcast last October. While the documentary was indeed real, the BFMTV video claims that Brigitte Macron's information was altered on the tax website by a partner, not that the First Lady's name is Jean-Michel.
Unlike other religious content, these publications are not promoted on social media platforms like X or Facebook.
The Catholic News Agency not only republishes content from Russian agencies and websites, fueling the disinformation campaign that claims Brigitte Macron is a man, but also frequently features similar content from websites like LifeSiteNews. It also shared other statements from Candace Owens, an American influencer who published a series called “Becoming Brigitte” on YouTube, where she has over four million followers. The series consists of eight videos in which Owens presents “evidence” that, according to her, proves Brigitte Macron was actually born male. Owens was sued for defamation by the Macron couple in June 2025.
LifeSiteNews is a website founded in 1997 by the Canadian political lobbying organisation Campaign Life Coalition. In 2021, it was blocked on some social media platforms, such as Facebook, for spreading misinformation about COVID-19.
The Catholic News Agency itself also published some of LifeSiteNews' conspiracy theories about vaccines. For example, they reproduced statements attributed to Mike Yeadon, whom they described as "former Vice President and Chief Scientist of Allergy and Respiratory at Pfizer." They reproduced an interview Yeadon gave to LifeSiteNews in November 2020 in which he said that "there is no need for vaccines, the pandemic is over." Maldita.es has already explained that Yeadon is neither a former president nor a former vice president of the pharmaceutical company Pfizer and that his statement, "there is no need for a vaccine, the [SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus] pandemic is over," did not correspond with the data and scientific evidence available at the time these claims were published.
The Catholic News Agency was founded in Mexico in 2019
Registered in Minatitlán, a municipality in the Mexican state of Veracruz, the Catholic News Agency was created in 2019, although its social media profiles on X and Facebook were registered in 2018. Initially, Hugo Valdemar was in charge, who from 2003 to 2018 headed the Office of Social Communication for the Archdiocese of Mexico during the tenure of Cardinal Norberto Rivera Carrera. Initially, the agency had a different domain (acnweb.com.mx), until 2022, when the current website was launched.
Today, it is directed by Guillermo Gazanini, who joined after ceasing to be a regular contributor to the Spanish media outlet Religión Digital, one of the leading Spanish-language religious websites, where he published a column called Sursum Corda. Since 2021, Gazanini has published a column under the same name in both the Catholic News Agency and Infovaticana, the website of Gabriel Ariza, son of Julio Ariza and president of the Intereconomía Group.
Infovaticana was one of the websites that published the so-called "Prevost Report," a dossier that began circulating days before the conclave, accusing the now-Pope Leo XIV of having covered up cases of sexual abuse in Peru and the United States. However, this was not proven. Infovaticana also occasionally publishes other content from the Mexican agency, also written by Gazanini.
The Spanish section of the Catholic News Agency: publications by one of the founders of Hazte Oír and live YouTube broadcasts by the leader of AcTÚa Familia
Part of the content offered by the Catholic News Agency website is dedicated to Spain. In fact, it has a section called ‘Va España’ (Go Spain), where they compile all the content related to the country, especially political issues rather than religious matters themselves.
Since at least 2020, the site has regularly published columns by the Spaniard Luis Losada Pescador, with more than 150 articles on the website. Losada was deputy director of La Gaceta de los Negocios, part of the Intereconomía Group, and is a founding member of Hazte Oír, the platform known for its anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ+ rights campaigns, chaired by Ignacio Arsuaga. He is also the campaigns editor for CitizenGo, the international arm of Hazte Oír. He has been publishing in the Catholic News Agency since at least September 2020. The same columns are also republished on other sites such as Actuall, a page promoted by Hazte Oír. Losada Pescador was accused in 2014 by his ex-wife, María Victoria Uroz, of belonging to the Mexican secret organisation El Yunque.
Another regular contributor to the Catholic Agency is Pedro Mejías, the leader of AcTÚa Familia. This organisation, whose social media profiles were created in 2020, defines itself as a “pro-life, pro-family, and pro-freedom civic platform, based on the principles of Christian humanism, with a vocation to be at the forefront of the ideological battle for non-negotiable values.” According to Meta's Transparency page, the Instagram and Facebook accounts are managed from Spain, Mexico, and Colombia.
AcTÚa Familia is one of the organisations that, along with Vox, promoted the initiative to raise awareness of the so-called “post-abortion syndrome” in the Madrid City Council (although they claim the proposed text was entirely Vox's). It was approved on September 30th and was based on a supposed syndrome that is not supported by scientific evidence. The initiative aimed to require municipal centers to inform all women seeking a voluntary termination of pregnancy about the procedure. Ultimately, although the People's Party, the party that governs in the City Council, voted in favor, the mayor of Madrid, José Luis Martínez-Almeida, stated that it would not be mandatory, but rather voluntary.
The leader of this platform has a YouTube channel whose videos are also republished by the Catholic News Agency on its own channel. In fact, many videos feature the logos of both organisations.
What the Catholic News Agency produces is then reproduced on the US website Gateway Hispanic
The Catholic News Agency not only amplifies and distributes what other websites publish, but also generates material that other websites reproduce. This is the case with the content produced by the coordinator of acTÚa Familia. The leader of this platform occasionally publishes columns with the Catholic News Agency. The first one on record on the website dates back to October 2020. This organisation also has a regular section on Gateway Hispanic, where they republish some of the content that Pedro Mejías writes for the agency.
Gateway Hispanic is the Spanish-language sister site of The Gateway Pundit, which has been labeled a questionable source for spreading propaganda, conspiracy theories, and disinformation by the website Media Bias Fact Check, among others, which specializes in studying media bias. Maldita.es verified various pieces of misinformation published by The Gateway Pundit during the pandemic.
Gateway Hispanic was founded in 2024. It is registered in the names of three people, including the owner of The Gateway Pundit and María Herrera Mellado, a Spanish woman who is sometimes presented as a representative of Vox in Florida (United States). According to Gateway Hispanic, Herrera serves as “editor-in-chief.”
Russia's Links and Role with Anti-Abortion and LGBTQ+ Organisations
Several investigations have revealed Russia's links with organisations that oppose women's reproductive rights, LGBTQ+ rights, and the feminist movement. These are positions championed by the Kremlin.
According to a 2021 publication by the European Parliamentary Forum on Sexual and Reproductive Rights, titled “The Tip of the Iceberg: Religious Extremist Funders Against Human Rights to Sexuality and Reproductive Health in Europe,” two Russian oligarchs, Vladimir Yakunin and Konstantin Malofeev, “stand out for their leadership in the global anti-gender landscape.” The report estimates that these two oligarchs allocated more than €160 million to the fight against feminism, gender diversity, and the acceptance of family structures other than the “traditional” one in Europe between 2013 and 2018.
Malofeev, sanctioned by the European Union and the United States for financing and providing logistical support to Russian separatists in the Crimean and Donetsk provinces, owns the Tsargrad Group, a Russian propaganda channel. In 2017, one of its presenters offered to pay for one-way plane tickets for homosexuals who wanted to leave the country.
In 2021, a WikiLeaks release of 17,000 documents, called “The Network of Intolerance,” concerning CitizenGo and Hazte Oír, exposed documents in which names like Malofeev's appeared as a funder of these organisations through the foundation he chairs at San Basilio el Grande. Malofeev also appears in the study “The Tip of the Iceberg” as a “possible donor” (p. 80).
For his part, Alexey Komov, a close associate of Malofeev, served on the board of directors of Hazte Oír for several years, until at least 2023, although he is no longer listed on the website.
This leak, published in Spain by the newspaper Público, also revealed how Hazte Oír commissioned a "crisis management plan" to deny the May 2014 ruling that linked its leaders to the secret society El Yunque. The trial took place after the publication of the report "The Transparent One of Toledo Cathedral," commissioned by the Episcopal Conference from philosophy professor Fernando López Luengos to investigate El Yunque's infiltration of the Church in 2010, and after Hazte Oír filed a criminal complaint against the professor.
The European Parliament's Research Service also warned of the Kremlin's use of religion as a foreign policy tool. “In EU countries without a significant Orthodox presence, the Kremlin’s strategy has been to infiltrate Western Christian associations and link them with Orthodox ‘allies’ to fight for a common cause: preserving ‘European civilization’ in what have been termed ‘conservative Christian alliances,’” they state. They highlight the role played by the World Congress of Families (an organisation that promotes a traditional, heterosexual family model and conservative gender roles), where the Russian Orthodox Church has had a significant presence in the last decade.
On the other hand, other investigations have also exposed Russia’s interest in Mexico and in ensuring that disinformation and its narratives reach the population of that country. Last November, Factchequeado, a media outlet founded by Maldita.es and Chequeado (Argentina), published the investigation “Putin’s Laundromat,” which exposes how the Journalists’ Club, located in the Historic Center of Mexico City, operates as a front for Russian disinformation and narratives that benefit the Kremlin, ranging from claiming that the reason for the Russia's invasion of Ukraine was described as "NATO's eastward expansion," even going so far as to call the invasion a "special military operation," a phrase used by Vladimir Putin's government.
Maldita.es and Verificado.mx contacted the Catholic News Agency to inquire about the numerous Russian disinformation campaigns, which are unsubstantiated and have been fact-checked by various countries, but as of the publication date of this article, we have not received a response.