https://x.com/EFischberger/status/2062580449617276983
Eitan Fischberger
@EFischberger
Russia just told on itself this week, and almost nobody noticed.
At a Federation Council meeting, Deputy Justice Minister Oleg Sviridenko admitted that only 4% of the people and groups Russia designated as "foreign agents" in 2025 actually receive any foreign funding.
Before 2022, foreign money was a requirement for the label. His point, said out loud, was that money is no longer what they look for — because, in his words, it "isn't even needed anymore. There are other forms now."
That's a huge admission right there.
The state that spent a century perfecting political subversion is telling you, on the record, that funding is the least interesting part of the equation.
Now look at the conversation this past week. Candace Owens is in St. Petersburg right now, speaking on a panel at Putin's flagship economic forum, beside officials who sit under U.S. sanctions. And the question I keep seeing is some version of "how much is Russia paying her?"
I don't think Russia is paying her anything.
Same with Tucker and the endless speculation over how much Qatar or Iran is supposedly wiring him. I don't think there's a check.
And even if there were, you'd never find it — shell layers, cash, a relative's account, an "honorarium" for a speech, a consulting deal booked in a third country. If your case depends on producing a wire transfer, you've already lost it.
But the deeper mistake is the premise that influence runs on money. It doesn't.
The intelligence world has known this for decades, and it has a name for it: MICE.
🔸Money
🔸Ideology
🔸Coercion
🔸Ego
Money is one lever of four, and arguably the weakest. Yet our entire legal conversation behaves as if it's the only one on the list.
Ideology is the one we mistake for innocence — the sincere believer who pushes a foreign line because he holds it. We call him a "useful idiot," as if sincerity were a defense rather than the most valuable trait an asset can have.
Coercion is the one you can't see — leverage someone abroad quietly holds and never has to mention.
And Ego is the most underrated of all, because the targets already have money. What a state can hand them for free is the feeling of mattering. A seat at a table they'd never otherwise reach, proximity to power, the sense of being a serious geopolitical figure rather than a podcaster. People have burned down their lives for that.
This is why the binary everyone reaches for (money or ideology) is useless.
Because structurally, we only see the M.
FARA asks one question — did foreign money touch you, and were you acting at the direction of a foreign principal.
Prosecutors hunt for the payment because the payment is provable. So the people most openly advancing a foreign agenda, the ones running on ego or ideology, sit cleanly outside the law.
They're untouchable precisely because they're unpaid. The professionals — Russia, Iran, Qatar, Turkey, China — worked this out long ago.
The cleanest asset has no financial tie at all. No paper trail, no defector risk, nothing to subpoena.
We need to stop asking how much people are being paid. It's the wrong question, built to be unanswerable.
Rather, ask the question Sviridenko handed us for free: what does this person get out of the relationship that they couldn't get anywhere else?
Answer that, and the rest is surprisingly simple.
