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New evidence has emerged tying Elon Musk and the Trump administration to a network of pro-Kremlin operatives in the US with a history of ties to Musk’s own family. The ties suggest that DOGE is a project to resurrect anti-democracy ideas rooted in a 1930s movement that opposed Allied war efforts against Nazi Germany.
Byline Times can exclusively reveal that a former US Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) official and longtime Musk employee – working at PayPal, SpaceX and now X – is connected to a movement for the revival of the Russian monarchy with close ties to the Russian Government including its Ministries of Defence and Foreign Affairs – and which believes Russia is engaged in a mortal civilisational war with the West.
The same network has links via Musk’s family to a 1930s technofascist movement. Known as ‘Technocracy’, the movement wanted to redraw the map of the United States to encompass vast swathes of territory from Canada to Greenland to Panama and Columbia and dreamed of replacing democracy with an “efficient” authoritarian regime run by engineers – paralleling what the Trump-Musk administration is doing today.
The DOGE Operative – Kremlin Ties
In an investigation published early March, former Washington Post cybersecurity reporter Brian Krebs revealed that one of Elon Musk’s most loyal acolytes and longest-serving employees for 28 years, Branden Spikes, worked at DOGE for the first two months of Trump’s second term – before returning to his previous role as the Director of Information Technology at X, the Musk-owned social media platform formerly known as Twitter.
Although it is not clear what role Branden Spikes played at DOGE, according to Krebs citing sources familiar with the role, he operated at a high-level “within Musk’s inner circle of trust”.
Before working at X, Branden Spikes held senior roles at SpaceX, where he was the fourth person hired into the company, PayPal (where he was IT director), and Zip2, Musk’s first major software venture.
Krebs’ report confirmed that Spikes’s ex-wife, whom he divorced in 2011, is a native Russian woman named Natalia Haldeman with ties both to Musk’s family and to Kremlin-aligned civil society groups in the US.
Natalia Haldeman operated within a network of pro-Kremlin Russian American nonprofits. She registered a wide range of internet domains including for an organisation called the Russian Heritage Foundation.
Photographs obtained by Krebs show Natalia with Branden Spikes at a fundraising dinner alongside Ivan Y. Podvalov, a board director of the Congress of Russian Americans (CRA). Feodor Yakimoff, chairman of Russian Imperial Charity Balls. Both organisations have pro-Kremlin ties. The latter in particular, Byline Times can reveal, has extensive ties to Russian monarchists connected with the Russian ministries of defence and foreign affairs.
The CRA is ostensibly a networking organisation for the Russian diaspora in the US founded in 1973. But it has demonstrated a consistent alignment with Kremlin goals. Today, it is a pro-Trump organisation which has lobbied the US government to drop sanctions against Russia. The Russian Foreign Ministry has reportedly promoted the CRA’s president, Natalia Sabelnil, who also has a track record of lobbying in support of Russia’s war in Ukraine.
Yakimoff’s Russian Imperial Charity Balls is sponsored by two Moscow-based groups which advocate a revival of the Russian monarchy and imperial state. One sponsor is the ‘Western USA’ chapter of the Assembly of Russian Nobility headquartered in Moscow. The Russian Heritage Foundation, which has rebranded to Constellation of Humanity, also works with the Russian Imperial Charity Balls.
Extreme Russian Monarchists with Ministry of Defence Ties
The Assembly of Russian Nobility (in Russian abbreviated to ‘RDS’ but whose full title is ‘the Union of Descendants of the Russian Nobility – Russian Nobility Assembly’) describes its mission as “the revival of the greatness of Russia, all its constituent regions, the preservation of the historical and cultural heritage of the Russian State, the restoration and continuation of the historical continuity of the state and generations…”
Founded in 1990 just before the Soviet Union collapsed, the RDS supports the revival of a monarchical form of government inspired by the Russian Empire. Its website calls for the “development of the monarchist idea in the 21st century, the role of the monarchical idea in the modern unity of the peoples of historical Russia, modern views on the past and future of Russian imperial geopolitics.”
Through conferences, summits and other activities, the RDS wants “to show that the monarchical form of government has not only not outlived itself, but, on the contrary, is both quite successful in the modern world and promising in the future, that in modern Russia there are enough social and political movements… who stand on such traditionalist positions, in the context of the imperial tasks of the Russian State and the prospects for their implementation in the space of Eurasia and the World.”
The group is also ardently anti-Western and sees itself at the forefront of a global civilisational conflict between a resurgent Russian empire and the West:
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“In March 2022, the leadership of the RDS issued a patriotic Statement in support of the defence of Russia, Russian civilization in the face of the unprecedented military-political and economic confrontation of the collective West, stating that it is in such times that the Russian Nobility must show its historical duty to protect the Fatherland from the desecration of shrines, preserve the national heritage and ensure the viability of Russian civilization.”
The Assembly also actively interacts with a range of Russian Government departments and agencies “including presidential and government structures, various ministries, including the Ministry of Defence, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Federal Agency ‘Rossotrudnichestvo’ the Ministry of Culture of Russia, the Russian State Military Historical and Cultural Center under the Government of the Russian Federation”
Another sponsor of the Russian Imperial Charity Balls is the Russian Imperial-Union Order (RIUO), another Kremlin aligned monarchist organisation, originally founded in 1929 by Russian exiles in Paris who wanted to preserve Tsarist legitimacy.
The RIUO supports many Kremlin initiatives that align with its values (such as church revival and patriotic education), and the Kremlin frequently consults or includes the RIUO in state events. The Kremlin has especially embraced parts of the RIUO’s agenda such as Orthodox heritage, veneration of the Romanovs, condemnation of the Bolshevik legacy and the glorification or Russian imperial history to bolster Putin’s own legitimacy and Russian nationalist narratives.