Another ‘non-profit organisation’, the ‘Fund for the Support and Protection of the Rights of Compatriots Living Abroad’, was established by a decree of Putin in January 2012. Its founders are the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Rossotrudnichestvo. 
The fund’s stated aim appears absurd at first glance – ‘… to provide Russian compatriots with comprehensive legal and other necessary support in cases where their rights, freedoms and legitimate interests are violated, in accordance with the universally recognised principles and norms of international human rights law’. The implication is that ‘Russian compatriots’ abroad face dangers from which Russia protects them. Under normal circumstances, any state protects the interests of its citizens who face trouble abroad. By establishing this fund, Russia is declaring its readiness to openly provide financial support not only to its citizens, but also to anyone who falls under the definition of ‘compatriots’ – that is, all its agents abroad. The means of assistance are grants and subsidies.  
The fund’s board of trustees is chaired by Sergey Lavrov, and its members include a host of high-ranking Russian officials, such as Dmitry Kiselyov, Natalya Narochitskaya and Sergey Stepashin. The executive board comprises four people, including the head of Rossotrudnichestvo, Yevgeny Primakov. 
The head of the fund’s board is Alexander Udaltsov, a graduate of Moscow State University and the Diplomatic Academy of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, who served as Russia’s ambassador to Lithuania until 2020.  
Somewhat ironically, given the specific background of the fund’s founders, its mission statement reads as follows: “The Foundation carries out its activities in the name of developing democracy, social justice, respect for human rights and freedoms and those of national minorities, improving relations between the individual and society, between the individual and the state, and fostering civic-mindedness.”  
This is typical of the vocabulary used by Russian security services to conceal objectives that are directly opposed to those stated. 
According to the foundation’s website, its ‘human rights centres’ operate in 19 countries.  However, the foundation itself does not initiate the establishment of these centres – ‘The Foundation’s support for the creation of centres generally takes place at the initiative of local human rights organisations and coordinating councils of compatriot organisations in a specific country’. In other words, the centres are set up by Rossotrudnichestvo, whilst the foundation provides the funding. Indeed, in Germany, the ‘human rights centre’ is headed by Yuri Eremenko, editor-in-chief of the website ‘Russkoe Pole’ (Erfurt), the official publication of the All-German Co-ordinating Council of Russian Compatriots (OKS) and a member of the OKS. 

By 2022, the number of the Foundation’s human rights centres in 23 countries across Europe and Asia had reached 32, having quadrupled over the course of 10 years.  
Furthermore, the Foundation funds human rights columns in the Russian-language press abroad. In other words, the Russian-language press itself. In 2022, 23 such columns were in operation. : According to a representative of the Foundation, “Russian-language print media supported by the Foundation, such as the newspapers ‘MK-Germany’, ‘MK-Athens Courier’, ‘Prague Telegraph’, ‘Cyprus Herald’, ‘Russia Today’ (Bulgaria), ‘Novoye Vremya’ (Azerbaijan), ‘Rights of Compatriots in Northern Europe’ (distributed in Denmark, Norway, Finland and Sweden) and a number of other publications. Judging by the positive response from our compatriots to their work, there is a need to further expand the range of such information and legal media outlets… In the current geopolitical climate, the Fund-funded online newspaper *Crimean Echo* and *Duslyk* (‘Friendship’), a magazine for the Tatar diaspora in eastern Ukraine, have carved out a unique niche.
In a 2012 interview, the Fund’s first director, Konstantin Panevkin, responding to a reporter’s suggestion that “our embassies and consulates in various countries will likely be your right hand”, said: ‘We will work quite closely with them, but, unfortunately, they have entirely different tasks. They can assist us in gathering information, but that is not their remit. We will probably work more with those 74 cultural and information centres that have already been established by Rossotrudnichestvo in many countries.’
The fact that ‘Pravfond’ was established and operated as yet another independent intelligence service, working in close collaboration with others, is confirmed by the events of 2024. 
On 11 June 2024, Danish Radio (Danmarks Radio), citing the country’s security and intelligence services, reported the detention in Denmark of a Russian citizen on charges of working for Russian intelligence. The Russian woman was providing legal advice to Russian-speaking residents of the Danish island of Zealand.
The publication ‘Vot Tak’ has discovered that the woman detained by the Danish police is most likely called Irina Petersen.  , She was born in Moscow, lives in the Danish town of Slagelse and heads the organisation ‘Centre for Legal Support and Integration of Compatriots in Denmark’, as well as the Russian-Danish club ‘Rudakis’. In addition, Petersen has for many years co-ordinated commemorative events to mark 9 May, including the ‘Immortal Regiment’ marches .
According to reports from the Danish police, the case against her is linked to the activities of the Russian state-run Fund for the Support and Protection of the Rights of Compatriots Living Abroad (Pravfond), which sponsors advisory centres abroad and is used by Russian foreign intelligence for its own purposes.
This information was published in an article by Danmarks Radio.  As reported by Inseider, “The article states that, four days after the start of the war in Ukraine, Pravfond held a conference for the heads of legal aid centres and editors of legal columns in Russian-language media in various countries. The head of the Danish advisory centre took part in the event. Furthermore, her advisory centre received at least 338,000 kroner from the fund, with Vladimir Pozdrovkin – a former SVR officer and deputy director of Pravfond, responsible for its operations in Northern Europe and the Baltic states – being the person in charge of disbursing these funds. In total, Pravfond funds 34 advisory centres across 21 countries. This was established thanks to a leak of the fund’s internal documents.”  
Representatives of the security services of several European countries stated that the ultimate aim of setting up such advisory centres was to influence public opinion in the countries where they were located and to “justify Russian interference in the internal affairs of other states”. Furthermore, according to The Guardian, the foundation allocated funds, amongst other things, to pay for lawyers for arms dealer Viktor Bout, drug trafficker Konstantin Yaroshenko and hitman Vadim Krasikov, who shot and killed Chechen field commander Zelimkhan Khangoshvili in Berlin in 2019.  In 2021 alone, Krasikov’s lawyer, Robert Unger, received 60,000 euros from Pravfond’s budget, in agreement with Udaltsov.  
According to another source, “More than 40 Pravfond documents, obtained by the Danish public broadcaster DR from a source within European intelligence and passed on to a consortium of European journalists, including *The Guardian*, indicate that the organisation’s leadership included several documented former intelligence agents. Among them is Vladimir Zdorovkin, who was identified by European intelligence sources as an agent of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), and who is listed in open sources as the operations coordinator for Pravfond in the Nordic and Baltic countries; and Anatoly Sorokin, who, as the documents show, is an SVR officer and heads Pravfond’s department for the Middle East, Moldova and Transnistria.
The head of the Institute of the Russian Diaspora, which is listed in official documents as Pravfond’s ‘project implementer’, is Sergei Panteleev, who has been subject to EU sanctions as an officer of a Russian military intelligence unit specialising in psychological warfare operations.” 
In 2023, Pravfond and its head, Alexander Udaltsov, were subject to EU sanctions for supporting the war in Ukraine, but this is unlikely to have significantly curtailed the foundation’s activities.
On 28 October 2022, an article on the Pravfond website entitled ‘On the experience of the Fund for the Support and Protection of the Rights of Compatriots Living Abroad’ stated:
“This year, due to the ‘sanctions’ war unleashed against Russia by the collective West, and bans on financial transfers, our centres in Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia have suspended their operations, and our websites in Denmark, Latvia, Norway and Estonia have been shut down. The Fund has had to find unconventional solutions to support our partners in Spain, France and Cyprus…’ 
The phrase ‘has had to find unconventional solutions to support our partners’ implies that Pravfond is using new and likely illegal methods to deliver money to its overseas staff and agents. 
In Cyprus, Pravfond has been working closely for many years with Natalya Kardash, editor-in-chief of the pro-Kremlin Russian-language newspaper *Vestnik Kipra*.