Iivi Anna Masso

Both Estonia and Finland rank high in international press freedom comparisons, boasting free and reliable press. However, in this story, the Finnish public broadcaster Yle, as well as the two largest private media houses of Estonia, Ekspress Grupp and Postimees Group, were deeply involved in a libelous and unethical disinformation campaign. How was that possible? How can the free media be harnessed for hostile disinformation campaigns? Why did the elites of two democratic countries go along with such campaigns, with not a single dissenting voice heard? * This article contains a J’accuse in the end, that lists persons and institutions who participated in this quasi-criminal enterprise of destroying one person’s reputation and livelihood with the help of lies and lowly libel.

On a successful disinformation operation in Estonia and Finland

By Iivi Anna Masso

How can Putinist information warriors manage to influence a top political institution like the office of the President of a country that is a member of EU and NATO, using the “free and independent” media of that country and another one? The story told here unfolds in Estonia and Finland, in 2014-2015, around the office of the President of Estonia, who at that time was Toomas Hendrik Ilves. At the time, Estonia was a member of both the EU and NATO, while Finland, also a EU member, publicly rejected any talk about an eventual accession to NATO, even though Finland joined NATO years later, in 2023. Both countries had developed very tight economic links to Russia during the Cold War, links that are way harder to eliminate than political choices and ideologies.

The work of investigative journalists in several European countries reveal ties to Russian economic interests among politicians, civil servants, businessmen and the media, even during the times of embargo and war. But many stories remain untold. Ironically, the better the information operations in favor of Russian interests succeed, the less we know about them. In this story, Estonian president Ilves, an outspoken and internationally popular critic of Russian actions in Ukraine, such as the annexation of Crimea in 2014, was essentially silenced and controlled by “eliminating”, through a massive information operation, his advisor who supported him in getting his message out. That advisor, whose name and career was destroyed in the process, was me. This is my story, but it is also a piece of history, recording our blindness and naiveté when it comes to disinformation.

Both Estonia and Finland rank high in international press freedom comparisons, boasting free and reliable press. However, in this story, the Finnish public broadcaster Yle, as well as the two largest private media houses of Estonia, Ekspress Grupp and Postimees Group, were deeply involved in the libelous and unethical disinformation campaign that cost me my reputation and my career, and the President his voice in the world from spring 2015 to October 2016. How was that possible? How can the free media be harnessed for hostile disinformation campaigns? Why did the elites of two democratic countries go along with such campaigns, with not a single dissenting voice heard? What did the police, the secret service, the president himself do? What was it that actually happened?

The story, with all details that involve the media and politicians in the two countries, is not short. I try to tell it the best I can, based on the limited information that I have about it.

Part 1: A humiliating expulsion of a presidential advisor

Part 2: How it all begun: a professional libel campaign in mainstream media

Part 3: The prelude of the expulsion: another libel campaign turned into an Orwellian hate chorus

Part 4: The end game: a Presidential office under hostile control; a ruined life

Appendix: J’accuse

Part 1: A humiliating expulsion of a presidential advisor

On March 2, 2015 the workweek at the Office of the President of Estonia started as usual for us, the president’s advisor team, with a 10.30 staff meeting. At the end of it, when others went on to have lunch in the nearby cantine, I was asked to stay in the meeting room by the Chief of staff Siim Raie and an administrative clerk, Mailis Neppo. It turned out that they had prepared and printed documents about the elimination of my position, Advisor to the President, and my subsequent dismissal “for economic reasons”.

The Estonian labor law requires, in case of this kind of dismissal, that the employee be offered an alternative position and that there be an at least two months warning time. In violation of the law, I was asked to sign the papers and leave immediately. As I doubted, I was threatened that armed guards would take me out by force. The presidential castle had plenty of armed guards around the house. I was forced to sign the papers and escorted out of my workplace with no right to talk to anyone, to make a phonecall or even visit the bathroom, as my colleagues in the cantine stared at their plates having their lunches as we walked by. They knew. My colleagues had been arranging this without me knowing. My boss, President Toomas Hendrik Ilves, sat upstairs in his office with a journalist from the local daily Postimees, Urve Eslas (later hired as Ilves’s personal advisor after his term in office) and his inofficial PR-advisor Raul Rebane. President Ilves had never said a single critical word about the work I’d done for him, on the contrary — “super work”, “well done”, were the last comments I got for the speeches I had drafted for him. Also, he had emphasized, twice, that I was among the people with whom he wanted to work until the end of his term in October 2016, as I was contracted to do. Ilves never talked to me about my eventual dismissal. Indeed, Neppo had warned me in November 2014 that my “public hanging” was being planned, but then the President assured me that there was no reason at all for me to be worried, as I was doing my work perfectly well.

So what happened between these assurances in November 2014 and my brutal, humiliating expulsion in March 2015? A decade later, I still don’t really know. Several security policy experts from different countries that I consulted later opined that a perfectly executed, even “elegant” professional information operation was behind these events. It was never truthfully or objectively analysed in either Estonian or Finnish media that themselves played in a crucial role in it. Also, law enforcement in both countries refused to investigate the massive public smear campaign that preceded, and led to, my expulsion not just from my workplace, but also from my profession and the entire society.

The media campaign against me in these two countries that immediately preceded the expulsion was initiated by two pro-Russian Finnish journalists, Yle’s (Finland’s public broadcaster) Risto Vuorinen and Iltalehti’s Sami Lotila. Theywent on their crusade against me apparently in defense of the pro-Russian and anti-Nato foreign minister of Finland at the time, Erkki Tuomioja. Tuomioja gave an interview to Finland’s Swedish language daily Hufvudstadsbladet on January 14, 2015 that led to a diplomatic dispute between Estonia and Finland, because of Tuomioja’s false and derogatory comments about Estonia. My task at the President’s office was to draft the President’s speeches and articles, I had no role in diplomatic relations in general nor in handling the crisis in question — but that did not prevent those libelous journalists from targeting me as the culprit, and starting the massive smear campaign against me. I’ll return to the details of this pure Kremlin style final pushout campaign below. That campaign in turn was preceded by nearly a year of libelous slander in mainstream Estonian media as well as a more obscure but equally distressing mobbing campaign within the Estonian President’s office, led by diplomat Kai Kaarelson who joined the Office nine months after me, in September 2013. That campaign started in April 17, 2014, and this is where the story actually starts.

Part 2: How it all began: a professional libel campaign in mainstream media

I joined Ilves’s office from the beginning of 2013, hired by the President as a person who “got it” about his thinking, his strong pro-liberal, pro-Western, pro-human rights political views, and who was able to articulate his thoughts on his behalf. My task was to draft and edit the President’s texts whenever he was too busy to do it himself (almost always). The authorship of his own statements was important to Ilves, always defying the state machinery trying to feed him their talking points. As the editor of Ilves’s earlier book in Finnish titled “In his own Voice” (WSOY Helsinki 2011), my task indeed was to be the guardian of “his own voice”, against the pressure of many competing interests around him. I was the advisor who could, and would, write down Ilves’s words the way he wanted to say them, instead of any faceless ministerial talking points politicians were expected to utter. That already made me a target in the eyes of the machinery, an outsider who made it harder for them to “own” the head of state. It didn’t really help that in a presidential debate on national TV in fall 2011, before being re-elected for his second term, Ilves, when asked about his preferences for his follower, said my name without any doubt.

Years later it is easier to see that this might have been a reason why I was picked as a target. An academic outsider to politics who migrated to Finland at an early age, who does she think she is? And, also the Kremlin could have been watching the debate carefully.

The smear campaign against me started during my second year at the President’s office, in spring 2014. At the time when Russia annexed Crimea and Ilves was an outspoken critic of those developments, widely followed in Europe and the Western world. On April 17 2014, Kroonika, a weekly gossip magazine belonging to Estonia’s influential Ekspress media group, ran a cover story on the President’s marriage, claiming it was falling apart and pointing at me as the home-wrecker, my boss’s secret mistress. The story came totally out of the blue, it was pure libel with no factual grounds whatsoever. As the only source of the “news”, the magazine cited anonymous “people close to the presidential couple”. The slander was then repeated by Estonia’s other big private media house, on the online gossip site Elu24 of the daily newspaper Postimees. As I e-mailed my protests to the editors in question, Postimees’ publisher Mart Luik admitted to me in an e-mail on April 21 2014 that he had learned that the “information” they had publish wasn’t true — but he refused to say it in public, to publish a correction or an apology. Thus the libel remained online, repeated by dozens of other smaller papers, and took on a life of its own. The President’s office stayed silent, they made no effort to refute the story and forbade me from doing so.

As I was to see during the years that followed, the libelous gossip was absolutely damaging to my reputation and professional status. Overnight, I was debased from a respected, high level professional to a hired escort. I was left alone as the target, with no support at all from any of my colleagues nor anyone in the media. In comparison — when in the US in 2018 Michael Wolff accused Nicky Haley of being president Donald Trump’s mistress, even the liberal media otherwise very critical of Trump, lined up in her defence: the libel was declared unacceptable and misogynist, and it was stopped right there. Sadly, that is not how the media and the political elite work in our small Northern European countries — here, a smear campaign against a female official was univocally endorsed.

At the exact same time as the Estonian media published their libelous gossip, the President’s office had also other interesting interactions with media behind the scenes. Financial Times had asked president Ilves to write an op-ed on the Ukrainian situation, and he did. I drafted the article for him and edited it with him. In his article Ilves asked Europe and the West to take the annexation of Crimea and the entire Ukraine situation more seriously, he warned about the escalation of the conflict if we didn’t.

The article was finished by the deadline, but then something happened — Ilves’s foreign policy advisor Kai Kaarelson shelved it with no explanation to me, the advisor officially responsible for the publication. Kaarelson had a habit of putting pressure on Ilves to tone down his critique of Russia. Her “private diplomacy” of convincing people one-to-one instead of participating in our regular procedures of working as a team, created an air of secrecy, intrique and unpredictability around such bans and vetoes. Talking to the President behind her colleagues’ back, Kaarelson managed to convince mr. Ilves that it was not a good idea to publish the article. None of us knew why he agreed to withdraw it.

The Financial Times article was shelved on the same day that the gossip papers labeled me, the President’s co-worker on the article, his secret mistress. An interesting coincidence.

The President’s office never publicly refuted the gossip. As I tried to find out where it had come from, I received a very long, psychotic, gaslighting e-mail at night from Kaarelson. She attacked me for taking distance from the gossip in an internal office e-mail and trying to find out its source. She threatened me that I was “hurting myself” and “making enemies” by asking questions, she warned me that my working at the President’s office would become “pointless” as my relationship with our boss would deteriorate. This e-mail, along with Kaarelson’s actions trying to control the President’s speeches, mute his criticism of Russia and to intimidate me, indicated that the gossip was fed to the papers by her; the suspicion was confirmed by journalists as well as colleagues in the Castle.

I went on working for Ilves while the “affair scandal” was never sorted out and the environment at his office grew increasingly toxic. Kaarelson took control over Ilves’s speeches more and more aggressively. Meanwhile, tensions grew between the two friendly neighbors Finland and Estonia, my two homelands, as Finland didn’t consider the Ukraine conflict to be relevant for the security of Finland or Europe, and Finland’s leaders didn’t think there was any reason for them to even discuss accessing Nato. Estonian politicians were seen as too hawkish, provoking Russia, unable of prudent diplomacy. Erkki Tuomioja, the minister of foreign affairs of Finland during Ilves’s presidency, openly hated Ilves and didn’t hide it in his public statements. He also feared that Ilves’s pro-NATO stance would affect the public sentiment in Finland against Tuomioja’s will. The antipathy between the two men was mutual and led from crisis to crisis between the countries. As Ilves used to present me to his Finnish colleagues as his “Finland contact”, the exporter of his words and views to Finland, I was bound to get my share of that mutual antipathy too.

Part 3: The prelude of the expulsion: another libel campaign turned into an Orwellian hate chorus

The gossip about the invented affair that never really went away, was blown up in full flame again early in 2015. Now it was two Finnish journalists that initiated the smear campaign in Finland, relying on the earlier libel in the Estonian media that was never publicly refuted. It started with a series of joint Finnish-Estonian security policy seminars, organized by the embassies of both countries and the Finnish foreign policy institute FIIA (Finnish Institute of International Affairs). The first of those seminars took place in Estonia, the next one in Helsinki, at the Finnish Parliament building. Much of the focus of those seminars was on what was happening in Ukraine. The Estonian side was more hawkish in its criticism of Russia’s actions. In Finland, the view promoted by foreign minister Tuomioja that the Ukraine conflict had no impact on Finland’s security, and that Nato was not relevant for Finland, was still held strong, as was Tuomioja’s fear that the hawkish, pro-Nato, Russia-critical Estonian leaders might change the Finns’ minds on this.

Those seminars were academic, not involving top political leaders. I participated on my own, as a speaker. Two Finnish media, the public broadcaster Yle and the Swedish language daily Hufvudstadsbladet, asked me for small interviews. In those, I challenged the popular Finnish argument that the Ukraine conflict was about the treatment of Russian minority there. Pace Tuomioja, I insisted that the conflict was relevant for all of Europe. The media made provocative headlines: “An advisor to the Estonian president considers the Finns naive!” This interview by Yle was posted in a Finnish Facebook discussion group on Ukraine, where I was attacked by an anonymous account: “This is just the Estonian president’s secret mistress speaking, no reason to take her seriously!” Some Finnish pro-Russian trolls had dug up the “mistress”-gossip, now in a clearly political context, and they used it to dismiss my views on Ukraine as well as my professional reputation.

Around the same time, on January 14 2015, Hufvudstadsbladet published an interview with foreign minister Tuomioja, asking whether the EU should try to actively counteract Russian propaganda (“Tuomioja vill inte att EU startar rysk propagandabyrå”, Hbl 14.1.2015). Tuomioja thought there was no need for such activity on the EU’s side, and he accused “the Balts” of leaving their Russian-speaking inhabitants at the mercy of Russian media, claiming that those “nationalists” do not broadcast any Russian language news themselves. This statement, hostile in its tone and untrue about the news in Russian, caused a minor diplomatic incident between Tuomioja and Estonian leaders who read “the Balts” as meaning “the Estonians”. Tuomioja had repeatedly publicly insulted Estonians, and personally president Ilves before, so the Estonian side’s reaction to the provocation was expected. The Estonian Ambassador to Helsinki, president Ilves’s former foreign policy advisor Margus Laidre, invited Finland’s Ambassador to Estonia, Kirsti Narinen, to meet and discuss the issue, and together they resolved it. The media reacted differently in both countries: Finland’s papers criticized minister Tuomioja for his offensive and untrue statements, but the Estonian media attacked their own side, accusing foreign minister Keit Pentus-Rosimannus as well as president Ilves for overreacting, for being hostile to the Finns and also for being lousy diplomats in relations with Russia.

A couple of weeks later, on February 2 2015, Yle’s correspondent in Estonia Risto Vuorinen posted a blog text on Facebook, commenting that it was “the truth” on Estonia, written by a “real expert, who knows better than the official Estonian propaganda”. The text was written by another Finnish journalist in Estonia, Iltalehti’s Sami Lotila. Lotila is well known in Estonia for his endless openly hateful writings simply bashing Estonians. His MA thesis, defended in Jyväskylä University in 2004, carried the title “The Face of Prostitution: research interviews on Estonian whores”. Now Lotila had written a blog post on the recent “Tuomioja scandal”, headlined “Why does Estonia put pressure on Erkki Tuomioja”. This was the post that Vuorinen, Yle’s representative, shared and recommended to his Facebook friends who were mostly or other Finnish journalists.

Lotila, like the Estonian papers, blamed Estonian leaders for the “scandal”. The text reminded me of the ones I’d seen by some Kremlin trolls in Finland since 2009, such as the infamous Johan Bäckman who recently was rewarded with Russian citizenship. Classic Kremlinite troll speech: vulgar and hateful language, grotesque accusations labeling his targets Fascists, CIA-agents and hawkish conspirators trying to lure Finland to Nato. Personally, Lotila abused the foreign minister Pentus-Rosimannus, Ambassador Laidre, president Ilves — and in addition, me. His including me by name as a target was notable as I had had absolutely no role in the incident, I had not commented it publicly, nor had I ever had any dispute or other contact with Lotila. As I worked behind the scenes with the President’s texts, diplomatic relations weren’t part of my job description at the President’s office. Attacking president Ilves and me as his advisor, blaming us for being the “architects of Estonia’s aggressive foreign policy” and for harassing poor minister Tuomioja, Lotila never mentioned Kai Kaarelson who actually was the foreign policy advisor to Ilves.

In the text that Yle’s Vuorinen shared to other Finnish journalists as “the truth”, Lotila blamed us, Estonia’s foreign policy leaders and me, for Machiavellian abuse of power, for putting pressure on Finland’s foreign minister with the goal of pushing Finland to join NATO. Among other abuse, calling us Fascists, CIA agents, stupid losers and secret conspiracists, he also presented me, again, as the secret girlfriend of the President, taken to Estonia from Finland with that purpose — to escort the President (well, and as a side job, however, to have significant leverage on international politics in the region). The text clearly was an open attack on my personal reputation, along with the attack on Estonia.

I got the information about this Kremlinite garbage being spread by a representative of Yle that enjoys very strong reputation in Finland as a reliable, high quality media, via friends. I had no access to Vuorinen’s timeline to defend myself under his post. By sharing and endorsing the text full of vulgar abuse, lies and libel, Vuorinen openly violated Yle’s social media rules that ask Yle’s journalists to follow the same guidelines in social media as in their work – they are obliged to pursue objectivity, polite tone and factual truthfulness. Nevertheless, Yle never reproached their correspondent for breaking the rules: they aggressively took the side of the slanderer against his target, that is, me. I commented on my own wall that Vuorinen is spreading Kremlinite propaganda, asked my friends to be careful around him. I told people to beware of him should he ask for an interview, as a friendly interview a few years back had been my only earlier contact with the slanderer.

I repeated my warning briefly on Twitter. I never was an active tweeter, my account was never followed widely nor was it connected to my role at the President’s office. My goal was just to warn my Estonian friends. However, within seconds of my tweet, Vuorinen’s boss, Yle’s head of world news and current affairs (and a member of the Advisory Board of FIIA, Finnish Institute of Foreign Affairs) Elina Ravantti wrote an aggressive series of tweets, blaming me as a high representative of state power for abusing my power position to limit the freedom of speech of foreign journalists. Instead of finding out why I criticized Vuorinen and making him responsible for the lies and hate that he spread on Facebook, Ravantti, and Yle through her, chose to participate in spreading disinformation online, in a blatant contrast to Yle’s own stated purpose and self-declared journalist ethics.

Ravantti’s rage was contageous, she pushed into motion a snowball-like movement that never stopped before my career, my reputation, my chances of participating in society in either Estonia or Finland, were ultimately destroyed. From Twitter, the campaign that painted me now as not just the President’s mistress but also an enemy of free speech, a harasser of poor foreign journalists, an enemy of my adopted homeland Finland, a public enemy all in all, rolled over to all media. It made headlines, it took on a life of its own. For about four weeks, no day went by without some journalist bashing me in either Finnish or Estonian media, or both. None of the journalists ever paid any attention to the initial, totally unprovoked attack on me, spread by Lotila and Vuorinen; none of them asked for my side of the story, although the journalist guidelines explicity tell them to do so; none made any attempt to present an objective version of what had actually happened.

Meanwhile, Lotila went on blogging, now on a page called Masso Watch, dedicated to attacking me alone. There he went on slandering me with more of invented, libelous claims and demanded that the Office of the Estonian President fire me. His tone was full of vile hatred, he twisted my name into Mössö (Finnish for an unpleasant paste) and Il Massolini, he called me a liar, he slandered and spat hatred, line after line after line. And for whatever reason, the entire Finnish and Estonian media, including the highly valued public broadcaster Yle, chose his side, supporting him in this hateful disinformation campaign against me, his target. The entire situation was utterly unreal, totally Orwellian.

At the President’s office, I got no support. Chief of staff Raie and the President’s media representative Toomas Sildam accused me of spoiling the reputation of the Office and told me to not say anything in my defence. They had never been bothered by the invented rumours on the President’s alleged affair, but once I had responded to the slander, they were worried for the reputation of the office and the President. I had become a liability.

On February 6, 2015 I visited Kapo, the Estonian Internal Security Service. They said they recognized that what was going on was a targeted, professional information attack. But they were not interested in sorting out the original source of the gossip against me and the President. The papers kept interviewing Vuorinen, who played the victim of restrictions to his free speech and still went on slandering me with no reporter questioning his vile libel. The chair of Union of Journalists in Finland Hanne Aho publicly condemned me in the name of the Union for “trying to boycott a journalist” — she too, remained uninterested in that journalist blatantly violating the Union’s own ethical guidelines for journalists.

President Ilves, who was at the Munich security conference with Kaarelson at the time, e-mailed me on February 9 (translated from Estonian): “I know how important your good name and free speech is for you. I care for the truth too. Your recent statements have proven to be very influencial, even affecting the relationships between Estonia and Finland, partly also harming them. Estonian and Finnish foreign ministers, diplomats, Finland’s office of the President and members of government — they all are engaged in dissecting those statements. I even talked about it with [Finland’s President Sauli] Niinistö… So please, stop this discussion. Do not publicly reply to the attackers, it is harmful to Estonia and to me. … I have enough of problems on other fronts.”

That was the last contact I ever had with my boss, president Ilves, who never had a critical word about my work for him. Essentially he said that he knew I was under attack, but I had to shut up because he had more important problems to deal with. I followed the order, I never said anything in public anymore, but three weeks later I was thrown out of my workplace as described above – no discussions whatsoever, no crisis meeting about the public attack on one of us that was seen as an attack against Ilves’s office, the entire issue was solved by just physically eliminating me. Lotila, on his Masso Watch hate page, appeared pleasantly surprised that Ilves had followed his orders. He commented, with apparent Schadenfreude, that his blog page had fulfilled its mission and could be closed.

What no one ever explained to me was why all those politicians and diplomats, as all the media, chose the side of the openly vulgar and hateful liars and slanderers against me, why, if the matter was important enough for them to react to, they never bothered to find out what actually initiated the dispute, who was the first to attack, who was the target. Why were two freelance correspondents to the Finnish media so important figures that no single word of critique could be expressed against their organised hate campaign; that they were free to lie and slander with no limits, and their target was to be punished? No officials, no media representatives ever asked that question. None of them ever wondered why president Ilves followed the orders of the well-known Estonia hater Sami Lotila.

Part 4: The end game: a Presidential office under hostile control; a ruined life

After my expulsion on March 2 2015, Ilves’s foreign policy advisor Kaarelson enjoyed full power over the President’s office. No speeches critical of Russia were written, recorded, published or referenced in the media during the rest of Ilves’s presidency until October 2016 — which might have been the main goal of the campaign, of which I was just “collateral damage”, as it was described by Kapo as well as Ülle Madise, Ilves’s legal advisor and soon-to-be chancellor of Justice of Estonia. No critical articles on Russia’s actions in Ukraine anymore. As for Ilves’s private life, he indeed divorced his wife Evelin Ilves in april 2015. Ieva Kupce, a woman that Ilves’s team had known as a close companion of the President for years, was presented to the Estonian public as the president’s new partner in September the same year. By hiding from the public the fact that Kupce, who became the third Mrs. Ilves early in 2016, was acquainted with the President years before her official presentation, the Office of the President still failed to refute the old, false rumors by the media that cost me my job, my reputation and my career.

As I returned to Finland upon my expulsion, I was only about to find out the full impact of the entire event: as I started to apply for jobs, I found that despite my top level education and experience I was never even invited to an interview anymore. Being completely blocked from jobs that I was qualified for, I never got a chance to answer the employers’ questions on the disinformation spread on me. They just didn’t talk to me. I lost my professional networks, including chances to work as a freelancer as I’d also done before. Even people who had pretended to be my friends disappeared in a true Gleichschaltung spirit, as Hannah Arendt once described it as an “empty space forming around you”. Any attempts to contact the media, anyone in my field I had or had not worked with, the result was the same: a concrete wall, no communication, absolute ostracism. I have been treated worse than a criminal ever since: true criminals are entitled to defend themselves, to know the exact legal cause and the duration of their punishment, to get legal help and to be treated by the basic norms of human courtesy. I never had any of that luxury since 2015.

The double standards involved in this case are striking. I reported the libel spread by the two men to the police in Finland who dismissed it as “just colorful political discussion”. In contrast, people have been investigated and convicted of libel simply for calling a politician “Fascist” – somehow on them, it’s not just political discussion. Several official figures have since publicly condemned the same two journalists who initiated the smear campaign against me in Finland, as pro-Kremlin liars and propagandists — such statements have been given on Lotila and Vuorinen by the press representative of Kapo, by Finland’s Ambassador to Estonia and a group of Finnish intellectuals residing in Estonia. None of this rehabilitated me for criticising their slander in a single tweet, however.

Also, “Kremlin trolls” became a popular subject of debate in the Finnish public sphere as Yle journalist Jessikka Aro published a book on it in 2019. The popularity of the book never opened the eyes of the media or the public to the fact that some of such “trolls” had been active in Yle itself, enjoying full protection by Yle as an organisation. In effect, Yle, the most respected and counted-on media in Finland, participated in a disinformation campaign and never admitted its mistake, never gave a word to the target, never apologised. There was even an incident in Finland in 2025 when a former politician, Carl Haglund, was dismissed from his position as a chair of a Finnish bank, Aktia, because he allegedly spread groundless rumours about his colleagues having an affair. Kai Kaarelson, who by all signs was the person spreading such rumours on me to the Estonian media, was rewarded by the position of the Ambassador of Estonia first to Georgia, then Lithuania, after Ilves’s presidency. Also Vuorinen and Lotila were free to spread such rumours, aggressively defended by the media and the political establishment in both countries. In my case, the target of the rumours was the only one to be punished, harshly.

Several high profile security policy researchers in Finland and abroad that I consulted during the years, see the case as an apparent hostile disinformation operation. Some of the persons involved, journalists and civil servants, have privately admitted to me that they were wrong to support Vuorinen in his campaign. None of them have admitted that publicly, however, and ten years later, none of the media have corrected their mistakes.

What are the conclusions we can draw from this story? One is that our democratic instistutions and the people functioning in them, are much less well informed and vigilant than they claim to be when it comes to recognising and stopping disinformation. Even worse, given the right settings — you trust ethnic Finnish men rather than an Estonian-Finnish woman, journalist colleagues rather than a presidential advisor, loyalties towards the people, structures and institutions that you are likely to benefit from in your further career rather than an underdog in a dirty but powerful attack — too many people are able and willing to join the campaigns, spread the disinformation, participate in the lynching.

An Yle journalist emeritus and the long time head of Finland’s Reporters Without Borders, Jarmo Mäkelä, attacked me personally upon my expulsion, claiming I had “stepped on the wrong toes”, and later admitted that he had been wrong, I had been right. But whose toes did I step on? I criticized, in a social media post, two journalists who had just posted a vile slanderous attack against me personally and the leaders of Estonia. Why were their toes so big that I had to be sacrificed? Who did those men represent? I was never told.

In an era where AI can be used to make any sort of fake news look authentic, where there is war at Europe’s borders threatening to spread, where information warfare remains an essential part of hybrid wars, how easy are our institutions, our media houses and our minds to infiltrate, to convince us that the good guys are bad and vice versa, that the truth is lies and lies are the truth? The challenge of the age of disinformation is not those cases when we see that we’re being fed lies and propaganda, but exactly those moments when we do not see that, and when we believe what we want to believe. If the most trusted media houses and the Presidents of friendly countries can join a hostile disinformation campaign against ourselves, who is totally safe from being a target — or a participant?

In this story, president Ilves, a popular foreign policy analyst across the Western world was silenced in the eyes of the wider public, and certainly the neighboring Finland. But even worse, by believing the lies spread to him Ilves himself became a mediator of disinformation, strengthening the lies by expelling their target in a most humiliating and destructive way thinkable in a country that doesn’t routinely use defenestration as a means of getting rid of colleagues who somehow become liabilities. Ilves made his office susceptible to hostile influences, possibly without even realising it. He just preferred supporting a smear campaign on his advisor to honesty in front of his people about his private life, he had “problems” more important than the dignity of his loyal staff.

Since 2015, and especially 2022, a lot has changed in the region. No one denies the importance of the Ukraine situation to the security of Europe and the Western world; Finland no longer views the conflict as a local minority problem and we joined Nato in 2023. Yet no one has looked back at the events and rhetorics of the past decade, we have seen no criticism of the pro-Russia stances of minister Tuomioja or some of the media in the hindsight, nor have I been cleared of my alleged role as one of the “grey eminences” pushing Finland into NATO. Well, “we” succeeded, I could ironize. And yet, besides the question of justice for one person whose name, reputation, status and career was ruined for life just because someone decided to do so and everyone else went along with it, we are left with the question: where is our next blind spot? Where will we be fooled the next time, where are we being fooled right now, without even noticing it?

That remains the question haunting us also when this story is completely forgotten. And forgotten it is, even as I still struggle my daily life with the consequences, the career that got killed, the relationships and networks that I lost through no wrongdoing on my part, the reputation that no longer exists, the impossibility to earn a living doing what I was educated to do, just as the Soviet public enemies in the Stalin era. Whatever reasons the media had, while this whole episode happened, to not present the story objectively — loyalties, prejudices, fear, hopes of promotion, misunderstandings etc., now the reason to keep dismissing the story is time: the story is old, no one is interested in what happened a decade ago. However, not all old news on smeared and falsely convicted people are dismissed as irrelevant — the fact that Alfred Dreyfus was promoted to the rank of a general in 2025 as a “final act of reparation” to his wrongful conviction 130 years earlier is a fine example reminding us that human dignity has no expiration date.

Thus, as in my case the wrongful conviction — by the media in two countries, the President, the colleagues, not by any court as I never was charged with any crime — is still in full force with no chance so far for me of an acquittal, a parole, or rehabilitation, I finish this article with a J’accuse of my own, listing the people and institutions that were directly involved in my lynching, and the main “crimes” that they committed in the process.

Appendix: J’accuse — who participated, whom do I blame for all that happened? They are not few:

J’accuse.

For the unfair, humiliating, illegal, degrading and undeserved end to my career and to my ability to be active and productive as a human among other humans and to make a living in capacity of my trained profession, I blame the following persons, groups, institutions and organisations (trying to follow the order of their importance in the process).

The Office of the President of Estonia, and persons connected to it:

1 Toomas Hendrik Ilves, the President of Estonia 2006-2016, my boss 2013-2015

for firing me from my position as his advisor

in the middle of my temporary contract, after repeated affirmations that he wanted me to continue working to the end of my contract and his presidential term;
using the legal form of “position eliminated for economic reasons”, for no fault of the employee, in violation of Estonian labor law as the conditions for such dismissal weren’t fulfilled;
not having had anything but praise to say about my work, not a single critical word said as an explanation of the dismissal, not a single word about it exchanged with me at all;
passive-aggressively by just stopping all communication and treating me as if I didn’t exist, letting other people do the actual expulsion in an extremely dehumanising, degrading and humiliating manner and at the same time very publicly, knowing it’d make me unemployable;
explicitly following Sami Lotila’s order expressed in his anti-Estonian libelous hate blog, as Lotila was the only person demanding my dismissal – president Ilves gave him that;
making sure that my further career would be blocked, using his international influence, e.g. by spreading disinformation to various think-tanks in which he was involved.

2 Kai Kaarelson, diplomat at Estonian MFA, president Ilves’s head of foreign policy department, de facto (not formal) foreign policy advisor 2013-2016, currently researcher at ICDS, Tallinn

for workplace bullying and pushing me out of my job by

trying to take full control of all the activities of President Ilves and his office;
intervening aggressively in speech writing processes and trying to censor the president, especially his criticism of Russia’s aggressive rhetoric and Russia’s actions in Ukraine;
undermining my work relations with the President by telling him I want to “steal” the glory of his speeches and texts, manipulating and using the President’s pride in his intellectual work;
sending me gaslighting, intimidating and threatening e-mails, mostly at night;
regularly sabotaging my work by lies, intrigues, cancellations of events I was responsible for, withholding information essential for my work that came to the house through her;
spreading to the Estonian media the libelous rumour that I was the President’s secret mistress (in addition, spreading the rumour in the President’s office that I myself spread the rumour);
actively working for my dismissal during the final media campaign against me.

3 Siim Raie, Chief of Staff of the Office of the President of Estonia in 2010-2015

for failing to protect the President, his office, and his advisor from sabotage and infiltration

by siding with Kaarelson while admitting behind her back that he knew that she had “a task” to control the President as she entered the office, and that she “wanted to control everything”;
by failing, with the media communications advisor Toomas Sildam, to refute the libelous rumour in the media that the President was having an affair with an employee (me);
by blaming me for being “harmful” for the Office’s reputation when I was attacked by the libelous media, while not having done his work to defend the Office in the first place;
by explicitly forbidding me from seeking justice against libel in Estonian courts;
by explicitly forbidding me from defending myself against libel in the media or social media;
by putting his private career interests in front of his duties to the President and his Office, studying at the Tallinn University of Arts during his time at the office, getting a restaurator’s diploma, then taking a job as the director of the National Heritage Board of Estonia in 2015;
by doing the “dirty work” of expelling me, in triple violation of Estonian labor law, talking and behaving like a NKVD officer during the process and ignoring my basic rights as an employee and a human being, threatening me with violence (threatening to use armed guards to throw me out of my workplace if I’d want to take time and get advise before signing the illegal elimination order); not even allowing me a phone call — even though by Estonian labor law, dismissal for economic reasons requires an at least two months time of advance warning.

4 Toomas Sildam, the Media Communications advisor to President Ilves 2006-2016

for failing to protect the President, his office and his advisor from the libelous media campaign claiming I was the mistress of the President. Sildam knew about the campaign in advance (by his own words), but did nothing to prevent it, did not warn me that it was going to happen, and did nothing to refute it once it was published; also he did nothing to make the media responsible. Sildam also helped to keep my professional reputation spoiled as my boss’s alleged mistress, and then a “thrown out former mistress”, by lying to the media about Mr. Ilves’s actual girlfriend Ieva Kupce. Sildam knew Kupce years before their relationship was made public, yet he participated in a gaslighting PR-operation bringing Kupce out as Mr. Ilves’s “new” acquaintance, telling the media in summer 2015, when asked about the lady in the President’s company, that he did not know who she was. By hiding, even afterwards, the President’s relationship with the woman who became his third wife in 2016, Sildam made sure that my reputation was never cleared.

5 Ülle Madise, the Chancellor of Justice of Estonia, legal advisor to President Ilves 2009-2015

for participating in the workplace mobbing that led to my elimination and offering a seemingly (almost) legal “solution” and a public explanation for my actually illegal dismissal

by repeatedly belittling the President’s thoughts during his speech writing processes;
by telling me to be flattered by the media attention as the alleged “secret mistress”,
she somehow knew the reasons why the media “chose” me as their target — was she involved in the process?
by preparing the dismissal papers so that they’d look as “legal” as possible.

The media, in Estonia:

6 Media concern Ekspress Grupp (and its majority owner, Hans H. Luik), for massive repeated libelous smear campaigns that had a crucial role in ending my career and destroying my professional reputation:

6 a Kroonika, the weekly “glossy gossip magazine” belonging to Ekspress Grupp, the Editor in Chief Krista Lensin and the reporter who wrote the libelous story, Jaanus Hämarsoo,

for initiating the libel campaign painting me as the mistress of my boss, President Ilves, on April 17, 2014

by writing and publishing a big cover story falsely describing me as the secret mistress of President Ilves, my boss, and hinting that I was to blame for the worsening relations between President Ilves and his wife Evelin Ilves, a story that initiated a flow of similar smear campaigns all over the Estonian media;
using anonymous gossipers as the “source” of the libelous claims and refusing to reveal them;
by refusing to publish a correction, a refutation or a public apology;
by refusing to publish any true factual information on the matter.

6 b Other publications belonging to Ekspress Grupp, including Delfi, Eesti Ekspress, Eesti Päevaleht, editors-in-chief Urmo Soonvald and Allar Tankler

for failing to correct or refute the libelous information published by Kroonika;
for publishing another massive smear campaign against me in February 2015, following both the Kroonika smear campaign and the next, related smear campaign initiated in Finland by Sami Lotila and Risto Vuorinen on February 2, 2015, one that repeated the “mistress” slander, but also painted me as the enemy of Finland, blaming me for the diplomatic crisis between Estonia and Finland that in reality was initiated by Finnish foreign minister Erkki Tuomioja and in which I had absolutely no role; after I protested that smear campaign I was smeared as the enemy of free speech and media; in the end I was turned into a public “enemy of the people” — that led to my expulsion and ended my career. Ignoring all basic ethical norms of journalism, the campaign sought no objectivity, it was an organised, targeted “kill” campaign by the media.

7 Media house Postimees Group, its Responsible Publisher Mart Luik, Editor in Chief Merit Kopli, its online gossip section Elu24 and its editor Anu Saagim

for republishing in Elu24 and thus enforcing and spreading the libel campaign initially published by Kroonika on April 17 2014;
for refusing to correct or refute the damaging false information they published, even as Mart Luik admitted by e-mail on April 21 2014 that he knew the information they published was not true;
for refusing to allow me to publish a statement on the libel campaign;
for participating in the smear campaign of 2015, among other things by interviewing the libelous pro-Kremlin Finnish journalist Risto Vuorinen and allowing him, with no critical comment or question by the reporter, to repeat and spread the “mistress” libel again, using the lies published earlier and never publicly refuted as his reference;
for never publishing any true information in relation to the entire story, including my dismissal.

8 The evening paper Õhtuleht, publisher Õhtuleht, Editor in Chief Väino Koorberg (2000-2016)

for participating in the libelous smear campaign initiated by Kroonika in April 2014;
for continuing the libelous smear campaign even after I had been fired and President Ilves had divorced his wife and married his third wife Ieva Kupce (later Ilves), counting me as “one of the President’s women” and hinting that I had been sent away from the President’s office as a used-and-thrown-out girlfriend, not injustly fired as a professional;
for participating in the final smear campaign in February 2015.

9 Postimees journalist Urve Eslas, later personal advisor to president Ilves after his term

who approached me in connection with the media scandals, pretending to be supportive;
who worked at Postimees at the time when the libel was published, not interrupting it;
who sat with president Ilves at his office at the very time I was physically expelled from the Office, apparently aware of what was happening and possibly deeply involved in it;
who took advantage of the situation in order to “inherit” my job as the President’s advisor.

10 Raul Rebane, president Ilves’s friend and inofficial PR-advisor

who also sat with Ilves at the time I was expelled from the Office;
who pretended to advise president Ilves on media publicity but apparently caused more harm than good;
who according to his friend, Yle journalist Jarmo Mäkelä (see below) was one of the earliest spreaders of the “mistress” rumours, knowing they weren’t true;
who in his position as “media expert” made no effort to counteract the rumours, the contrary;
who mocked me after my expulsion, telling me to disappear onto a remote Pacific island.

Other state institutions in Estonia:

11 KaPo, the Estonian Internal Security Service

for knowingly ignoring both disinformation campaigns against the President, the Office of the President and the advisor to the President:

The Director General of KaPo (2013-2023), Arnold Sinisalu listened to dinner chat about libel claims at Lennart Meri Conference on April 25 2014, a week after the “mistress” libel was widely published, laughed at it and didn’t see it as a serious issue;
the Deputy DG of KaPo (2013-2023) Martin Arpo, acknowledged that the smear campaign initiated in Finland by the pro-Kremlin journalists Sami Lotila and Risto Vuorinen was a professional, organised hostile disinformation operation, yet Kapo did nothing about it. Also, Arpo said that Kapo would refuse to look into the Office of the President to clarify the initial “leaking” to the media of the invented “affair” of the President, even though there were multiple indications and claims by insiders that the “leak” came from there (first of all, from Kaarelson).

The media in Finland and its representatives:

12 Sami Lotila, the Finnish correspondent-in-Estonia for evening paper Iltalehti, Finland

for initiating and driving a massive hate campaign against Estonia, against Estonian Office of the President, against the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Estonia, and personally against me:

earlier, by publishing massive hate campaign, also called psychological warfare, against Estonians in general for years in both Estonian (especially in Õhtuleht) and Finnish (especially in Iltalehti) media and numerous blogs (e.g. Todellinen Tallinna, “The Real Tallinn”);
from January 2015, initiating and driving a massive hate and smear campaign against the Estonian President and his office, the Estonian Foreign Minister Keit Pentus-Rosimannus, Ambassador Margus Laidre and personally me as the advisor to the President, in his blogs;
during the campaign, blaming Estonians, including personally me who had no part in the dispute, for the diplomatic crisis that was initiated by Finland’s Foreign Minister Erkki Tuomioja by his derogatory and false statements about news in Russian in Baltic states;
writing and spreading a targeted personal libel attack against me, presenting me as a Fascist, an aggressive pro-Nato conspirator and a radicalised enemy of Finland, and also, again, as the President’s “girlfriend” who only got the job as the advisor of the President for that reason, thus deliberately, purposefully undermining my professional image and reputation;
continuing the personal smear campaign on separate blog pages, one of whom was named “Masso Watch”, expressing extreme personal hatred, persecution and contempt by e.g. twisting my surname into “Il Massolini”, “Mössö” (a word meaning in Finnish mush or porrige, also used to describe disgusting smear) and “Mössöpää” (implicating a head full of the former); presenting many more libelous claims and demanding that the Office of the President fire me; after the actual expulsion rejoicing that President Ilves fulfilled his demand against his own advisor;
continuing his personal smear campaign against me on other forums and even years later.

13 Risto Vuorinen, the Finnish correspondent-in-Estonia for Yle, the Finnish public broadcaster

for joining in Lotilas’s hate and smear campaign, and using (abusing) his status as the correspondent of Yle, offering an air of respectability and credibility to the lies

by publishing Lotila’s libelous blog post in Facebook to hundreds of his mainly journalist friends, adding an appreciative comment, saying “Sami knows Estonia deeply and offers better information than the ‘official truth’” on February 2 2015, thus violating Yle’s social media rules, published in January 2015, which declare that Yle journalists must follow the same journalist ethical guidelines when posting in social media as well as in their journalist work — which call for objectivity, pursuit of factual truth, and when writing about identifiable persons in a negative light, including their view to the story etc — Vuorinen ignored all of these rules by publishing and promoting the blog post full of lies, libel, hatred and false accusations;
by initiating and participating in a massive hate campaign in the media against me as the initial target of his smear campaign in social media, after I briefly criticized his slander, now labeling me as the enemy of free speech, of journalists and of Finland;
by repeating, in interviews given in February 2015, the libelous claims about me being the president’s “mistress”, claiming it is something that “everybody knows”.
by grocely violating the Finnish journalist ethical guidelines in all this activity.

14 Elina Ravantti, Yle’s Head of World News and Current Affairs (2014-2018)

for starting massive hate campaign against me in Twitter and the media, after my brief protest in social media against the initial smear campaign by Vuorinen and Lotila, instead of reproaching Vuorinen for violating Yle’s own as well as Finland’s general guidelines of journalist ethics. She pushed into motion a lynching campaign all over the Finnish mainstream media, painting me as an abuser of state power silencing foreign journalists, remaining silent about the smear campaign against me by her subordinate colleague — doing so she was violating the ethical journalist guidelines and not just protecting, but also spreading disinformation herself.

15 Yle, Finnish Public Broadcaster

As Yle’s Risto Vuorinen and his boss Elina Ravantti were in key roles in initiating what security policy experts (including Kapo) later diagnosed as a “professional disinformation operation”, Yle as a state-owned company is fully responsible for it. As the campaign went through a “snowball effect”, it went on and grew for several weeks until I was dismissed from her work, Yle as a media house totally ignored all journalist ethical guidelines, by not publishing any objective information on the issue, nor the perspective of the target of their campaign, taking a one-sided position to back their own correspondent and the libelous smear campaign he had been spreading, against the target of the campaign, with disastrous consequences for their target (me) and for international politics, Estonia-Finland relationship and the work of the Office of the President of Estonia.

16 Iltalehti, MTV3, Helsingin Sanomat and many smaller Finnish media platforms

for reprinting the libelous claims and the smear campaign deduced from them, without for once presenting the position of the target or trying to post objective information on the entire affair.

17 The Union of Journalists in Finland (UJF), and Hanne Aho, its president (2015-2025)

for participating in the smear campaign and labeling me “officially” as the enemy of free press

by issuing a statement, in the name of the UJF, that it condemns my actions as an “call to boycott a foreign journalist in Estonia” without finding out the facts about the issue, thus ignoring the ethical guidelines of journalism for whose protection the Union exists in the first place;
by doing so, giving the media outlets a “licence” and a justification to go on bashing me and ignoring the truth; thus knowingly further undermining my professional reputation as a political scientist and writer and making it harder for me to find jobs after my expulsion.

18 Jarmo Mäkelä, retired journalist, Yle and Reporters without Borders

for quietly following the slander campaign from the very start, allowing it to grow, and refusing to use his position to help clean my name when he was in a position to do so:

he admitted having heard the “mistress” gossip during a high profile sauna night weeks before it was published, and did nothing about it even though he was in contact with Ilves’s office;
he attacked me in May 2015 after my expulsion, claiming I had “stepped on the wrong toes”,
he admitted years later that I had been right, he had been wrong, but never said it publicly,
as the chair of the Finnish Reporters without Borders, he refused to discuss my case although he was repeatedly asked to do so.

19 Erkki Tuomioja, Finland’s minister of foreign affairs 2011-2015

for creating tension between Estonia and Finland by repeatedly verbally attacking the President of Estonia, Toomas Hendrik Ilves, in media statements and interviews, offending him personally, and making false and offensive statements about Estonia and Estonians, in connection with his blatantly pro-Russian, pro Ukraine occupation and anti-Nato stances;

for not taking a stand against the hateful smear blog written by Lotila in his “defence” in connection with the 2015 “Tuomioja scandal”, a smear campaign full of hate and libel against Estonian foreign policy leaders and me personally, thus endorsing the slander in effect (while there is no evidence on him ordering the campaign, given all facts such a possibility cannot be ruled out);

for spreading disinformation at the Munich security onference 2015, according to Ilves’s statement, blaming me for my self-defence against the libelous hate campaign against me, not blaming the authors of the campaign, thus in effect defending and supporting Lotila’s smear campaign and participating in creating the false image that I was to blame for the media hysteria around me.

20 Sauli Niinistö, the President of Finland 2012-2024, and the unnamed diplomats, civil servants and ministers participating at the Munich security conference 2015 with him

for believing and spreading disinformation at the Munich conference, according to Ilves’s statement, blaming me for my self-defence in the vile, libelous hate campaign against me, not blaming the smearers, thus in effect defending and supporting Lotila’s smear campaign and participating in creating the false image that I was to blame for the media hysteria around me.

In addition, anyone who followed the smear campaign closely, who knew that it was libelous, and could have intervened given their position and the weight of their public voice but chose not to — journalists, including those I had worked with for years; my colleagues at the Office of the President, former colleagues at the International Centre of Defence Studies (ICDS, later renamed International Centre for Defence and Security), politicians and public figures, anyone in a position to speak up in Estonia and Finland, aware of what was happening, but chose not to; editors and reporters in all of the newspapers who could have included my point of view, but didn’t; who could have published my response to their slander but didn’t, who refused to publish my refutals at the time and later; Estonian public broadcaster ERR who did not participate in the campaign but offered me no forum to defend myself either, including its board member Tiina Kaalep who was admittedly aware of the situation but chose not to speak up or allow me to do so; journalists who approached me in connection with the expulsion but never went on to publish my point of view, such as Anja Snellman in Finland and Tiia Nightingale in Estonia; all the diplomats and civil servants who were aware of the relationship of president Ilves with his soon-to-be-third-wife Ieva Kupce, but chose to allow me to be slandered as the President’s alleged mistress; people making inappropriate and dismissive remarks right after my expulsion instead of supporting me, including, in addition to Raul Rebane and Jarmo Mäkelä named above, Lasse Lehtinen, a Social Democratic politician in Finland; and all the countless people, journalists and colleagues whom I contacted in vain in order to clear my name and return to work after the expulsion and who didn’t bother to reply, or at best replied with a dismissive refusal to have any discussion with me; those colleagues and as-if-friends who sought contact as long as I had my position and disappeared or acted openly contemptuous after the expulsion, in the spirit of the Gleichschaltung of the 1930s as Hannah Arendt described it; and in the end, all potential employers who dismissed my job applications before giving me a chance of an interview, despite my qualifications and experience.