New extent of Russian meddling in the 2016 Dutch referendum on Ukraine revealed

It’s April 4, 2016, one of the last days before the referendum in the Netherlands on the European Union’s association agreement with Ukraine. The hour is late, but Delft University of Technology is crowded. There is a debate: whether to accept or dismiss the document. The EU’s free trade and travel with Ukraine are at stake. 

A man in the audience stands up to ask the very last question. Once the floor is his, he says in Russian via a translator that the “nationalist government in Kyiv is responsible for the murder of dozens of pro-Russian activists” in the southern Ukrainian city of Odesa in 2014. He twists the tragic events of 2 May that year, when pro-EU and pro-Russia protesters clashed in front of the trade union building that then caught fire. He encourages the public to vote against the agreement, arguing that some in Ukraine want to team with Russia rather than the EU, and are supposedly executed for this.

Commotion ensues in the room at Delft University. Little does the audience know that this man, Sergey Markhel, is of Russian origin and leads a pro-Kremlin organization spreading disinformation about Ukraine.

Once the moderators have calmed the audience down, Kati Piri, then a Member of the European Parliament for the Dutch Labour Party, takes the floor. “I have never heard so many conspiracy theories in the Netherlands about any subject as I have about this one,” she says from the stage, addressing Markhel’s comments. “This is the biggest nonsense I’ve ever heard,” continues Piri, who visited Odesa in 2014 as an election оbserver on behalf of the European Parliament.

A lot of disinformation was floating around in the Netherlands then, believes Nina Jankowicz, a prominent disinformation expert and writer of the book: “How to lose the information war.” Looking back, she says, it’s clear that the 2016 Dutch referendum on the EU-Ukraine association agreement was the first time a Western country had to deal with Moscow’s attempts to influence a vote.

“The Netherlands was a sort of testing ground for Russia”

The Netherlands, Jankowicz continues, was a sort of testing ground for Russia, where “ahead of Brexit, ahead of the Trump vote, its influence activities could be tested in a Western country to see if they had any effect.”

The American Secretary of State Marco Rubio shares Jankowicz’s take.

In January of 2017, Rubio, then-U.S. senator, referred to the Dutch referendum as an example of where the international community “has seen these (Russian – ed.) active measures deployed,” during a special hearing in the Senate about Moscow meddling in the American presidential elections the year before.

This piece by investigative reporters from the Netherlands, Open Eyes collective, and Ukraine, Schemes (RFE/RL’s Ukrainian service project), shows the new extent of Russia’s attempts to confuse the Dutch in the run-up to the high-stakes referendum, which was supposed to determine whether the Netherlands at last joined the rest of the EU-member states in supporting the agreement with Ukraine, that required unanimity.

For this story, our team reexamined archival videos, photos, and social media posts from that time, obtained old Dutch Chamber of Commerce registration files, browsed leaked Russian documents, and spoke with insiders in both Kyiv and Amsterdam about the political campaign.

“The actual motivation behind the vote was to expose the ‘undemocratic nature’ of the European Union”

The findings show that Russian online influence activity exceeded previously reported. Moreover, what was initially considered as separate incidents – in which Russians and pro-Kremlin Ukrainians disrupted public events in the Netherlands ahead of the referendum – turned out to be part of an alleged coordinated attempt by a Moscow-linked organization to sow chaos and confusion among the Dutch electorate. One of its coordinators later received an award from the Russian government for his service.

The setting
It has been ten years since the Netherlands held its referendum on the association agreement between the EU and Ukraine on the 6th of April 2016. A vote enforced by the provocative online outlet GeenStijl, which managed to collect enough signatures to enact a new Dutch referendum legislation that had just come into effect. This was the law’s first and almost last use: after just one more application, it was eventually withdrawn, for failing to meet the expectations of both the public and the government, among other reasons.

The architect of this referendum, and former deputy director of GeenStijl, Bart Nijman, tells Open Eyes it “was never about Ukraine.”

The actual motivation behind the vote, he says, was to expose what he considers the ‘undemocratic nature’ of the European Union.

“It claims to be democratic, but in reality often ignores or dismisses certain criticisms and wishes of democratic citizens in democratic nation states, and does not listen to them or act on them,” says Nijman, who has since left the Netherlands and now resides permanently in Portugal. He moved there in 2022 “in search of a quieter life,” he explains.

Despite Nijman saying that it was about the EU rather than Ukraine, the NO campaign’s arguments primarily centered around the latter. And they worked. In 2016, Nijman’s goal was achieved with 60 percent of Dutch voters expressing against the association deal between the EU and Ukraine.

NO vote
The NO campaign brought together a mix of far-left and far-right parties, including the Socialist Party and the then-think tank Forum for Democracy, which has since become a large political party in the Netherlands with a strong affinity for Russian President Vladimir Putin.

It ran on three central themes, remembers Kees Verhoeven, a prominent Dutch MP who led the YES campaign on behalf of the D66 party: “Mainly, labour migration, corruption, and military support – the claim that we would be dragged into a war with Russia was important.”

According to the former MP, it was hard to combat the opposing camp’s vision of the future: “I had to keep refuting what they thought would happen as a result of the treaty.”

“It was a difficult fight, no matter how well I had done, we had lost this.”

Verhoeven also confesses that from early on, he and his peers in YES camp knew their campaign was set up for failure: “It was a difficult fight, no matter how well I had done, we had lost this.”

Far-right politician Geert Wilders, for example, called the association treaty for free trade and travel, EU membership for Ukraine essentially. Other NO campaigners, like, for example, Emile Roemer from the Socialist Party, claimed Ukraine and its officials were “the most corrupt in Europe,” and “would bring this corruption into the EU.”

These arguments fell on fertile ground as the Dutch society was divided in its attitudes towards Russia.

One reason was economic, says Jelle Postma, a former employee of the Dutch intelligence service, the AIVD. He now runs an NGO called Justice for Prosperity, which investigates how networks and actors seek to undermine democracies worldwide.

Through the oil and gas giant Shell, the Netherlands was then one of the five countries that invested heavily in the construction of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline from Russia to Germany, which was finalized later in 2021.

The Dutch wanted more access to Russian oil and gas, and thus felt “there was a need to work together,” Postma said. But there was also “suspicion and negativity towards the Russians” due to the downing of the MH17 plane in Ukraine’s east in 2014, which took the lives of 298 passengers, including 196 Dutch citizens. “This also created tension within society,” which Postma said he saw reflected in the government as well.

“For many people, this direct link with Russia was not crystal clear,” argues Tony van der Togt, a former diplomat who now works for Clingendael, the Dutch think tank, where he is part of the Russia and Eastern Europe Centre.

It was only in May 2018, when the Joint Investigation Team – in which the Netherlands, Australia, Malaysia, Belgium, and Ukraine worked together to establish the cause of the crash – determined that MH17 was downed by a Buk missile system belonging to the 53rd Brigade of the Russian armed Forces.

Until then, the Dutch public has been heavily targeted with Russian disinformation about the real cause of the MH17 disaster in 2014. Including, in the run-up to the 2016 referendum.

Russian meddling
A decade later, there are still blind spots in the extent of Russian interference in the Dutch referendum. The suspicions of meddling, however, appeared way before the vote.

A year ahead of the referendum, Dutch intelligence warned the public of “Russian influence operations intensifying globally, including in the Netherlands,” after Russia’s 2014 aggression against Ukraine. It didn’t specifically mention the upcoming referendum. Not even to the members of parliament.

There was no heads-up from AIVD about expected Russian interference in the referendum, says Verhoeven. Such a briefing, for example, came in several years later on another subject – the use of the Chinese electronics brand Huawei, Verhoeven tells Open Eyes Collective.

Yet, Russian interference was expected, says Pavlo Klimkin, the then-Ukrainian Minister of Foreign Affairs, who led the YES-vote camp.

“It was clear that Russia would use systemic influence”

“It was clear that (Russia – ed.) would use systemic influence. We were getting ourselves ready for it with the Dutch. We had our scenarios on how to act, of which I cannot speak in detail,” he tells Schemes.

However, said Klimkin, despite being informed about it, the Dutch didn’t act on Russian interference: “We told them, and not only us, by the way, but they didn’t do anything since they were afraid to be accused of influence on the referendum.”

“We had to bring this up to them at some point. And many didn’t like that,” he said. He refused to say whom he spoke to, citing security reasons, but confirmed being in contact with the Dutch government. Open Eyes and Schemes approached the latter for comment.

It wasn’t until November 2017, when the then-minister of Dutch Internal Affairs, Kajsa Ollongren, said in a letter to parliament that the country had been a target of Russian election meddling.

As an example, Ollongren referred to a video of armed men in balaklavas claiming to be part of Ukraine’s Azov Battalion and threatening the Dutch with retaliation if they voted “against Ukraine.” The video is Russian-made, as Bellingcat established, and likely originated from the Internet Research Agency, a troll factory in St. Petersburg.

This is, however, the only Russian disinformation campaign targeting the 2016 referendum that the Dutch government has ever publicly acknowledged.

What happened in the Netherlands during the 2016 referendum was indeed Russia’s influence operation, Nina Jankowicz says. “There was certainly disinformation, but we also know that there was a lot of hybrid activity with Ukrainians of Russian descent or Russian sympathetics who were activated in the Netherlands in and around the referendum. So it wasn’t just online activity, although that existed as well,” she goes on.

Jankowicz, who also briefly ran the American Disinformation Governance Board under the Biden Administration, has been advising various governments, including Ukraine, over the last decade.

What happened online
Asked by Open Eyes and Schemes about the features and extent of online disinformation during the referendum, Justice for Prosperity scraped all social media posts from around that time, still available as of early 2026 on Facebook and X, as well as on the website of GeenStijl, an outlet that organized the referendum.

In an interview in the historical halls of the KIT complex in Amsterdam, the NGO’s director, Jelle Postma, shares his findings: “We repeatedly found posts that indicated manipulation. For example, we saw misinformation, we saw suspicious timing patterns, and we often saw repeated posts sending the same message on multiple channels.”

“We repeatedly found posts that indicated manipulation”

One example that stood out, says Postma, was an incident on Facebook on March 21, 2016, just two weeks before the vote. An empty account named Tomas Roll spread disinformation under pro-Ukrainian posts of the YES campaign.

“You see one message repeated nine times in one minute,” Postma explains, saying it’s an indicator of a troll account. The message posted was a link to the article by Joost Niemoller, a well-known Dutch conspiracy theorist, “which included clear narratives that we also heard from the Kremlin and, of course, argued for a NO vote, against the association agreement.”

The article consists of claims that the EU association agreement with Ukraine is a treaty against Russia, which will lead to a world war fought on European soil.

What happened offline
The disruption the Russian man Sergey Markhel caused during the debate in Delft a few days before the vote was not an isolated incident. Throughout the campaign, Russian activists routinely showed up at events, heckling guest speakers by shouting Kremlin talking points from the audience.

Postma of Justice for Prosperity explains that the purpose of these interventions was to take away the sense of security: “If you suddenly organize a very intense disruption which seems to come directly from the Kremlin, in the middle of such a relatively safe environment, then you create a feeling of insecurity, because then that war is really not so far away. Because if they can come here, where I was sitting just a moment ago, how easy would it be to get the army in here, for example?”

On the 30th of March, during a referendum debate in Hoofddorp, Kees Verhoeven received such treatment. A Russian man in the audience asked him angrily, “What do you think of the referendum in Crimea? Why do you ignore this? A democratic vote in which 80 percent voted yes. And what do you think of the rights of the Russian minority who are being bombed because of their wish to install Russian as a second state language?!”

Looking back, Verhoeven says he was a bit naive and didn’t take the possibility of Russian influence on the referendum seriously. “I thought I would just answer these people, try to do this debate as well as possible. So I didn’t see the meaning of this fully.”

A Russian native, Nikita Ananjev, who repeated Kremlin narratives about Crimea and the Donbas at the event, was not a usual attendee of the pre-referendum debate. He is connected to Sergei Markhel, who disrupted the event in Delft in a similar way to Ananjev.

The two turned out to be part of the same organisation, Global Rights of Peaceful People. While already active in 2016, it officially registered in the Netherlands only in 2018. The journalists from Open Eyes and Schemes established this, obtaining the registration documents for this entity from the Dutch Chamber of Commerce.

Our online research shows that from 2014 to 2019, this NGO held events throughout Europe and spread Kremlin narratives about Ukraine. Among them are the alleged killing of the pro-Russian protesters in Odesa on May 2, 2014, and the alleged suppression of the rights of Russian speakers in Ukraine.

In 2016, they focused all their attention on the Dutch referendum. In a local newspaper at the time, Markhel mentioned spending three weeks in the Netherlands alone, during which he visited over 20 events.

Global Rights of Peaceful People was registered in multiple European countries, including Italy, Spain, Germany, and the Netherlands. The Dutch registration ended in early March 2022. Markhel left the Netherlands soon after the referendum. He was then seen speaking at the events around Europe. For example, in Brussels, Belgium, on 24th May 2017, where he spoke at the Anti-NATO Conference of the World Peace Council, a Soviet-founded organization. Markhel died in 2019.

Other former members of the NGO remain in the Netherlands and still regularly participate in and organize demonstrations to share Kremlin-talking points about the war in Ukraine in various Dutch cities.

A 2018 research study by two think tanks, Washington-based Free Russia and the Bonn-based Boris Nemtsov Foundation for Freedom, categorized Global Rights of Peaceful People as a Russian government-organized NGO, or GONGO.

Political inroads
It appears the Global Rights of Peaceful People also worked to establish political connections in the Netherlands.

The two other members of the NGO, Elena Plotnikova and Natalia Vorontsova, served as advisers to Harry van Bommel, then a leading voice in the NO-camp and prominent politician for the Socialist Party.

Plotnikova was a member of the party as well. The New York Times first reported on Van Bommel having Russian advisers during the referendum; however, details on their exact background were missing.

In an interview with Open Eyes, Van Bommel admits a group of Russians and Kremlin supporting Ukrainians played a role in his campaign. However, the former parliamentarian argues he used his helpers only to “strengthen” his preexisting belief that “Ukraine was a divided nation,” part of which prefers close ties with Russia over the EU. “That made their stories more useful,” argues Van Bommel.

One such case study he used during the campaign. Plotnikova, one of the Ukrainian pro-Kremlin advisers to Van Bommel, shared a stage with him at a pre-referendum event in de Rode Hoed in Amsterdam. She talked about why the association agreement between the EU and Ukraine was wrong.

Asked if it mattered that the advisers he hired might have been sent by Russia, Van Bommel says, “If that were the case, and they would have told me. I would have objected.”

In 2020, investigative platform Bellingcat revealed that Plotnikova, in the years after the referendum, also supported a GRU-led alternative media channel called Bonanza Media in the Netherlands, which spread lies about the MH17 plane crash.

Bonanza Media’s biggest success was the production of a documentary about the downing of the aircraft called Call for Justice, for which the screening in the Netherlands was organized in The Hague by the NGO Global Rights of Peaceful People. Another former adviser of the Socialist Party, Natalia Vorontsova, delivered the opening words at the event.

Reflecting on the referendum, Van Bommel says he feels vindicated. “I think you can safely say that we were right. They’re (Ukraine – ed.) joining the European Union. Something we said back then was on the agenda, and two, this (the association agreement – ed.) is leading to a major conflict with Russia. And that’s what happened.”

When pressed on the cooperation with his pro-Kremlin advisers, he calls the commotion about his decision to consult with them “fabricated.” The fact that some of them had a Russian background is “irrelevant,” he says.

Van Bommel argues that his party already had a ‘rock solid story’ and that if Russia wanted to influence the SP campaign, “they should have deployed stronger people and stronger resources.”

In 2018, two years after the referendum, Nikita Ananjev, one of the then-directors of Global Rights of Peaceful People, received an honorary certificate from the Russian ambassador in the Netherlands in recognition of his ‘significant contribution to supporting Russia’.

The certificate was issued on behalf of the Russian government commission for compatriots abroad, of which Sergey Lavrov, Russia’s minister of Foreign Affairs, is the chairman.

Van Bommel claims Ananjev and Markhel never advised him.

Open Eyes and Schemes reached out to the former advisers of Van Bommel, but did not receive answers to our interview requests.

Former Ukrainian Minister of Foreign Affairs Klimkin recognizes this type of certificate. ‘When they award that distinction, they are effectively labeling that person as someone who is in some way directly cooperating with the Russian embassy. I know of such stories from many embassies.’

Global Rights of Peaceful People might be gone for five years now, but its message is kept alive by former members and advisers of Van Bommel, who can still be spotted at pro-Kremlin events and demonstrations in the Netherlands regularly.