 [Gatestone] Have Western environmental non-governmental organizations (NGOs), movements and parties been possible, even unwitting, collaborators with the Russian government for the last ten years?
This question arises from a recent report by the Foundation for Political Innovation (Fondapol) in Paris. Fondapol's director, Dominique Reynié, said in a recent interview:
"We have found Gazprom funding in particular environmental NGOs, which furnished certain European countries with ministers -- Belgium for example -- who then evidently embarked on a sort of return of favor by defending an exit from nuclear power."
These allegations are not new.
The Guardian, already in 2014, quoted NATO's then Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen, making the following accusation:
"I have met allies who can report that Russia, as part of their sophisticated information and disinformation operations, engaged actively with so-called non-governmental organisations - environmental organisations working against shale gas - to maintain European dependence on imported Russian gas."
Below Europe's soil lie large reserves of shale gas, also known as bedrock gas. The exploitation of these natural gas reserves would have substantially reduced Europe's purchases of, and dependence on, Russia's gas -- in particular on its gas giant, Gazprom. The same is true of nuclear power, which offers Westerners an abundant, non-CO2-emitting energy source as an alternative to Russian gas.
Hence the interest, for the Russian government, in mounting a vast disinformation campaign against shale gas and nuclear power in the West, by massively financing the groups most likely "naturally" to oppose it: environmentalist organizations.
On June 29, 2017, two of America's leading federal lawmakers on energy issues, US Representatives Randy Weber and Lamar Smith , sent a letter to then-Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin, demanding an investigation into the funding of US environmental organizations by the government of the Russian Federation. According to The Hill: 
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