Italy home to first NATO-hosted EU-banned RT festival

The first NATO time. Over the weekend, the northeastern Italy city of Gorizia—European Capital of Culture 2025 united with Nova Gorica, in Slovenia—became the first city in a NATO country to host RT.Doc: The Time of Our Heroes, a documentary festival sponsored by RT (formerly Russia Today), which the EU banned following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

• The event—presented as an act of “cultural resistance”—ran on 30 and 31 May and opened with remarks by Yekaterina Yakovleva, head of RT Documentary.
• Yakovleva thanked Italian attendees, asserting: “We are blocked throughout Europe, but thanks to you Italians, we still have a voice in your splendid country.”
• Margarita Simonyan, RT’s editor‐in‐chief and an EU‐sanctioned propagandist, delivered a video message, while Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova sent a letter of greeting.

A festival of propaganda. Organised by the Vivere o sopravvivere? Association—better known for opposing vaccines, digital currencies and climate‐change policies—the festival openly targets the EU and NATO.

• The event blends left‐wing and right‐wing grievances against “the system,” casting Russia as a counter‐model to Western liberal democracies.
• Attendees included satirist Vauro Senesi and historian Angelo D’Orsi from the left, alongside libertarian activist Leonardo Facco, a supporter of Argentine President Javier Milei.
• Also present was Vincenzo Lorusso of International Reporters—criticised by Reporters Without Borders for spreading Russian disinformation via his Donbass Italia Telegram channel.
• The programme in Gorizia featured a film by Russian director Oleg Nekishev, which highlights “Italian civic mobilisations against authoritarian drift and the ‘Russia is Not My Enemy’ campaign,” complete with friendship demonstrations and petition drives—both staple Kremlin narratives: Western decline and pro‐Moscow sentiment abroad.

Global precedent and local impact. Gorizia’s festival follows similar RT.Doc screenings in over 20 countries, including a 19–20 May edition in Banja Luka, Bosnia and Herzegovina, portrayed in pro-Russian media as the capital of Republika Srpska.

• There, presentations mixed historical accounts of Nazi atrocities against Serbs with allegations of Ukrainian “war crimes” in Eastern Ukraine, conflating facts and disinformation.