Pekka-philia: disgraced porn profiteer turned pro-Ukraine ‘disinfo expert’ could face legal action

By Kit Klarenberg

Faux disinformation expert Pekka Kallioniemi gained notoriety by smearing critics of the Ukraine proxy war. Since being unmasked for peddling pornographic representations of minors, Kallioniemi has been caught promoting fraudulent KGB documents to slander a journalist as a Russian spy.

In October 2024, mainstream Canadian defense journalist David Pugliese suffered “the political equivalent of a drive-by shooting,” according to a local publication called The Walrus. Citing alleged KGB documents, a prominent lawmaker accused Pugliese of being a longstanding Soviet/Russian spy during a parliamentary hearing on “disinformation.” Those files turned out to be blatant forgeries, but parliamentary privilege insulated the accuser from a defamation suit.

However, the same protections do not apply to a self-proclaimed “disinformation expert” named Pekka Kallioniemi, who simultaneously promoted the fraudulent material.

With the eruption of the Ukraine proxy war in 2022, Kallioniemi abruptly emerged as a leading authority on “Russian disinformation”, best known for lengthy Twitter/X threads smearing prominent Western critics of the war as Russian assets, sexual deviants and worse. Rather than factually rebutting the assertions and positions of his opponents, Kallioniemi specializes in character assassination, disseminating supposedly embarrassing personal details of targets in order to invalidate their opinions.

A look at Kallioniemi’s personal history before his stint as a disinfo researcher reveals his personal attacks to be exercises in projection. The Finnish academic poseur turns out to have been a small-time, sexually obsessed internet hustler who peddled pornographic representations of minors while boasting on online chat forums of his most depraved hijinks, including masturbating at a memorial to a WWII-era concentration camp near Berlin.

Kallioniemi’s latest target, Pugliese, is a seasoned reporter who has exposed Canadian government and military corruption over the course of his 40 year career. His muckraking has angered powerful forces in his country, including the member of parliament who libeled him, Chris Alexander. Furnishing what he claimed were photocopies of documents taken from “pre-1991 archives of the Ukrainian KGB,” Alexander insisted the files proved Pugliese had worked for Moscow for decades. Alexander said the material was in the hands of Ottawa’s “national security officials,” and had been authenticated by “several of the world’s leading experts on KGB documents.”

The following month, Kallioniemi published the fraudulent files. While using careful phraseology to avoid directly accusing Pugliese of being a “spy for the Soviet Union then later Russia,” Kallioniemi clearly implied this was the case. He not only reiterated Alexander’s assertion the documents “were proven to be authentic by experts,” but also declared:

“A leading expert on KGB operations stated that the documents confirm Pugliese was recruited by 1984, meaning that he was accepting conspiratorial methods of work and taskings directly from Moscow, and by 1990 he was also receiving money.”

In July this year, a researcher demonstrated through a detailed academic paper that the documents were crude forgeries. The findings were supported by Ukrainian archivists themselves, who were unable to verify the material or find duplicates in their own records. The paper further concluded Pugliese was “subject to a coordinated character assassination campaign.” In the intervening time, he and his family have been threatened, forcing him to increase security around his home. Pugliese has also been added to Myrotvorets, an SBU-linked hitlist of Kiev’s enemies.

Pugliese commented to The Grayzone: “I am not surprised the ‘documents’ Chris Alexander presented have been proven to be forgeries. As I testified to Canada’s parliament in November 2024, the photocopied records contain significant factual errors about my personal history. Alexander presented no supporting evidence to indicate the so-called records were even real. I told parliamentarians, ‘it is the height of irony that a committee studying disinformation would in fact propagate it.’ The question still to be answered is who is behind these forgeries and what are their real motives?”

Pugliese further notes how Kallioniemi failed to reveal his own financial relationship with a controversial charity, Mriya Report, in his defamatory Twitter/X thread. The Canadian journalist has published a several articles detailing grave concerns about the organization, including how and where its donations are spent. In fact, Kallioniemi received thousands of dollars simply for hosting Twitter/X spaces for Mriya Report. In October 2024, over 20 of the charity’s volunteers resigned due to ethical concerns about its activities.

“It’s disturbing how this ‘disinformation’ expert has himself spread disinformation,” Pugliese commented to The Grayzone. “To summarize this situation, Pekka Kallioniemi, who is linked to a charity that is facing various controversies, published false claims about a journalist who has been writing about and investigating this same charity. I have met with lawyers and all options are being examined.”

Kallioniemi exposed as fraud and child porn peddler

Kallioniemi’s smearing of Pugliese could ultimately prove the demise of his brief but highly profitable career smearing and doxxing journalists, researchers, politicians, and even private citizens during the Ukraine proxy war, under the guise of battling “disinformation.”

In several cases, Kallioniemi has publicized sensitive personal information such as divorce records, exposed the real identities of anonymous social media users, and circulated sensitive personal data apparently acquired through illegal means. Independent journalist Johnny Miller claims Kallioniemi released material hacked from his phone, while he simultaneously received “escalating death threats,” prompting him to claim asylum in Russia. Despite his ethically dubious conduct – or perhaps because of it – Kallioniemi has cultivated mainstream attention, earning a quote as an academic expert in “social media and disinformation” by the New York Times in April 2024.

Byline Times, a British intelligence-linked publication, has also published his work. However, Kallioniemi has struggled to secure an audience outside the highly weaponized, bot-saturated bounds of Twitter/X. His own backstory is murky, with little information readily available about him online. Nonetheless, Kallioniemi’s easily accessible web footprint is sufficient to prove his claims of spending years researching social media “disinformation” are a bare-faced lie.

Open source records of Kallioniemi’s lengthy academic history offer no evidence of any such interest. Papers published under his name instead focus on topics such as “enriching airport experiences through interactive storytelling,” and “collaborative navigation in virtual worlds.” Few of his followers bothered to ask obvious questions as his status as an “expert” grew, and income soared from sources including Ukrainian charities.

Finally, in May 2024, internet sleuths released deeply damaging details of Kallioniemi’s own personal life. Their revelations included his history of peddling and profiting from sexual depictions of children through a network of porn websites he managed for several years. On the Kallioniemi-controlled web pages, users were encouraged to publish erotic fantasies involving “teenage boy 13 – 18,” “teenage girl 13 -18,” as well as “non-consensual sex” apparently depicting scenes of rape. Another section directed readers to erotica about “incest and inbreeding.”

A 2014 note posted to these sites informed visitors the multiple pornographic platforms Kallioniemi managed had been conglomerated into a wider den of digital degeneracy. It stated the sites had historically neither accepted ad revenue nor charged users a fee for viewing or contributing explicit material. Instead, they were a personal passion project, financed out of his own pocket and through “sums given by small, individual donors.” Now, Kallioniemi was seeking donations to the sites’ parent company, which also developed video games.

It is unknown whether Kallioniemi had “teenage girl 13 – 18” on his mind when he masturbated in the toilets of a memorial to a World War II-era concentration camp – one of several obscene acts about which he openly boasted online before his “counter-disinformation” grift commenced and web footprint was cleansed. Enterprising cyber sleuths discovered an array of vile comments Kallioniemi made in his previous life as an alt-right shitposter, including on Reddit, and a pre-proxy war Twitter account.

“There’s a lot of money in this, believe me”

In a sublime irony, the fanatically anti-Russian Kallioniemi was found to have once named Vladimir Putin as his “favorite President”, and expressed dismay over the “civil war in Donbass” that erupted in 2014 following the Western-fomented Maidan coup. In his current guise, Kallioniemi condemns suggestions the Donbas conflict was not a Russian invasion as a bogus ‘Vatnik’ talking point. He also offered free advertising space on porn sites he ran, while apparently publishing a guide to “500 ways to make money FAST! [emphasis in original]”

Kallioniemi’s get-rich-quick schemes included selling salacious information on celebrities to tabloids, “[marrying] into money” – reportedly “easy for hot girls/women” – starting an escort service, and making “your own porn.”

On the latter point, he declared, “amateur porn sells SO [emphasis in original] good…just make a film with your boyfriend/girlfriend/friend and sell it to some amateur porn site (there are thousands of these)”. Kallioniemi promised, “there’s a lot of money in this, believe me,” strongly suggesting he has personally profited from such activity.

After this reporter contacted Kallioniemi to inquire about his past ownership of several porn sites, he took to Twitter/X to preempt the coming storm. In a May 15, 2024 post, Kallioniemi tacitly acknowledged the authenticity of the unearthed material and his ownership of the sites, whining, “they’re attempting to blackmail me with, is presumably that as a young entrepreneur, I launched a few sex sites back in 2009, which I made money on selling them some years later [sic].”

His admission predated the revelation that those sites contained explicit sexual representations of minors and rape and incest fantasies. Kallioniemi went on to complain about “personal information on me, and on my family” being published, while chalking up his past bigotry to being “an ‘edgy’ 30-something.”

Tellingly, these damning disclosures failed to dent Kallioniemi’s standing among his supporters, in particular within the NATO-endorsed contingent of pro-Ukraine cyberbullies known as NAFO. “Running a porn site is hella based,” one NAFO supporter replied to his semi-confessional post.

His assorted Twitter/X threads on so-called ‘Vatniks’ targeted supposed “disinformation” purveyors and Russian “useful idiots” ranging from Julian Assange to Pope Francis to journalists at The Grayzone. He eventually converted his smear-filled dossiers into a November 2024 book called “Vatnik Soup – The Ultimate Guide to Russian Disinformation.” Kallioniemi claimed the supposedly “effective antidote to Russian bullshit” had sold 5,000 physical copies in just four months.

The book’s foreword was authored by none other than the defense chief of Ukraine, Kyrylo Budanov, demonstrating the level of official support for Kallioniemi’s smear tactics. However, only a paltry 10% of the book’s net profits were earmarked for UNITED24, Ukrainian President Volodmyr Zelensky’s official charitable donation platform. Despite his high-level endorsements and dedicated online supporters, Kallioniemi’s grift is so brazen, numerous Ukrainians and hardcore Kiev supporters have taken umbrage at his digital panhandling.

In April, Kallioniemi claimed Ukrainian authorities had asked him for “help on building war crime cases against Russian propagandists who are spouting hate speech and inciting genocide online.” For reasons unclear, Kallioniemi requested his followers donate $25,000 for the apparently state-directed project. Several Twitter/X users wondered why he could not simply invest some of the vast sums he reaped from his “disinformation” expertise into the effort instead.

One Ukrainian slammed Kallioniemi’s shakedown as “absolutely disgusting” in an extraordinary diatribe documenting how “money people donated to help Ukraine” had repeatedly been abused to “line [Kallioniemi’s] pocket [sic].” She forcefully declared her country needed “drones, ambulances, tactical medicine — not Pekka’s vanity projects,” urging her followers, “please don’t donate to this bullshit.”

The pushback might explain why Kallioniemi has since deleted all his posts mentioning the purported project. Its status today is unclear.

Kallioniemi’s personal enrichment from supposedly charitable sources not only verges on illegal activity, it is clearly hypocritical, given his habit of accusing so-called ‘Vatniks’ of cynical financial schemes. Still, despite weathering the storm over his child porn profiteering, allowing for the publication of a second edition of his book, Kallioniemi announced his intention to permanently quit Twitter/X on October 8, 2025.

Perhaps he has achieved the dream he charted out before he was a prominent proxy war propagandist, when he said he aimed “to pay zero taxes when I’m 40 and use all the benefits of our welfare state” and thus “be ultimate [sic] parasite!” But there is also the considerable possibility Kallioniemi is finally grappling for the first time with the consequences of disseminating toxic disinformation.

Pekka Kallioniemi was repeatedly approached for comment by The Grayzone, but failed to respond before publication.