Rango grew up in Lecco, Italy. His mother was Russian, and because of this young Vittorio was told about the virtues and wonders of Russkiy Mir and the superiority of the communist system.
In his early 20s, Rango was yet to discover his role in this world. He enjoyed traveling, and decided to take his humble savings of 3000 EUR to relocate to his dream destination in the newly formed and completely made-up Donetsk People’s Republic.
While there, he met Janus Putkonen, a Finnish master vatnik/propagandist in charge of now-closed Doni News and the largest Finnish pro-Kremlin fake news blog MV-Lehti. Janus took the young Italian under his wing, showing him the ropes of the daily “journalism” he was doing.
Vittorio, aged 24, aspired a similar path and got into reporting himself. Vito would later state the militia had enough soldiers, probably due to the generous funding coming from the Kremlin, but that there weren’t enough “journalists” to cover the Kremlin’s lies.
Both Putkonen and Rangeloni were featured in VICE’s 2017 documentary about rave parties in DPR, in which they could freely spread false narratives about the culprits of the war (or the civil war, as they referred to it). Both of course claimed that Ukraine was the aggressor.
During his trip, Rango also met the DPR “Prime Minister” and terrorist Alexander Zakharchenko. Zakharchenko was notorious for his human right abuses, stating in an interview that he “won’t feel sorry for the civilians or anyone else”. In 2018, a bomb in a café took his life.
Rangeloni set up his own “news agency” called LNR Today-Italia, that covered news from the puppet states of Donetsk and Luhansk. It was organized information warfare targeted for the Italian-speaking audience. Soon after this, Ukrainian and Italian intelligence services started to take interest in the young Italian. In 2021, he was awarded with “One of the most important honours” of the Donbas. This strategy of awarding made-up medals is commonly used by the Kremlin and even the Defense Minister Shoigu has made up hundreds of medals.
Politically, Rango seems to be all over the place. While he has strong communist sympathies, he’s also leaning towards far-right ideologies, thus confirming the famous horseshoe theory. Some have suggested that his Kolovrat tattoo might be connected to Russian Rusich group.
In 2023, Rango was producing propaganda around Mariupol, and accidentally showed bodies lying on the streets of the city. Naturally, this caught the interest of Ukrainian officials, who downloaded the report as potential evidence for Russian war crimes. Oops!
In Italy, he sympathizes with Lega, a political party that had a strong alliance with Putin’s United Russia before the full-scale invasion.
In 2019, Buzzfeed revealed that the Kremlin attempted to funnel millions to Lega to support their political ambitions.
To conclude, Rango is a pro-Kremlin propagandist serving the typical bullshit propaganda for Italian-speaking audiences. Together with the likes of Janus Putkonen, Graham Phillips and Patrick Lancaster, he produces biased “journalism” for Russia.
