Russia has been meddling in the political affairs of western democracies for at least a century so allegations in the 277-page FBI affidavit published last week, detailing Kremlin attempts to “reduce international support for Ukraine, bolster pro-Russian policies and interests, and influence voters in the US” should come as no surprise.
Since the days of the Cheka and the OGPU (forerunners of the KGB and now the FSB) Russia has effectively conducted a largely covert war on the West, expending huge sums on what is known in Russian as aktivnye meropriyatiya, or “active measures”. This is the general fomenting of unrest and division and the spreading of disinformation or what we now call fake news.
Yuri Andropov, briefly the general secretary of the Russian Communist Party between 1982-83 and a former head of the KGB described active measures as the exerting of influence on the adversary to “weaken his political, economic, scientific and technical and military positions”.
A Russian spy who defected in 1992 claimed the GRU (military intelligence) alone spent over $1bn in the late 1960s funding peace movements against the Vietnam War. Stanislav Lunev said: “the GRU and the KGB helped to fund just about every anti-war movement and organization in America and abroad” and was “well worth the cost”.
The activity waned after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 but has grown again under Vladimir Putin. We know for example there was considerable Kremlin-directed interference in the 2016 US presidential election from the two weighty Mueller reports published by the Department of Justice in 2019.
FBI affidavit: how Russia exploits social media
What the new FBI affidavit spells out in some detail is how Russia is currently exploiting the internet and social media to advance what the cyber security firm ClearSky calls “Russia’s Information War efforts”, including influencing the 2024 US presidential election campaign, “weakening European Union cohesion, and reducing Western backing for Ukraine”.
Three Russian companies Social Design Agency (SDA), Structura National Technology and ANO Dialog, ran campaigns under the umbrella term ‘doppelganger’ to impersonate well-known legitimate news outlets to covertly spread Russian government propaganda. These outlets included The Washington Post and Fox News, among others. The campaigns were directed and controlled out of Putin’s Presidential Administration (AP) by Sergei Kiriyenko.
Internet domains were purchased with an address (URL) virtually identical to the real one, in the Washington Post’s case this was washingtonpost.pm (warning: don’t try this link, it’s infected with phishing software) instead of washingtonpost.com. All links on the fake website from the navigation menu, the Washington Post icon, and the story byline, went back to the real washingtonpost.com, lulling the reader into believing they had visited the genuine website.
A fake story would be produced using the byline and image of a legitimate Washington Post reporter. A link to the story would then be released on social media, taking the reader to what appeared to be an authentic story or op-ed published by a reputable news source.
SDA had a manual for “monitoring, analytics, content production, and content delivery” which described efforts to create fake articles which were to be “original texts ranging from 2,000 to 5,000 characters with spaces, devoted to topics relevant to the Ukrainian audience, which fit into the main subject areas of the project. Each text is professionally edited and accompanied by 10 comments and 3 teasers for disseminating the text on social networks”.
The impact of these articles, some of which are included in the affidavit, was to be monitored with the data added to a ‘dashboard’ enabling trends in public opinion to be analysed so that the effectiveness of these fake stories (see below) could be measured.
The FBI claim that SDA also maintained a list of “more than 2,800 people on various social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook and Telegram, spanning 81 countries, that SDA identified as influencers, including television and radio hosts, politicians, bloggers, journalists, businessmen, professors, think-tank analysts, veterans, professors, and comedians”.
US-based influencers accounted for approximately 21% of the accounts being monitored by SDA, meaning 79% were elsewhere, presumably including Britain.
Encouraging conflict
On page 202 of the affidavit, the FBI have obtained a Russian document titled: International Conflict Incitement, the objective of which is to “escalate internal tensions” in the countries allied with the United States “in order to promote the interests of the Russian Federation on [sic] the international arena”.
Another section in exhibit 7A sets out the “algorithm for working with real conflicts” and explains how the mainstream and social media are to be monitored daily to identify conflict situations of any kind, be they “social, economic, political, ethnic, religious, mixed type, etc”. The potential scale of the conflict and the stage reached is to be determined together with an “assessment of using the conflict to implement Russia’s foreign policy objectives”.
If necessary, the document states, an “artificial shift” in the rhetoric is made to “further introduce/embed narratives that are beneficial to Russia”.
Escalation of the identified conflicts are to be encouraged using “available tools” and these are then listed: traffic redirection, work with comments, work with influencers, analytical comments, augmented reality, media mirror outlets, fakes, etc., “in order to destabilise the societal situation”.
In case there is a shortage of natural conflicts, another page deals with methods to create “artificial generation of conflicts” using “sociological research to identify ‘pain points’ and hot-beds of increased social and political tension”.
This is how the Kremlin carries out its foreign policy, the main plank of which is to destabilise the West in every possible way.
The UK connection
The affidavit is largely concerned with the USA but other countries and other well-known international news outlets are mentioned. For example, among the domain names purchased were dailymail[.]cam, dailymail[.]cfd, and dailymail[.]top, with only the latter still being active.
And it is not just right-wing outlets. In 2022, when the horrors of Bucha were being revealed to the world, Russia’s Defence Ministry claimed that the bulging dossier of war crimes was a “hoax, a staged production and provocation” by the authorities in Kyiv and apparently a story to that effect was published on a fake Guardian website.
According to Meta (Facebook): “For example, the same article about Bucha was published on the same day in English on the spoofed Guardian site, in Italian on the spoofed ANSA site, and in German on the spoofed Spiegel site. It also appeared in English, French, German, Italian, Spanish and Chinese on rrn[.]world.”
RRN was the website of Recent Reliable News (formerly Russian Reliable News) another Russian government propaganda outlet.
Brexit
The Americans have twice investigated Russian influence in their elections and found considerable evidence, both in 2016 via the Mueller reports and now in 2024 from the FBI.
Given everything we know and suspect, it seems inconceivable that Russia stood by and did nothing in 2016 when the EU referendum was held, a golden opportunity to weaken the UK and the EU in a single blow. The heavily redacted report into Russian meddling in UK politics was published 21 July 2020. One member of the Intelligence and Security committee, the SNP MP Stuart Hosie, said at the time: “no one in [the UK] government knew if Russia interfered in or sought to influence the referendum because they did not want to know.”
This was at best shameful complacency on the part of the Conservative government. At worst it was complicit in allowing Putin to interfere in the EU referendum because Russian and Tory objectives were aligned.
Russia Today
In addition to pushing fake news, Russia also employs ‘useful idiots’ to amplify anti-Western messages. The US Department of Justice also unsealed an indictment against two former RT (Russia Today) employees Kostiantyn Kalashnikov and Elena Afanasyeva on two counts, conspiracy to violate the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) and conspiracy to commit money laundering.
The indictment alleges that “using multiple fake personas” they deployed nearly $10mn, laundered through a network of foreign shell entities, to covertly fund and direct a US company, believed to be Tenet Media, to publish videos on multiple social media channels, including TikTok, Instagram, X, and YouTube. The $10mn came via an unnamed British company.
Tenet is said to have posted nearly 2,000 videos that have garnered more than 16 million views on YouTube alone since November 2023 without disclosing it was funded and directed by RT.
The company also lists on its website six right-wing influencers including Dave Rubin, who has more than 2.4 million YouTube subscribers; Tim Pool, a podcast host with more than 1.3 million YouTube followers; and Benny Johnson, whose YouTube channel has nearly 2.4 million subscribers. One is said to have demanded and received $100,000 per weekly episode.
RT is alleged to have “pursued malign influence campaigns in countries opposed to its policies, including the United States, in an effort to sow domestic divisions and thereby weaken opposition to Government of Russia objectives”.
The indictment goes on: “For example, in discussing RT’s coverage of the United Kingdom’s exit from the European Union in 2016, an RT journalist recalled to an academic researcher: ‘I asked my editor, what is RT’s line for this [Brexit], and he said: ‘Anything that causes chaos is RT’s line’.’”
