Russian disinformation
Russian disinformation campaigns have occurred in many countries. For example, disinformation campaigns led by Yevgeny Prigozhin, a Russian oligarch, have been reported in several African countries. Russia denies that it uses disinformation to influence public opinion. Often Russian campaigns aim to disrupt domestic politics within Europe and the United States in an attempt to weaken the West due to its long-standing commitment to fight back against "Western imperialism" and shift the balance of world power to Russia and her allies. According to the Voice of America, Russia seeks to promote American isolationism, border security concerns and racial tensions within the United States through its disinformation campaigns.
Background
During the Cold War era, the Soviet Union used propaganda and disinformation as "active measures... against the populations of Western nations". During the presidency of Boris Yeltsin, the first President of Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union, disinformation was discussed in the Russian media and by Russian politicians in relation to the Soviet era, and to differentiate Boris Yeltsin's new Russia from its Soviet predecessor.In the post-Yeltsin era, Russian disinformation has been described as a key tactic in the military doctrine of Russia. Its use has increased since 2000 under Vladimir Putin, particularly after the 2008 Russian invasion of Georgia. This style of disinformation propaganda has been described as a "firehose of falsehood" by observers due to its high number of channels and willingness to disseminate outright falsehoods, to the point of inconsistency. It differs from Soviet-era disinformation tactics in its use of the internet, claimed amateur journalism, and social media.
In December 2024, The European Union proposed sanctions targeting over a dozen individuals and three entities for Russian disinformation operations and hybrid activities. Additional sanctions on Belarus were also proposed, targeting individuals linked to human rights abuses or benefiting from ties to President Alexander Lukashenko’s government.
Debunking Russian disinformation
The European Union and NATO both set up special units to analyze and debunk falsehoods. NATO founded a modest facility in Latvia to respond to disinformation. An agreement by heads of state and governments in March 2015 let the EU create the European External Action Service East Stratcom Task Force, which publishes weekly reports on its website "EU vs Disinfo". The website and its partners identified and debunked more than 3,500 pro-Kremlin disinformation cases between September 2015 and November 2017.In 2016, the US government established the Global Engagement Center as an agency within the United States Department of State to counter foreign propaganda efforts. When explaining the 2016 annual report of the Swedish Security Service on disinformation, spokesman Wilhelm Unge stated: "We mean everything from Internet trolls to propaganda and misinformation spread by media companies like RT and Sputnik." RT and Sputnik were created to focus on Western audiences and function by Western standards, and RT tends to focus on how problems are the fault of Western countries. Russia's television outlet RT and the Sputnik news agency are state-sponsored media.
Research has tested methods to debunk the effects of Russian disinformation, particularly in the context of the Russian war against Ukraine. One study examined how inoculation can empower individuals of Russian descent living in the West against pro-Kremlin disinformation. The study found that having a Russian identity and being exposed to Russian media is correlated with a heightened susceptibility to disinformation. However, inoculation was shown to improve participants' ability to recognize and perceive disinformation as less credible, heighten perceptions of Russia's responsibility for the war, and strengthen solidarity with Ukraine.
Sergey Yastrzhembsky
, who has been called "the keeper of Vladimir Putin’s secrets", is a prominent supporter of Russian disinformation. In 2014, The Times called him the "spin doctor in chief" for supporting Russia's interests during the Chechen Wars. After the deaths of both Alexander Litvinenko and Anna Politkovskaya, Yastrzhembsky gave numerous misleading statements about both Politkovskaya and Litvinenko and their deaths. Also, Yastrzhembsky has been prominent in his anti-Ukraine efforts including countering the Orange Revolution and supporting Russia during the Russo-Ukrainian War.Social media platforms and the internet
As social media gained prominence in the 2010s, Russia began to use platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and YouTube to spread disinformation. Russian web brigades and bots, typically operated by Russia's Internet Research Agency, were commonly used to disseminate disinformation throughout these social media channels. In late 2017 Facebook estimated that as many as 126 million of its users had seen content from Russian disinformation campaigns on its platform. Twitter stated that it had found 36,000 Russian bots spreading tweets related to the 2016 United States elections. Russia has used social media to destabilize former Soviet states such as Ukraine and Western nations such as France and Spain. It has been suggested that since 2019, Russian-sponsored troll accounts and bots have formed and taken over prominent left-wing and right-wing subreddits on Reddit, such as the antiwar, greenandpleasant, and aboringdystopia subreddits, "suggest a Russian-led attempt to antagonize and influence Americans online, which is still ongoing." Canadian subreddits have also been directly targeted by Russia.Social media companies have moved to limit Russian disinformation on their platforms. In October 2019, Facebook moved to take down accounts connected to Yevgeny Prigozhin used to interfere with African political affairs. Cameron Hudson, a senior fellow of the Africa Center at the Atlantic Council at the time, said Russia's aim is to make its presence felt in the same way it did during the Cold War, but with a much smaller investment using disinformation campaigns. In 2020, the United States State Department identified several "proxy sites" used by Russian state actors "to create and amplify false narratives". These sites include the Strategic Culture Foundation, New Eastern Outlook, Crimea-based news agency NewsFront, and SouthFront, a website targeted at "military enthusiasts, veterans, and conspiracy theorists". Russian influence operations, such as the Pravda network, have increasingly spread content that serves as training data for large language models in order to influence the output produced by popular chatbots.
Internet Research Agency
Following the 2011–2013 Russian protests against the results of the 2011 Russian legislative election organized by several persons, including Pussy Riot, Anton Nossik, and Alexei Navalny, who used Facebook, Twitter, and LiveJournal blogs to organize the events, Vyacheslav Volodin, who was Deputy Prime Minister at the time and later became First Deputy Chief of Staff of the Presidential Administration of Russia and was responsible for domestic policy, was tasked with countering these efforts and began to rein in the internet using Prisma, which "actively tracks the social media activities that result in increased social tension, disorderly conduct, protest sentiments and extremis" by monitoring in real time from more than 60 million feeds about the protesters discussions on blogs and social networks and perform social media tracking which later led to establishing the Internet Research Agency. Nossik claimed that the Twitter fueled events in 2009 in Moldova known as the Twitter Revolution and the events of Arab Spring, which Igor Sechin blamed Google for masterminding the revolution in Egypt, were not as devastating to Putin as the events of the Snow Revolution during 2011–2012. Putin announced on 24 April 2014 that numerous laws would be enacted to restrict freedoms of expression on the internet through censorship and were signed into law by Putin on 5 May 2014 with enforcement beginning on 1 August 2014, according to Nossik.Twelve of the thirteen Russian nationals indicted by Robert Mueller for conspiracy meddling in the 2016 United States presidential election were employees of the Internet Research Agency, based in St. Petersburg, Russia. In the runup to and during the 2020 United States presidential election, Russia's Internet Research Agency demonstrated evolved tactics for spreading disinformation. Probably to evade the detection mechanisms of social media platforms, the IRA co-opted activists working for a human-rights focused Ghanaian NGO to target black communities in the United States. Russian campaigns also evolved to become more cross-platform, with content spreading, not only on Facebook and Twitter but also on Tumblr, WordPress, and Medium. The IRA is more emboldened, with evidence that they recruited American journalists to write articles critical of then presidential candidate Joe Biden.
Russian Institute for Strategic Studies
During both the 2016 and the 2020 United States elections, the Russian Institute for Strategic Studies was integral to disinformation efforts from Putin and the Kremlin. During the 2016 elections, Leonid Reshetnikov headed RISI, followed by Mikhail Fradkov during the 2020 elections. During the 2016 presidential election, George Papadopoulos met several times with Panos Kammenos who had numerous close ties to Russian intelligence, Putin, and the Kremlin group tasked with interfering in the 2016 United States elections. Kammenos formed the Athens-based Institute of Geopolitical Studies which in November 2014 signed a "memorandum of understanding" with the former Foreign Intelligence Service officer Reshetnikov who headed RISI. In 2009, RISI, which had been an SVR operation, was placed under control of the Russian president with Reshetnikov regularly meeting with Putin and participated in Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections by developing plans of action: for example, with Russian intelligence assets and using a large disinformation campaign, Putin would support Republicans and the 2016 Trump campaign and disrupt Democrats and the 2016 Clinton campaign, and if Trump were likely to lose the 2016 election, then Russia would shift its efforts to focus upon voter fraud in the United States in order to undermine the legitimacy of the United States electoral system and the elections. Kammenos' positions followed closely with the Kremlin's talking points.Johan Backman supports RISI's interests in Northern Europe. Russia's numerous disinformation attacks including support for white supremacist activities and attacks of Biden's mental fitness were utilized by Donald Trump, senior Trump Administration officials, and his re-election campaign. Brian Murphy, who was acting chief of intelligence at the Department of Homeland Security from March 2018 until August 2020, said that he was instructed "to cease providing intelligence assessments on the threat of Russian interference in the United States, and instead start reporting on interference activities by China and Iran." Chad Wolf, who was acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, said that Robert O'Brien, who was President Trump's national security advisor, had the assessments of Russian interference suppressed. John Cohen, who was under secretary of intelligence at the Department of Homeland Security during Barack Obama's presidency, stated: "By blocking information from being released that describes threats facing the nation... undermines the ability of the public and state and local authorities to work with the federal government to counteract the threat."