Cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/13024669
In an ongoing campaign that seeks to influence congressional and other political debates to stoke anti-Ukraine sentiment, Kremlin-linked political strategists and trolls have written thousands of fabricated news articles, social media posts and comments that promote American isolationism, stir fear over the United States’ border security and attempt to amplify U.S. economic and racial tensions, according to a trove of internal Kremlin documents obtained by a European intelligence service and reviewed by The Washington Post.
One of the political strategists, for instance, instructed a troll farm employee working for his firm to write a comment of “no more than 200 characters in the name of a resident of a suburb of a major city.” The strategist suggested that this fictitious American “doesn’t support the military aid that the U.S. is giving Ukraine and considers that the money should be spent defending America’s borders and not Ukraine’s. He sees that Biden’s policies are leading the U.S. toward collapse.”
The documents — numbering more than 100 and dating between May 2022 and August 2023 — were provided to The Post to expose Kremlin propaganda operations aimed at undermining support for Ukraine in the United States, as well as their scale and methods. The files are part of a series of leaks that have allowed a rare glimpse into Moscow’s parallel efforts to weaken support for Ukraine in France and Germany, as well as destabilize Ukraine itself.
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Russia has been ramping up its propaganda operations as part of a second front that current and former senior Western officials said has become almost as important for Moscow as the military campaign in Ukraine — especially as congressional approval for further aid has become critical for Kyiv’s ability to continue defending itself.
Propaganda operatives have used another technique to spread just a web address, rather than the words in a post, to frustrate searches for that material, according to the social media research company Alethea, which called the tactic “writing with invisible ink.” Other obfuscation tricks include redirecting viewers through a series of seemingly random websites until they arrive at a deceptive article.
Sergei Kiriyenko, the Kremlin’s first deputy chief of staff, called in the team of political strategists already working on campaigns to weaken backing for Kyiv in Europe, including Gambashidze, and asked them to expand their efforts, the documents show.
As the Biden administration prepared once again this spring to try to push supplemental funding for Ukraine through Congress, sites linked by Microsoft and other social media researchers to the Kremlin campaign launched fresh attempts to spread misleading content over immigration and the border with Mexico.
One of the most successful claims was disseminated by DC Weekly — a respectable-seeming internet outlet, which disinformation researchers at Clemson University traced back to domains affiliated with a former American police officer, John Mark Dougan, who has reinvented himself as a pro-Russian journalist in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region.
One pro-Ukraine senator, North Carolina Republican Thom Tillis told CNN that the debate on aid had been halted in part because some politicians said they were concerned about the corruption allegations and the notion that “people will buy yachts with this money.”
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I thought it was kinda wise to tie Ukraine funds with Israeli funds. Because, funding Israel was in the interest of Republicans.
It didn’t work, though. House Republicans couldn’t agree on it. Now, Bibi went way worse with genocide than the West feared, and so even Dem voters have shown strong disapproval on funding Israel (understandably so).
It’s now chaotic. I, for one, have lost track on how the Ukraine funding proposal in Congress is going now, despite me having been a donor to Ukraine for multiple times. One might even say Biden’s now doing service to Putin at this point.
It’s so weird watching good things happen for the wrong reasons in the Federal Government.
Because, funding Israel was in the interest of Republicans.
I don’t disagree, but you can cite anything other than a meme.
What substantial difference is there between Democrats and Republicans on Israel?
There isn’t one.
No matter who we elect, Israel gets its charity from the American taxpayer, even though we won’t fund health care or any real aid to our own people.
I mean, it’s not like they have to work that hard.
There has been next-to-nothing done to address the cost of living crisis but our government seems to be able to make hundreds of billions appear out of thin air for yet another foreign war. (And everyone’s just kind of ignoring that we’re at war in several other countries already.)
I’m not Russian. I’m not a troll. I’d just like to see the neglect of Americans in service to warmongers end.
This is not some war of expansion, like we’re used to initiating/taking part in/co-opting as Americans, this is an honest-to-goodness invasion by a very malicious actor (Putin).
I would also love to see our social programs funded and expanded, but denying money to Ukraine doesn’t re-allocate it to social programs. Our budget is not zero-sum, as Republicans pretend to believe when they crow about cuts, it is entirely made-up based on what level of debt risk we believe we can safely operate under. All that not funding Ukraine’s defense does, is make it easier for Russia to expand its influence and and legitimize its claims of the supposed inevitable reunification of former Soviet bloc states.
Furthermore, the specific narratives that Russia is pushing are right-wing ones like anti-immigrant and isolationist ones. They’re a dual-pronged attack meant to erode support for Ukraine, AND bolster Trump politically, who is in Putin’s pocket. I loathe Biden, but I’m not going to turn a blind eye to Putin’s agitprop just because he’s also anti-Biden.
This enemy of my enemy is also my enemy.
The American government has the ability to address both. It’s not like money is being taken away from social programs to fund the defense of Ukraine. It’s not like much money is involved in the defense of Ukraine to being with: The vast majority of weapons the Eastern European nation is receiving are old, even expired stock that would have otherwise been destroyed.
The issue is that while monetary capital exists to fix e.g. housing, political capital does not. Part of it is intentional - like all democracies, American democracy is intentionally designed to be slow in order to protect it - and part of it is due to the fact that one party is highly dysfunctional and entirely bought and paid for by interest groups, both foreign and domestic.
The American government has the ability to address both.
And yet, they don’t.
That’s the point. Russians don’t have to lie about the neglect of the American people, and pretending that Russia’s the problem here is a little silly to me when the vast majority of Americans are impoverished and definitely being robbed of their labor.
The Russian lie is that the support of Ukraine and existing American social issues are meaningfully related, that if the former wouldn’t exist, the latter could be solved. You’re dangerously close to repeating this lie.
It’s not a lie, though.
We do neglect our people’s needs so we can be involved in like nine wars at once, including Ukraine. Most countries provide for the basic needs of their people and can only maintain a sustained war for months at most.
It’s your right to support that. It’s my right to point out how remarkably shitty it is that we do this to our people.
It’s not a lie, though.
It is. The two things aren’t related as a couple of users already said.
The Kremlin lies by relating U.S. social policy to Ukraine aid, although these things have nothing to do with each other. One major objective of these trolls is to undermine the trust in Western values, democracy, and human rights.
It is true that Russian (and other totalitarian states’) disinformation exploits social problems in other countries to sew mistrust in their Western pllitical systems, blacken Western politicians’ reputations, and breed conspiracy theories. (This was already a major goal in the USSR propaganda during the cold war in the 20th century, btw.)
Political polarization and growing social inequality are creating a fruitful ground for this propaganda and the spread of conspiracy theories, especially if and when Western politicians trade democratic values for short-term political gains (which is what some U.S. and European politicians appear to do right now, especially from the far right).
But, again, the U.S. can do both as it has been said, increasing social welfare and helping Ukraine. If Ukraine doesn’t win this war, Russia will attack more countries, and I guess China is watching closley how the West reacts given Beijing’s intentions and activities in Taiwan and the South China Sea. If Ukraine doesn’t win this war, it gets worse for all of us, in the U.S., in Europe and the much bigger rest of the world.
You: “I’m not Russian. I’m not a troll.”
Also you: immediately proceeds to pretend supplying Ukraine with the weapons they need to defend from a warmongering Russia is itself warmongering
Next you’ll say that a rape victim defending themself is aggression
I for one am shocked by this news.
