SITUATED IN THE PRIMORSKY DISTRICT IN the north-west of St Petersburg, the office building at 55 Savushkina Street is a modern four-storey edifice of glass and concrete typical of those that have sprung up across Russia’s second city since the end of communism. Behind the front doors a short flight of stairs leads up to a lobby and a pair of metal turnstiles. The bland exterior belies the curious nature of what until recently went on inside. Here, in a suite of offices belonging to an organisation known as the Internet Research Agency, an army of young people used social media to wage war against the West.
Their task was to write posts denigrating America and its allies and to talk up the Putin regime. Hiding their true identities and location behind internet proxy servers, they did their work on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and its Russian equivalent VKontakte, as well as the comment sections of Russian and foreign newspapers and websites. Up to four hundred of them were reportedly employed at any one time.
Every morning they would be given a list of targets to attack and an outline of the themes to be tackled. The Russian economy? It was recovering far better than predicted after the financial crisis. The murder of Boris Nemtsov, the opposition leader and former deputy prime minister gunned down in February 2015 as he walked near the Kremlin? Probably carried out by the opposition in order to pin the blame on Putin. Oh, and Nemtsov’s girlfriend, although describing herself as a model, was actually a prostitute. The most popular of the themes was the situation in Ukraine: workers were encouraged to disparage President Petro Poroshenko and the ‘fascists’ that had taken power in Kiev and to highlight atrocities carried out by the Ukrainian army.
It was here that Lyudmila Savchuk, a single mother of one in her mid-thirties, went to work in January 2015. She was assigned to the special projects department. For a salary of 50,000 roubles a month (£600) – high by Russian standards – she would work three twelve-hour shifts a week. During each shift she would be expected to write five political posts, ten non-political ones and at least 150 comments on fellow trolls’ posts. She did so through the prism of three fake personas whose blogs she wrote on LiveJournal, a hugely popular social media site in Russia, weaving pro-Putin propaganda and attacks on opponents of the regime into invented stories of everyday life.
‘One time we were supposed to write about how terrible things are in the European Union,’ Savchuk recalled.1 ‘Another time we were supposed to praise Russian Defence Minister Sergey Shoygu. You sit there and write things like: “Yesterday I went for a walk and the idea came to me about how bad the situation is in Europe”.’ In one post, entitled ‘Bad premonitions: Why I’m worried about my sister living in Europe’, one of Savchuk’s imaginary personas, a fortune-teller called Cantadora, wrote how sanctions had made life grim for her sister in Germany.
In her job interview, Savchuk had claimed to be a ‘housewife with no real views’. In reality, she was a long-time environmentalist and critic of Putin who had joined the Internet Research Agency to expose its activities. Before making her application she went carefully through her own social media postings, removing politically contentious posts and replacing them with recipes.
During her time at 55 Savushkina Street, Savchuk copied dozens of documents and pumped her fellow workers for information. She also made a clandestine video of the office. The following month she handed over her findings to Moi Raion, an independent St Petersburg newspaper. Its report, when published, provided the most detailed inside account to date of the workings of Russia’s troll army. Savchuk quit the next day, launching a campaign to shut down the Internet Research Agency, which she believed was run by a wealthy businessman with links to the Kremlin. To maximise exposure she also took the company to court, suing it for alleged non-payment of wages and for failing to give its workers proper contracts. That August a court found in her favour, paying her symbolic damages of one rouble (one pence).
The operation was one of scores around Russia aimed at both domestic and international audiences, the funding of which was opaque. Their origins lay in the protests prompted by the December 2011 parliamentary elections, which were largely organised via social media. During Putin’s first term, he had concentrated on taking control of television, leaving the Russian-language internet, known as the ‘Runet’, which was largely used by the educated urban middle class, to flourish in a world free of censorship. Medvedev, meanwhile, had embraced social media as part of his image.
Everything changed once Putin came to appreciate how the opposition could use the internet as a weapon against him. New laws were introduced to regulate the medium: one, passed in April 2014, ordered social media sites to keep their servers in Russia and save all information about their users for at least six months. At the same time, investors linked to the Russian leader gained control of VKontakte. That August another law came into force obliging bloggers with more than three thousand followers to register with the government.
In a speech at a media forum in St Petersburg, Putin described the internet as originally having been a ‘CIA project’ that was ‘still developing as such’. To resist Western influence, Russia needed to ‘fight for its interests’ online, he proclaimed. At the same time, an army of trolls such as Savchuk were put to work to spread a positive message – not just among fellow Russians, but, equally importantly, to people abroad.
LIKE ANY NATION, THE RUSSIAN STATE has long understood the importance of working on its image. After the abortive 1905 revolution which shook the monarchy, advisers to Nicholas II attempted to promote him through pamphlets, portraits, photographs and events marking the 1913 tercentenary of the Romanov dynasty. The Bolsheviks made propaganda a central pillar of their regime. Rigorous censorship at home was combined with a determined effort to showcase the Soviet Union and its unique political and economic system to the world. Launched in 1929, Radio Moscow broadcast at its peak in more than seventy languages using transmitters in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and Cuba. The Sovinform agency, later renamed Novosti, published sixty illustrated newspapers and magazines with the aim of painting a rosy picture of the Soviet Union abroad and giving Soviet citizens an ideologically appropriate view of the rest of the world.
As part of this, the KGB became expert in planting anti-Western stories that would typically appear first in publications in developing countries and then, after being picked up by other media organisations, gradually make their way to the West. Most notorious of these was ‘Operation Infektion’, a disinformation campaign begun in the early 1980s that set out to demonstrate that the HIV virus had been created by the Pentagon as part of a biological weapons research project at Fort Detrick in Maryland. After the collapse of communism, it also became clear the extent to which the Soviet Communist Party had been bankrolling various organisations in the West. Until 1974, for example, Britain’s Morning Star received direct contributions from the Kremlin, and when this stopped it was indirectly supported by bulk orders that boosted its anaemic circulation by as many as six thousand copies a day; they were abruptly halted in 1989 with a week’s notice, causing what was described as ‘huge financial disruption’.
Such tactics largely fell out of favour during the 1990s when relations with the West improved, but have since returned with a vengeance – although the nature of the message has changed. Soviet-era propagandists attempted to ‘sell’ their own political and social system to the world in the hope of spreading revolution or, at least, winning converts to their cause. Their modern-day counterparts have a different task. They do not claim to have a unique model to export but instead present Putin’s Russia as home to the kind of values prevalent in the Europe of the 1940s or 1950s: social conservatism, orthodoxy and hostility towards ‘propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations to minors’ (eliding homosexuality with a threat to child safety). This is coupled with the hostility to US hegemony in world affairs that they inherited from the Soviet era. The approach is therefore less about self-promotion and more about undermining Western society and institutions. It thrives on conspiracy theories: the 9/11 attacks were an inside job, while Zika (like AIDS before it) was created by the Americans. The aim is to highlight contradictions and sow discord and to deflect criticism of Russia by accusing its critics in the West of double standards.
Vladimir Pozner, a veteran broadcaster now in his early eighties who for decades was the voice and face of the Soviet Union in America, brings a personal perspective to the issue. His Soviet broadcasts to the English-speaking world were ‘more about the Soviet Union and less about the rest of the world’, he recalled over brunch in Moscow’s Café Pushkin. ‘As a propagandist I talked about what was going on in the Soviet Union: I talked about my mother-in-law, who was on a pension, I talked about public health, and so on. I didn’t talk about what Americans were doing somewhere in Vietnam.
‘It was not anti-Western, it was pro-Soviet. There used to be a great pride in what we had done. Gagarin, Sputnik. It was like, “wow – look at us” . . . It was all about ideology: presenting a certain set of ideas as something really attractive and, in a way, presenting the future.’2
‘Now it’s very different,’ Pozner added. ‘This is propaganda in the direct sense of the word. It’s half-lies, lies attempting to change people’s view about their own country rather than about Russia . . . This is anti-Western, it’s not pro-Russian. That’s a very important difference.’
In Europe, the most receptive audience for the Kremlin’s message is among supporters of the far right, who not only tend to identify with this kind of nostalgic social conservatism but are also wary of migrants and deeply suspicious of the European Union – a convenient bonus for Putin, who sees the weakening or even break-up of the EU as a chance to undermine the united front against Russia. Some of this propaganda also enjoys sympathy from those on the anti-globalist left for whom hostility to America is everything – even though it means they are effectively supporting a regime whose stance on civil liberties and on homosexuality would normally be anathema to them.
Underlying this is a philosophy that has been dubbed ‘what aboutism’, a form of moral relativism that responds to criticism with the simple response: ‘But you do it too.’ ‘What aboutism’ has its origins during the Cold War, when Western criticism of Soviet actions such as the invasion of Afghanistan, the imprisonment of dissidents or imposition of martial law was frequently met not with an attempt at justification but instead with a riposte about US involvement in Latin America, apartheid in South Africa or British policy in Northern Ireland. The approach was summed up by the phrase: ‘U nych negrov linchuyut [Over there they lynch Negroes]’. The appeal of the policy is obvious: you cannot be blamed for the bad things you do because there is another country that has done things that are just as bad – or worse.
The modern incarnation of this tactic has been neatly summarised by Roman Skaskiw, a Ukrainian-American journalist who has lived in Ukraine since 2012: ‘The truth is immaterial and only Russia’s interests matter,’ he wrote in an article that appeared in March 2016.3 ‘For Russia, read Putin.’ Skaskiw broke down the policy into nine elements:
1. Rely on dissenting political groups to deliver your message abroad; far right is as good as far left in Europe.
2. Domestic propaganda is most important to control the Russian population, whose living standards are plummeting.
3. Destroy and ridicule the idea of truth.
4. Putin is strong. Russia is strong.
5. Headlines are more important than reality.
6. Demoralise.
7. Move the conversation.
8. Pollute the information space.
9. Accuse the enemy of doing what you are doing to confuse the conversation.
ONE OF THE MOST POWERFUL WEAPONS in Russia’s propaganda portfolio is Russia Today, a television station that was set up initially as an English-language service in 2005, with Arabic- and Spanish-language versions following soon afterwards. The station, which also has a strong internet presence, was the product of a growing realisation by the Kremlin that it had an image problem abroad. A survey commissioned by Putin’s government two years earlier had asked Americans to name the top ten things they associated with Russia. The top four were communism, the KGB, snow and the mafia. The only brands that came to the minds of those questioned were Kalashnikov rifles and Molotov cocktails. Something clearly had to be done to burnish Russia’s image, especially since it was due to host the G8 summit for the first time in St Petersburg in July 2006.
To counter suggestions that the station would deliver a stodgy, Soviet-style propaganda effort, its director general was a lively twenty-six-year-old named Margarita Simonyan, a Russian of Armenian origin who had once worked as a Kremlin pool reporter for state television, where she was reputed to be one of Putin’s favourite journalists. Some five hundred staff – including two hundred journalists – were hired and bureaux opened in London, Washington, Jerusalem and Brussels, with operations controlled from Moscow. The initial budget was reportedly $60 million a year, with more coming from advertising. The on-screen reporters were not Russians but fresh-faced young Britons and Americans lured to the station by far bigger salaries and higher-profile jobs than they could expect at home.
To switch from a Western channel to RT, as the station was renamed in 2009, is like stepping into a looking-glass world in which conspiracy theory is presented as fact, fringe opinions are treated as part of the mainstream and black is described as white. The channel’s coverage of the Ukraine crisis demonstrated such an approach to dramatic effect. Peter Pomerantsev, a Russian-born British expert on Russia’s information policy, was one of the first to talk of a ‘post-fact’ or ‘post-truth’ world, in which ‘there are no facts, only interpretations, to mean that every version of events is just another narrative, where lies can be excused as “an alternative point of view” or “an opinion”, because “it’s all relative” and “everyone has their own truth”’.4 According to this logic, Pomerantsev argues, when Putin went on television during the annexation of Crimea and insisted there were no Russian soldiers in Ukraine, ‘he wasn’t lying so much as saying the truth doesn’t matter’. ‘Putin doesn’t need to have a more convincing story, he just has to make it clear that everybody lies, undermine the moral superiority of his enemies and convince his people there is no alternative to him,’ he adds.
The approach seems to work, with the channel establishing itself in the media landscape alongside the likes of the BBC World Service, CNN, Al-Jazeera and the rest. In February 2010, RT started a service aimed at America alongside its global English-language service. It followed this in October 2014 with a dedicated British channel, RT UK, which promised to ‘challenge dominant power structures in Britain by broadcasting live and original programming with a progressive UK focus’. The Kremlin has also been stepping up considerably the budget of Rossiya Segodnya, a news agency created by executive order of the Russian president in December 2013 that runs Sputnik, an online news and radio broadcast service aimed at an international audience. It has not been all smooth running, however; hiccups included a couple of embarrassing on-screen resignations during Russia’s annexation of Crimea: Liz Wahl, a US-based anchor for RT, declared during a live broadcast that she could no longer ‘be part of a network funded by the Russian government that whitewashes the actions of Putin’. Ofcom, the British media regulator, took the station to task fourteen times in its first ten years for misleading or biased reporting.
When Russia Today was launched, it was intended to ‘provide an international audience with an understanding of what is going on in Russia from Russia’s point of view’. Yet for a station controlled from Moscow, the station talks relatively little about its home country. The shortening of its name seemed intended to downplay the Russian connection. The station’s slogan ‘Question More’ epitomises its approach.
One of the motivations for creating the station was a desire to bypass the Moscow correspondents of foreign media organisations, who were felt to be painting an image of Russia that was not positive enough – supposedly because they were coming too much under the influence of the capital’s liberal intelligentsia, who were suspicious of Putin. This feeling also inspired the creation in 2004 of the Valdai Discussion Club, an annual meeting of foreign experts and journalists with top Russian officials – including Putin – to which Moscow-based journalists were not invited.
At the same time, the Kremlin was also investing heavily in hiring high-profile lobbyists: in December 2005, just weeks after he left office, the former German chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, took a job as chairman of the board of a Russian–German gas pipeline that was majority owned by Gazprom, raising eyebrows in his homeland. In parallel with this, the Kremlin spent millions of dollars on public relations, hiring Ketchum, a leading US PR firm, and its European partner, Brussels-based g+.
Getting the Kremlin ‘on message’ was not always easy, according to Angus Roxburgh, a former BBC Moscow correspondent who has described his work for g+ in his book, The Strongman: Vladimir Putin and the Struggle for Russia. Despite Roxburgh’s best efforts, the Russians found it difficult to grasp how Western media worked: they did not understand that it was not possible to pay to place favourable stories in the media, were convinced that journalists wrote only what the owners of their newspapers (or governments) wanted and that governments punished those who wrote critically about them by harassing them and denying them entry to future events. ‘The Kremlin wanted us to help distribute the message, not change it,’ Roxburgh complained.5
Think-tanks have become another weapon in the Russian armoury. The Paris-based Institute of Democracy and Cooperation, headed by Natalia Narochnitskaya, a former member of the Duma with hard-line nationalist views, was set up in 2008 with the apparent aim of creating another source of pro-Russian attitudes. In July 2016, a far larger and higher-profile think-tank, the Dialogue of Civilizations Research Institute, was set up in Berlin by Vladimir Yakunin, a Russian businessman and a member of Putin’s close circle. The institute’s co-founder, Peter Schulze, a German political scientist, insisted that the institute, which grew out of an annual get-together on the Greek island of Rhodes, would not ‘represent any Russian interests’ and would not receive any government funding. German media reports claimed Yakunin himself was planning to invest €25 million over the following five years. The institute claimed on its website that ‘mutual understanding is the fundamental prerequisite for humankind’s inclusive development’, but Yakunin’s own views were anything but inclusive: he supported the Kremlin’s ‘gay propaganda law’ and claimed that the Ukrainian protest movement had been hijacked by neo-Nazis. He was also placed on the US state department’s sanctioned list in the wake of Russia’s annexation of Crimea.
There were also links between Russian-funded organisations and NGOs and pressure groups in Britain and other European countries. An investigation by the Sunday Times, for example, published in October 2016, revealed ties between Stop the War and two Moscow-based groups: the Anti-Globalisation Movement of Russia (AGMR), which aims to ‘fight global dominance of transnational corporations’ and has been described by Chatham House, the foreign affairs think-tank, as a ‘key actor’ in Russia’s apparatus of international ‘soft power’; and the Institute of Globalisation and Social Movements (IGSO), a Kremlin-funded think-tank.6
Anne Applebaum, an American author, commentator and fierce critic of Putin, has pointed to parallels between such bodies and the Cold War ‘front organisations’ that were allegedly independent but secretly supported with Soviet money. ‘Such groups were run by “agents of influence” – people who knowingly promoted the interests of the Soviet Union inside the West – or “useful idiots”, people who did the same thing, unconsciously, usually out of ideological naiveté,’ she wrote.7 Yet the people behind these modern-day organisations are not idiots; nor, in contrast to their pro-Soviet predecessors, do they try to hide their links with Russia. ‘So what do we call them?’ Applebaum asked. ‘We need a new vocabulary for a new era.’
Such policies, taken together, could be mistaken for ‘soft power’ of the sort Western countries openly exercise. Yet Russian understanding of the term is different: the phrase used in Russian, myakaya sila, translates better as soft ‘force’ rather than ‘power’. While the West sees soft power as being about creating a positive image of, say, America or Britain, Putin’s Russia treats it as part of a toolkit for waging an information war that also includes deliberate misinformation, manipulation of public opinion and cyberwarfare. As Putin himself put it: ‘Soft power is a set of tools and methods to achieve foreign policy goals without the use of weapons, through the use of information and other levers of influence.’
Such an approach appeared to be reflected in a much-quoted article by General Valery Gerasimov, chief of the general staff of the Russian Federation armed forces, which was published in a Russian military journal in February 2013. ‘The very “rules of war” have changed,’ Gerasimov wrote. ‘The role of non-military means of achieving political and strategic goals has grown, and, in many cases, they have exceeded the power of force of weapons in their effectiveness.’8 The article, which spoke of ‘non-linear warfare’ was seized on by Western analysts, some of whom spoke of a ‘Gerasimov doctrine’. Others downplayed its significance, however, while Gerasimov himself, in more recent writings, has indicated his views were misinterpreted in the West.
Regardless of the significance of Gerasimov’s ideas, the Kremlin has certainly made considerable efforts within the former Soviet states to play up historic ties with Russia and to denigrate the countries’ own leaders if they are not seen as sufficiently sympathetic to Russia. In Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova in particular, which have declared their intention to integrate with the West, a network of pro-Kremlin groups promotes Russkiy Mir (‘Russian World’), a flexible tool that justifies increasing Russian actions in the post-Soviet space and beyond. As Orysia Lutsevych argued in a research paper for Chatham House, Russian pseudo-NGOs undermine the social cohesion of neighbouring states through the consolidation of pro-Russian forces and ethno-geopolitics, denigration of national identities and the promotion of anti-US, conservative Orthodox and Eurasianist values. In doing so, they often work hand in hand with the Russian Orthodox Church.9 Such soft power is complemented by the activities of paramilitary groups such as the Cossacks and the Night Wolves, a bikers’ club with more than five thousand members that set out to ‘gather Russian lands’ in the post-Soviet states and held annual rallies in Crimea in the years before it was seized by Russia. Putin gave the group his blessing, riding with them and posing for photographs with their leader, Alexander Zaldostanov, nicknamed ‘The Surgeon’.
Further west, the Kremlin has been accused of trying to ‘buy’ political influence with anti-establishment political parties in Europe, although such assertions are difficult to prove. In December 2014, Médiapart, a French investigative website, revealed that Marine Le Pen’s National Front had taken out a €9 million loan from the First Czech-Russian Bank, a financial institution based in Moscow, to fund its campaign. The National Front claimed that it had been obliged to look abroad because no French bank would lend to it, but the move inevitably prompted critics to accuse the party of being in the Kremlin’s pocket. Le Pen, it was noted, was an admirer of Putin, whom she praised for ‘restoring pride to a nation that had suffered seventy years of humiliation and persecution’. She was also critical of the EU for its recognition of the ‘totally illegitimate government in Ukraine’. Le Pen rode out the storm, and, tellingly, it was the National Front itself that announced in February 2016 that it was hoping Russian banks would lend it the €25 million it needed to finance its campaign for the 2017 presidential election.
Other parties, largely on the right of European politics, are also being cultivated by Russia, among them the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), a right-wing party hostile to the EU and to immigrants. In an investigation entitled ‘Moscow’s Fifth Column: German Populists Forge Ties with Russia’ published in April 2016, Der Spiegel reported on the AfD’s extensive links with Russia – including the participation by Marcus Pretzell, one of the party’s most senior figures, as guest of honour at a conference in Yalta, in Russian-occupied Crimea, alongside several people on the European and American sanctioned lists – and on its attempts to forge an alliance between the AfD’s youth wing and that of Putin’s United Russia. Unlike Le Pen’s National Front, the party denies any financial links with Russia.
‘The right-wing populists [of the AfD] are undeterred by the Kremlin’s anti-liberal, anti-American and homophobic ideology,’ the magazine noted.10 ‘On the contrary: for large parts of the AfD party base, those factors appear to make Russia an attractive partner. At the same time, the AfD, with its critical stance toward the EU and NATO, also appears to be a natural partner for Putin.’ There is similar sympathy towards Russia within the Freedom Party of Austria and its Dutch namesake, and within other parties in Eastern Europe, especially in Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic.
FOR SEVERAL YEARS, WESTERN COUNTRIES WATCHED this growing Russian propaganda initiative without much concern, confident that their own societies and established media brands were strong enough to see off any assault on their values. Indeed, Western media – especially broadcasters – are to a great extent the victims of their own editorial guidelines, which require them to provide balanced reporting. This means the Kremlin’s version of events, even if far-fetched, is still reported in order to give the view from the other side.
The conflict in Ukraine has shown the need for a more robust approach, given Russia’s use of disinformation as a weapon in its efforts to destabilise the country. In March 2014, the month that Putin annexed Crimea, a group of Ukrainian journalists set up an organisation called StopFake to check facts, verify information and challenge disinformation about their country in the Russian media and elsewhere. The site, which appears in several languages including English, Ukrainian and Russian, even has a regular video round-up in which it debunks some of the most egregious examples.
Some of the stories highlighted were shocking: Russian state television’s Channel One, for example, ran a report claiming that a three-year-old boy had been publicly crucified by Ukrainian government forces in Slavyansk, in the east of the country. A woman claiming to be an eyewitness described in detail how the child was nailed ‘like Jesus’ to a bulletin board in the town, but strangely no one else from the town corroborated her story. Other reports bordered on the absurd, such as those involving Maria Tsypko, a woman apparently in her late thirties, who became an unlikely media star after popping up in a variety of different guises in pro-Kremlin television reports on the war in eastern Ukraine. Once she appeared as a pro-Russian protester in the eastern Ukrainian city of Kharkov; another time as the mother of a soldier sent by the Ukrainian army to the front; a third time as a lawyer who was coordinating an independence referendum in Luhansk; and a fourth as a ‘humanitarian worker’ in Debaltseve, soon after it was taken by separatist militias. For some of her appearances she seemed to have dyed her hair red, but she invariably wore the same thick golden necklace and heavy gold earrings. The underlying message was always the same: as a Ukrainian resident affected by the conflict, she was expressing her discontent with the government in Kiev.
Such tactics have caused concern in the Baltic states, whose leaders are worried that their substantial ethnic Russian populations could be manipulated by the Kremlin into becoming a fifth column that could act against them. Estonia, which prides itself on being the most digitally progressive country in Europe, has become more sensitive than most to cyberwarfare since 2007 when it suffered a crippling denial-of-service attack. The attack was believed to have originated in Russia, since it was carried out the day after Estonian authorities removed a large statue celebrating the Second World War achievements of the Red Army from the centre of Tallinn, the capital.
In Germany, the tipping point came in January 2016 after a report for Channel One, the state television station, claimed that a thirteen-year-old girl from a Russian immigrant family in Berlin, named only as Lisa F., had been abducted on her way to school and held for thirty hours by a group of ‘southern-looking’ asylum seekers who gang-raped her. The report, by Ivan Blagoy, its German correspondent, was spread on social media and quickly watched more than a million times on Facebook. It prompted demonstrations in Berlin and other German cities by thousands of the country’s Russian speakers, many of them relatively recent arrivals. The report’s impact was all the greater since it coincided with a bout of national soul-searching prompted by claims from more than six hundred women in Cologne that they had suffered sexual attacks on New Year’s Eve by groups of male immigrants, which had been largely downplayed by the German media.
Lisa F. subsequently admitted to prosecutors that she had made up the story. But this did not prevent Sergey Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, from using his annual press conference to attack Germany for ‘covering up reality in a politically correct manner for the sake of domestic policies’. For Merkel’s government this was the last straw, since Lavrov had made his comments despite the summoning of Vladimir Grinin, the Russian ambassador to Berlin, to the German foreign office with a request to tone down Russian media’s coverage of the case. Concerned at what appeared to be a deliberate attempt to use the migrant crisis to destabilise her government, Angela Merkel ordered the country’s secret services to mount an investigation.
Other bodies were also studying methods of combating Russian propaganda. In March 2015, EU leaders agreed to look into ways to ‘challenge Russia’s ongoing disinformation campaign’. The result was the creation of a unit known as ‘EastStratCom Task Force’. Established that April, it was given the remit of monitoring and analysing Russian-language media reports, particularly those broadcast in the EU’s six ‘Eastern Partnership’ countries – former Soviet satellites with large Russian-speaking populations, including Ukraine and the three states in the Caucasus. The unit puts out two weekly publications – a Disinformation Review, that collects examples of disinformation, and The Disinformation Digest, that analyses how pro-Kremlin media see the world and follows trends on Russian social media to put them into their wider context.
NATO has also been looking at how to combat what it has described as Russia’s ‘weaponisation of information’ by creating a new, more powerful communications section. This could include moving more quickly to declassify images – such as those of Russian troop movements – to reveal what is going on. This would be a departure from the Crimean crisis, when it failed to release real-time spy satellite images showing Russian troop deployments and instead waited several months, even then only showing images from commercial satellites.
Although Britain and other countries are enthusiastic proponents of such a strategy, the United States has long been wary of anything that could be construed as propaganda. In a column published in the Washington Post in May 2016, Anne Applebaum and Edward Lucas, a fellow conservative commentator on Russian affairs, berated America for failing to do enough to combat the problem. There is no public analytical database of ‘what Russia says, when and where’, they argued.11 Nor do we know ‘which elements of the Russian message are effective, who believed them and why’. The authors’ conclusion: ‘It’s high time we learned.’
Pressure for a change of stance was intensified two months later by the leaking of emails from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) in an operation blamed by US officials on hackers linked to Russia. On 22 July, three days before the start of the Democratic convention, WikiLeaks released a collection of 19,252 emails and 8,034 attachments from the DNC, laying bare Democratic scheming against Senator Bernie Sanders, who had only recently admitted defeat by Hillary Clinton in the primaries. Sanders loyalists were outraged by the revelations, which cast a shadow over the first days of the convention and led to the resignation of the committee’s chairwoman, Debbie Wasserman Schultz. WikiLeaks’ founder, Julian Assange, a fierce critic of Clinton, refused to say where he had obtained the documents. But the attack was thought to have come from an entity known as ‘Fancy Bear’ which is connected to the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence service, an official involved in the investigation told the New York Times. The same arm of Russia’s intelligence operation was also implicated in the attack on computer systems used by Clinton’s presidential campaign workers. Russia, it was claimed, was trying to undermine Clinton and help her Republican rival, Donald Trump.
Then, several weeks later, during the final weeks of the presidential election campaign, WikiLeaks released thousands of emails, many of them sensitive, written by John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign chairman. Podesta blamed Russia. ‘I’ve been involved in politics for nearly five decades,’ he said. ‘This definitely is the first campaign that I’ve been involved with in which I’ve had to tangle with Russian intelligence agencies who seem to be doing everything that they can on behalf of our opponent.’ The Obama administration publicly acknowledged for the first time that it believed the Kremlin was responsible. ‘Only Russia’s senior-most officials could have authorised these activities,’ said James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, in an apparent swipe at Putin.
The leaks were greeted with a mixture of shock and anger in America. It was one thing for Russian hackers to leak a recording of a phone call between Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and the US ambassador to Ukraine, as they had done two years earlier; interfering in America’s presidential election process was a step too far. Intelligence officials quoted by American media claimed the administration was planning a retaliatory cyber covert action, which would perhaps involve releasing documents that would shed light on the unsavoury actions of Putin or the murky financial transactions of some of his allies. Joe Biden said ‘we’re sending a message’ to Putin that ‘will be at the time of our choosing, and under the circumstances that will have the greatest impact’.
Michael McFaul, whose own private phone calls were hacked and published while he was US ambassador to Moscow, argued that the attack should serve as a wake-up call for America to combat increasing efforts by Russia and other autocracies to weaken democracy abroad by giving rhetorical and financial support to political parties and organisations with illiberal, nationalist agendas. This should come not directly from the US government, for fear recipients could be tainted by being accused of being in its pocket, but from independent foundations, whose establishment should be encouraged, he argued.
‘We should think of advancing democratic ideas abroad primarily as an educational project, almost never as a military campaign,’ McFaul wrote.12 ‘Universities, books and websites are the best tools, not the 82nd Airborne. The United States can expand resources for learning about democracy.’