Russian trolls conduct campaigns to stop aid to Ukraine – WP

The Washington Post has obtained access to EU intelligence documents and learned that Russian political strategists and Internet trolls have launched a campaign to discredit Ukraine in order to stop the adoption of aid to Kyiv. 

Source: The Washington Post

Details: These are more than 100 documents, dated from May 2022 to August 2023, from the internal correspondence of people involved in the disinformation campaign. The documents showed that Moscow was working in France and Germany to weaken support for Kyiv and destabilise the situation in Ukraine itself.

The documents' metadata indicated that they were written by members of a team working for Ilya Gambashidze, the head of the Moscow-based PR company Social Design Agency. The United States imposed sanctions on Gambashidze in March for his involvement in a "persistent foreign malign influence campaign" on the instructions of the Kremlin.

The Washington Post gave an example of a task that one of the political technologists assigned to a bot firm worker: "Write a comment of no more than 200 characters in the name of a resident of a suburb of a major city. This fictitious American doesn’t support the military aid that the US 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 US toward collapse."

Another narrative accuses the Ukrainian government of stealing and selling Western weapons. Yet another argues that "Americans are not ready to sacrifice their well-being for the sake of the conflict in Ukraine" and that Russia's closer relations with China are a new threat created by current US policy.

The bots also spread information about "universal poverty, record inflation, a halt to economic growth … the risk of job losses for white Americans." One comment, for example, tried to compare the level of homelessness in America and Russia. The United States is beginning to look more and more like a "third world country".

A comment to the article posted by a Russian troll reads as follows: "I am overcome with anger when another Ukrainian aid package is distributed right before my eyes into the pockets of American and Ukrainian officials. Indeed, it is hard to understand such gestures of ‘help’ when one’s own homeless sit at the feet of passersby [and] sleep under bridges."

WP noted that the Kremlin began seriously undermining US support for Ukraine in January 2023. Sergei Kiriyenko, First Deputy Kremlin Chief of Staff, convened a team of political strategists already working on campaigns to weaken support for Kyiv in Europe and asked them to expand their efforts.

The Republican Party said that Russia's priority is to stop the supply of weapons, so they are "throwing things against the wall to see what sticks."

Republican sources say that the Russian campaign includes several avenues, some of which are working better than others. The Russians don't care. They are just trying to "seed the environment." 

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