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in the future through Russia financing the party. An even more subtle approach was employed in the United Kingdom in the summer of 2014. The Conservative Party received a gift of £160,000 from Lubov Chernukhin, the wife of Vladimir Chernukhin, a former deputy finance minister in Putin’s government. She paid this sum to play tennis with the Prime Minister David Cameron during a fund-raising event.26 The party rejected criticisms and accepted the money. Of course, in most cases, there is no direct quid pro quo, but certainly this transaction helps create a friendly atmosphere in which the generosity of one side might be reciprocated by the other side in the future.
Election Interference as the Kremlin’s Infowar Weapon
Financing political parties offers only a limited influence. Being a donor among dozens of others cannot guarantee that the favor will be reciprocated in the future. Therefore, the Kremlin conceived a new and bold strategy—to interfere directly in the electoral process. The emergence of the social media facilitated interference practices. The Facebook platform was founded in 2004 and Twitter in 2006, which exponentially increased the number of users of social media. The American presidential election of 2016 was an excellent opportunity to test the new strategy.
In March 2016, the personal email account of John Podesta, chair of Hillary Clinton’s campaign, was hacked, and his emails were stolen. According to the American intelligence services, acting under the pseudonym Guccifer 2.0, the hackers were affiliated with the GRU, the intelligence service of the Russian army.27 In October and November 2016, in order to increase the impact, Podesta’s stolen emails were published by WikiLeaks just before the presidential election. The impact was greater than the Kremlin expected. The fact that Clinton used her private email accounts instead of her professional email account was used by Trump in his attacks on the Democratic candidate. Podesta’s emails were also used to spread fake news, such as the allegation that these emails contained coded messages that revealed the connections of Clinton and other officials, members of the Democratic Party, with human trafficking and a pizza-restaurant child sex ring, allegedly run by Clinton. This “Pizzagate” story went viral on the social media before the election. The owner of the Comet Ping Pong pizzeria in Washington, mentioned in the social media, received death threats. Moreover, on 4 December 2016, a man walked into the pizzeria with a semi-automatic rifle and fired three rounds, attempting to save the alleged victims. Fake news narratives are “sticky,” and it is telling that in a poll, conducted one month after the election, even among the Clinton voters were those (17 percent) who believed that Podesta’s emails contained secret information about pedophilia. For Trump voters this number was much higher—46 percent.28
The Russian trace is also evident in the activities of Cambridge Analytica, a firm which collected the data of millions of Facebook users without their knowledge. The British Information Commissioner’s Office discovered evidence that suggests that the files of Cambridge Analytica were accessed from Russia.29 Damian Collins, an MP who led a parliamentary inquiry into fake news, shared his views about the possibility that the Russians had subverted Facebook users’ personal information to run their advertisements in the United States during the presidential election, individually targeting voters in swing states. In a report of the British Parliamentary Intelligence Committee, it was alleged that Russian interference might also have affected the 2016 Brexit referendum, although its effect was said to be “unquantifiable.”30
Finally, the separatist drive in Catalonia during the 2017 Catalan breakaway was likely instigated by the Russians. In 2019 in Spain, the High Court opened an investigation into a Russian spying unit in Catalonia. The activities of an elite group called Unit 29155 traced to the Russian intelligence service, the GRU, included contacts with radical Catalan separatists during the independence referendum of 2017.31 The members of this unit reportedly participated in the poisoning of the former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in the United Kingdom in March 2018, and in the failed coup attempt in Montenegro in October 2016. Indeed, the scale and geography of Russian covert operations and Russian interference in foreign political processes are substantial, and their consequences might be detrimental to national and global security.
How to Fight the Russian Infowar?
As mentioned earlier, in his 2014 book, Igor Panarin assumed that the second global information war would be won by Russia in 2020. Putin’s influence campaigns and information war have destabilized the political landscape in the United States and Europe, and have helped regain Russia’s influence in its “near abroad” and expand its borders. The dismemberment of the EU and Western military alliances would be welcomed by the Kremlin. The question, therefore, is: how can the Russian information war and election meddling be countered? At least, six of the following measures should be considered:
1. Spend more money.
Until recently Russia has been augmenting the budget for its propaganda effort. In contrast, Western governments have been decreasing the budgets available for public diplomacy. This trend has to be inverted.
2. Create an alternative Russian language TV station.
This station should be able to compete with RT. Latvia has already taken an initiative in creating a Russian language TV station. In Berlin, on 1 June 2016, Peter Tietzki’s private firm RtvD launched Russian language TV for Russian speakers in Germany.
3. Tell the truth.
Do not fall into the trap of producing “counter-propaganda” which is not trustworthy.
4. Raise public awareness of Russian trolls’ activities.
“Forewarned is forearmed.” At the high school and college levels, an emphasis should be made on analyzing how propaganda works.
5. Analyze the facts.
Russian propaganda includes misinformation and disinformation. Misinformation is false information, which is intended to deceive. Disinformation is a mixture of true and false facts designed to mislead the public. Debunking lies, half-truths, and half-lies is important. Progress has been made by the EU External Action Service that publishes weekly disinformation bulletins. In Ukraine, a private initiative entitled StopFake.org debunks myths since 2014. Quality papers and studies accessible by broader audiences are an effective weapon against fake news.
6. Do not be too tolerant.
RT has direct access to homes of tens of millions of Europeans and Americans, while the Western media in Russia have limited possibilities in this respect. The West could ask for reciprocity as a condition for the Russian media presence in the West. Western governments should issue a series of legislations preventing RT from diffusing explicitly biased information. In the United Kingdom, there exists a media watchdog, Ofcom (Office of Communications) which ensures impartial news coverage. Several times it has found RT in breach with the British regulations, imposing punitive measures on RT. Media watchdogs in Western countries should more closely coordinate their efforts.
7. Forbid foreign financing of political parties.
Foreign financing of political parties and political advertisements should be strictly forbidden.
8. Protect the electoral process.
There should be designed a set of measures that would prevent outsiders from interfering in the electoral process. Voting online should therefore be discouraged and the use of voting machines restricted. Old-fashioned paper votes should be kept or reintroduced.32