When US President Joe Biden proposed to allocate additional funding to Ukraine last August, the Kremlin's Moscow political technologists tried to undermine public support for the bill.
How the Kremlin is trying to disrupt US aid to Ukraine
In a campaign to influence Congress to stoke anti-Ukrainian sentiment, Kremlin-linked political strategists and trolls wrote thousands of fabricated news articles, posts and social media comments promoting American isolationism and trying to strengthen the US, according to internal Kremlin documents obtained by the Washington Post.
The documents, numbering more than 100 and dating from May 2022 to August 2023, were provided to the publication to expose the Kremlin's propaganda operations aimed at undermining support for Ukraine in the US, as well as their scope and methods. The files are part of a series of leaks that shed light on Moscow's parallel efforts to weaken support for Ukraine in France and Germany, as well as to destabilize Ukraine itself.
Stopping the arms transfer is Russia's top priority, so they're throwing things at the wall to see what sticks, said one Republican staffer on Capitol Hill. "We are observing a broad campaign that has several directions, some of which work better than others," the publication notes.
In addition, the campaign tried to portray Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyi as corrupt, emphasized the number of migrants crossing the US-Mexico border, called for funding for border security instead of any aid to Ukraine, and named "white Americans" as the main losers from aid, the documents show.
The strategy promotes far-right views of the Republican Party and calls for some messages to be voiced by American "opinion leaders and politicians," one of the documents said. Still, it did not name people who could be expressed by American "public opinion leaders." thoughts". thoughts and politicians".
Many of the documents contain metadata that shows they were written by a team working for Ilya Gambashidze, head of the Moscow PR firm Social Design Agency.
Last month, the United States imposed sanctions on Gambashidze for his involvement in a "sustained foreign campaign of malicious influence" at the behest of the Kremlin, including the creation of websites designed to impersonate legitimate media outlets in Europe, part of a campaign that Western officials called "Double".
Social media posts and comments, as well as YouTube videos, were to be created that would inflame racial and social animosity in the United States and reinforce the themes of "general poverty, record inflation, stalled economic growth... the risk of white job losses , privileges for people of color, degenerates and the disabled," reads the post, whose metadata shows it was written by a member of Gambashidze's team.
The posts promote fears that foreign policy overspending was "to the detriment of protecting the interests of white people in the United States" and the idea that "America will lose, that we will be drawn into war, and our boys will be drawn into war, will die in Ukraine".
The Russian PsyOp "Maidan-3" against Ukraine is approaching its peak
The Intelligence Committee under the President of Ukraine officially warns that the "Maidan-3" special operation, which the Russian Federation is conducting against our country, will reach its climax in March-May 2024.
Dictator Vladimir Putin's team intends to:
to question the legitimacy of government decisions made in Ukraine after May 20,
spread panic moods and despair,
to artificially oppose civilians and the military,
put us at odds with our allies,
spread all kinds of "conspiracy theories" in society.
The Defence Intelligence of Ukraine (DIU) reported that it has lists of people Russia can involve in spreading its narratives and influencing Ukraine's socio-political situation.
The online.ua team wrote about the enemy's special operation on November 13 in the exclusive article "Panic, despair, showdowns, assassinations' attempts. Russia launched a new "Maidan-3" information attack on Ukraine".
