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Buying Western Papers: The Case of France-Soir
In 2009 in France, where a popular paper France-Soir was on the verge of bankruptcy, it was bought by the Russian oligarch Sergei Pugachev and his son Aleksandr. They planned to transform this paper into a popular mass-selling tabloid, similar to the German Bild or the English Sun. The young Pugachev who was in charge openly expressed his extreme-right sympathies. “I like the ideas of Le Pen,” he said.16 His bias in favor of the extreme right became even clearer in March 2011, when during the campaign for the regional elections in March 2011 the paper published the results of an opinion poll, commissioned by the paper, about the Front National, an unconditional supporter of the Putin regime.17 The results of this poll were accompanied by an editorial that praised the Front National for having become a party “just like the others.”
In order to have a significant influence on their subscribers, papers need mass readership. In the United Kingdom, for instance, The Sun has a readership of approximately two million, and in Germany Bild reached approximately one million. The Pugachevs aimed high. They even hired a man who had led an (abandoned) Springer project to launch a French version of Bild. However, the paper never sold more than 75,000 copies, and in 2012 the paper was liquidated. As a result, an attempt to win support of a mass tabloid in France for the Front National, a party that supported Putin’s regime unconditionally, failed.
Interestingly, in the United Kingdom the former KGB agent Aleksandr Lebedev and his son Yevgenii launched a similar project. They bought The London Evening Standard and The Independent. Although Lebedev publicly supported the 2014 Russian annexation of Crimea, he is far from being a Kremlin tool or a fan of the extreme right. Together with the former President of the Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev, Lebedev owns the Russian opposition paper Novaia Gazeta (New Newspaper). One of its prominent journalists, Anna Politkovskaia, who covered Russia’s campaigns in Chechnya and who was a vocal critic of Putin and the FSB, was assassinated on 6 October 2006 in the center of Moscow.18 Until today, the editorial line of The Independent has remained true to its name.
Kremlin Trolls
Anonymous state-sponsored Internet political commentators, known as Kremlin trolls, is another innovation in Russia’s information war against the West. The origin of this phenomenon is associated with symbiotic cooperation that developed among the Russian government, the Russian secret services, and the Kremlin-sponsored youth movement, known as Nashi (Ours). In 2009, the Kremlin pundit and the director of the Foundation for Effective Politics Gleb Pavlovskii set up a project entitled the “Kremlin School of Bloggers.”19 Pavlovskii’s Foundation for Effective Politics is a think tank that has been instrumental in shaping the Russian ideology and Russian identity over the last decade.
Since 2009, the “Kremlin School of Bloggers” has been advocating, defending, and selling the Kremlin’s policies to the Internet community by writing blogs, attacking opposition websites, and posting comments on Facebook and Twitter. In times of increased tension with the West these activities reached new heights. In May 2014, for instance, during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the British paper The Guardian received a massive number of pro-Russian comments, often written in poor English. Due to the activities of these trolls, the Moscow Times had to close its comments page. In July 2014, a Dutch web magazine, De Correspondent, had a similar experience, having published an interview with the author of this chapter. The magazine received an avalanche of pro-Kremlin comments that doubted the integrity of the reporter and the interviewee. Moreover, the magazine was accused of receiving financial support from dubious sources. The slur campaign encouraged the chief-editors to publish a declaration in which they distanced themselves from these comments.20 This happened a few weeks after the downing of the MH-17 airliner by a Russian BUK missile above the occupied Donbas region in eastern Ukraine. Of the 298 victims, 196 were of Dutch nationality. In the Netherlands, the deaths of 298 people became a national trauma, which made broad popular support for the Kremlin’s policies an unlikely development.
In June 2015, more information about secret activities of “troll farms” became available, when Liudmila Savchuk, a former employee of the “Internet Research Agency” based in Saint Petersburg, sued her purported former employer who failed to provide her with a contract. This firm employed an estimated workforce of four hundred employees who worked in two twelve-hour shifts. They were paid relatively high salaries of approximately $780 a month for posting comments on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms. Each employee was in charge of a dozen or more fake Facebook and Twitter accounts.21
Hiring Western Communication Firms
Beyond establishing “troll farms,” which was a genuine communication innovation, Russia began to hire Western communication firms. During the Cold War, this was inconceivable, but the situation changed after 1991 and Russia’s integration in the capitalist world economy. In 1997, the Russian government was accepted into an intergovernmental political forum, the G7, which became the G8. In this new international environment, it became possible for the Kremlin to get access to prestigious Western lobbying and communication firms. These firms were eager to work with the Kremlin that was willing to generously pay for their services.
The first initiative was undertaken in 2006, when Russia was tasked to organize the G8 summit in Saint Petersburg. To improve its image, the Kremlin hired the prestigious New York-based firm Ketchum with its Brussels-based daughter GPlus Europe. The $2 million contract included sending twenty-five people to Saint Petersburg, who arranged interviews, established podcasts featuring Russian officials, and made a webcast of the summit with the BBC. After the event Ketchum touted that it “succeeded in helping … shift global views of Russia to recognize its more democratic nature.” Its privileged contacts with the Kremlin apparently boosted Ketchum’s reputation: the firm received the “2009 Silver Anvil Award of Excellence Winner—Marketing Consumer Products,” a prize from the Public Relations Society of America.22
The Kremlin was also satisfied, because its reputation was enhanced. In January 2007, Russia signed a two-month contract for $845,000 with Ketchum and its subsidiary, the Washington Group. The contract was worth its money. Ketchum lobbied successfully on behalf of Putin who was chosen Time Magazine’s “Person of the Year” in 2007. The political implications of the Kremlin’s cooperation with Ketchum became even more transparent during the war in Georgia in 2008, when Ketchum helped set up a web platform, called ModernRussia, later changed into ThinkRussia, which disseminated the Kremlin’s views. Even Russia’s annexation of Crimea in March 2014 and the subsequent invasion of eastern Ukraine did not end the honeymoon between the Kremlin and the American PR firm. Although the scale of their cooperation was reduced, it was even then not suspended.
The “Russian World”
The Russian propaganda offensive also included a process of mimesis which consisted of copying Western soft power initiatives. In 2007, Putin established the Russian World Foundation (Russkii Mir), an agency led by Viacheslav Nikonov, a grandson of Viacheslav Molotov. The official goal of this agency was to defend the interests of Russian speakers outside Russia and to promote Russian culture and language abroad. At the beginning, the agency targeted the former Soviet republics, but today its strategic scope is truly global. Pretending to be a cultural organization, similar to the British Council, the Alliance Française, or the German Goethe Institut, it has a clear political task: to mobilize Russian speakers all over the world to support the Kremlin’s policies. Together with the Russian aid fund Rossotrudnichestvo, founded in 2008, the agency opened Russian Centers at foreign universities. In 2015, there were approximately 70 such centers in the United States, 14 in France, 11 in Germany, and 13 in Britain. Branches of the Chinese Confucius Institute established at university campuses served as a model for the Russians. Arthur Waldron, a Lauder Professor of International Relations at the University of Pennsylvania, who refused to open such a branch, has stated: “Once you have a Confucius Institute on campus, you have a second source of opinions and authority that is ultimately answerable to the Chinese Communist Party and which is not subject to scholarly review.”23 Subjects, such as the Dalai Lama, Tiananmen, Tibet, Taiwan, the repression of the Uighurs, and the democracy movement in Hong Kong, would be declared off limits. It is clear that similar objections can be made against the opening of Russian Centers at European and American universities. These are not independent cultural or scientific institutes, but tools in the hands of a revisionist power.
Financing Political Parties
The Russian information war intends not only to influence Western public opinion, Western elites’ opinions, and students at Western universities, but also—more directly—governments and political parties. The Kremlin could here fall back on an old tradition, developed during the Soviet era. A famous example is the case of Günter Guillaume, the Stasi’s agent who became a close aide to German chancellor Willy Brandt.24 In his memoirs, Brandt would later write: “In hindsight, I accepted advice that I certainly should not have accepted.”25 KGB practices of planting agents of influence abroad have survived the demise of the Soviet Union, being extremely useful under Putin.
The arrest of a Russian spy ring by the FBI in the United States in June 2010 seemed to be an echo of the Cold War, reminding the world of Soviet practices. A team of eleven illegals with fake names and false passports resided in the United States for many years, living normal lives. Their mission was to gather information and to infiltrate circles close to the government. The calculations were simple: although not every “sleeper” would become a Guillaume, there was a chance that at least a few of them would succeed.
To influence foreign governments of Western countries, the Russians also used more conventional ways, such as bribing politicians and political parties. For instance, in 2004, the Lithuanian president Roland Paksas was removed from office after having accepted $400,000 from Mr. Yurii Borisov, a Russian businessman who, according to the Economist, was linked to the Russian security services. Another case is that of the Centre Party in Estonia, an opposition party whose members are mainly Russian speakers. Its leader, Edgar Savisaar, at that time mayor of Tallinn, was accused by the Kapo, the Estonian intelligence service, of having asked for 1.5 million euros from Russia for his party.
In addition, there is ample evidence to suggest that in the Czech Republic, President Miloš Zeman received money for his presidential campaign from the Russian firm Lukoil. In 2014, in France the extreme right party Front National received a loan of 8 million euros from the First Czech Russian Bank. In 2016, it asked for an additional loan of 27 million euros. In November 2014 the German Bild reported about a dubious gold business transaction: the Eurosceptic German party Allianz für Deutschland (AfD) apparently bought cheap gold from Russia, which the party later resold for the world market price. Obviously, an exchange of favors and services between the Russian Federation and the AfD was guaranteed 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
