The State Department’s Global Engagement Center periodically produces reports exposing clandestine information operations around the world. Their latest breaks new ground, not only accusing RT, the Russian state news agency (formerly known as Russia Today) of conspiring with the Russian government to influence the Moldovan election, but of conspiring to foment unrest in Moldova, “likely with the specific aim of causing protests to turn violent.” RT, their reports states, is “aware of and prepared to assist Russia’s plans to incite protests should the election not result in a Russia-preferred candidate winning the presidency.”
Nor does the story end there. In recent months, RT is also said to have organized schemes to purchase weapons for the Russian military, using fake crowd-funding websites; to have deployed new cyber capabilities to spread disinformation; and to have actively run covert information campaigns in Germany, France, Argentina, and across Africa. You can read the whole account here, on their website.
Secrecy is the new element. RT has long been an open source of Russian propaganda. Now it is engaged in something I describe in my recent book, Autocracy Inc : information laundering. This is the creation of entire media outlets, planned and organized in Russia, that don’t necessarily advertise themselves as Russian at all.
Some of this story won’t surprise anyone who has followed the saga of Tenet Media, a Tennessee-based far-right media company who, as I wrote in the Atlantic a couple of days ago, allegedly received nearly $10 million over the course of a year from RT—money “laundered through a network of foreign shell entities,” including companies in Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, the Czech Republic, and Hungary. RT was interested in supporting Tenet Media’s work and shaping the messages in its videos, including, for example, a video that accused the Ukrainians of carrying out a terrorist attack at a Moscow shopping mall, even though the Islamic State had already taken responsibility.
The indictment makes clear that the influencers must have had a pretty good idea where the money was coming from:
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Open Letters, from Anne Applebaum to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.