Russia is conducting a large-scale campaign to discredit Ukraine to halt US assistance to Kyiv, as reported by The Washington Post. Kremlin’s political strategists have created a network of anti-Ukrainian internet trolls.
“When President Biden proposed an additional $24 billion in supplemental funding for Ukraine in August, Moscow spin doctors working for the Kremlin were ready to try to undermine public support for the bill, internal Kremlin documents show,” journalists write, citing documents from EU intelligence.
Intelligence has scrutinized over a hundred internal communication documents among those involved in the disinformation campaign from May 2022 to August 2023.
“In an ongoing campaign that seeks to influence congressional and other political debates to stoke anti-Ukraine sentiment, Kremlin-linked political strategists and trolls have written thousands of fabricated news articles, social media posts and comments that promote American isolationism, stir fear over the United States’ border security and attempt to amplify US economic and racial tensions,” the text states.
The document metadata reveals that individuals from the Social Design Agency, a Moscow PR firm led by Ilya Gambashidze, authored the texts. In March, the US sanctioned Gambashidze for participating in “a persistent foreign malign influence campaign” directed at the Kremlin.
“One of the political strategists, for instance, instructed a troll farm employee working for his firm to write a comment of “no more than 200 characters in the name of a resident of a suburb of a major city.” The strategist suggested that this fictitious American “doesn’t support the military aid that the U.S. 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 U.S. toward collapse.”,” the text states. Messages accusing the Ukrainian government of theft and selling Western weapons were also promoted.
Russia began seriously undermining American support for Ukraine last January, journalists write. Republicans said that the Kremlin’s priority is to stop arms supplies, so they are doing everything possible for this. Meanwhile, Russia is also working in France and Germany to weaken support for Kyiv and destabilize the situation in Ukraine itself, according to The Washington Post.
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