Russian disinformation

• 1. Introduction

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  Russian disinformation campaigns have reached into nearly every corner of the modern world, from American social media feeds to African elections to European news cycles. In late 2017, Facebook estimated that as many as 126 million of its users had seen content produced by Russian disinformation operations. Twitter found 36,000 Russian bots spreading election-related tweets in 2016 alone. These numbers hint at something vast and deliberate. How did this machine get built? Who runs it? And what does Russia actually want from it?

• 2. Roots in Soviet Active Measures

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  During the Cold War, the Soviet Union institutionalized propaganda and disinformation as what officials called "active measures" directed against the populations of Western nations. When Boris Yeltsin became Russia's first post-Soviet president, his government treated disinformation as a topic of open discussion, using it to distance the new Russia from its Soviet predecessor. That openness did not last. Under Vladimir Putin, who consolidated power after 2000, disinformation shifted from embarrassing legacy to operational tool. The 2008 Russian invasion of Georgia marked a turning point; observers noticed an intensification in the use of coordinated false narratives alongside military force. Analysts began calling the resulting style of propaganda a "firehose of falsehood" because it relied on a high volume of channels and a willingness to spread outright contradictions without concern for consistency. Unlike Soviet-era methods, the new approach made heavy use of the internet, social media, and accounts posing as amateur journalists.

• 3. The Internet Research Agency

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  After the 2011-2013 Russian protests, which figures including Pussy Riot, Anton Nossik, and Alexei Navalny helped organize via Facebook, Twitter, and LiveJournal, Vyacheslav Volodin was tasked with countering the online opposition. Volodin, then Deputy Prime Minister, turned to a surveillance system called Prisma that monitored more than 60 million feeds in real time. That effort eventually gave rise to the Internet Research Agency, based in St. Petersburg. Twelve of the thirteen Russian nationals indicted by Robert Mueller for conspiracy to interfere in the 2016 United States presidential election were IRA employees. By the 2020 election cycle, the IRA had evolved its tactics considerably. To evade detection, it recruited activists from a human-rights-focused Ghanaian NGO to target Black communities in the United States. It also spread content across a wider range of platforms, not only Facebook and Twitter but also Tumblr, WordPress, and Medium. Evidence emerged that the IRA had recruited American journalists to write articles critical of then-presidential candidate Joe Biden.

• 4. Strategic Architecture

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  The Russian Institute for Strategic Studies, known by the acronyms RISI, RISS, or RISY, played a central role in both the 2016 and 2020 United States election interference efforts. In 2009, RISI was placed under direct control of the Russian president; its director Leonid Reshetnikov met with Putin regularly. During the 2016 election, Reshetnikov headed RISI; Mikhail Fradkov led it during 2020. The institute's documented plans included supporting the Trump campaign, disrupting the Clinton campaign, and, if Trump appeared likely to lose, shifting focus to amplifying claims of voter fraud in order to undermine confidence in the American electoral system itself. George Papadopoulos met several times with Panos Kammenos, who had close ties to Russian intelligence and the Kremlin. In November 2014, Kammenos's Athens-based Institute of Geopolitical Studies signed a memorandum of understanding with Reshetnikov. In September 2024, the United States Justice Department asserted that Kremlin official Sergey Kiriyenko had created roughly 30 internet domains to spread disinformation, including on Elon Musk's platform X. In October 2024, the Wall Street Journal reported that Musk had been in contact with both Kiriyenko and Putin, a fact confirmed by Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov.

• 5. Platforms and Proxies

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  Alongside the troll farms and bots, Russia built a layer of state-sponsored media intended to function like legitimate outlets. RT, formerly known as Russia Today, and the Sputnik news agency were created specifically to reach Western audiences on Western terms. Wilhelm Unge, spokesman for the Swedish Security Service, described the range of tools in 2016 as covering "everything from Internet trolls to propaganda and misinformation spread by media companies like RT and Sputnik." RT tends to frame global problems as the fault of Western countries. In 2020, the United States State Department identified several websites it called proxy sites used by Russian state actors to create and amplify false narratives; these included the Strategic Culture Foundation, New Eastern Outlook, a Crimea-based outlet called NewsFront, and SouthFront, described as targeting military enthusiasts, veterans, and conspiracy theorists. More recently, Russia's Pravda network has seeded content designed to function as training data for large language models, with the goal of shaping what popular chatbots say. In October 2019, Facebook removed accounts linked to Yevgeny Prigozhin that had been used to interfere in African political affairs. Cameron Hudson of the Atlantic Council's Africa Center described Russia's goal there as achieving Cold War-level geopolitical presence at a fraction of the cost, using disinformation instead of troops.

• 6. Conservative Media and Amplification

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  Fox News became an involuntary conduit for Russian messaging during the Russo-Ukrainian War. Russia's state channel Russia-1 aired Tucker Carlson's interview with retired Colonel Doug Macgregor, who favored Russia, and used it as a demoralization tool directed at Ukraine. Russia-1 also broadcast Carlson's interview with Tulsi Gabbard, in which Gabbard argued that President Biden could prevent war by guaranteeing Ukraine would never join NATO. Crucially, Russia-1 edited out the portion of Gabbard's remarks where she said NATO membership for Ukraine was "highly, highly unlikely anyway." A Fox News internal report titled Ukraine, Disinformation, and the Trump Administration named Lev Parnas, Igor Fruman, Yuriy Lutsenko, John Solomon, Dmytro Firtash, Victoria Toensing, and Joe diGenova as indispensable figures in collecting and domestically publishing elements of a disinformation campaign. Fox News founding producer and news director John Hanick, who worked at the network from 1996 to 2011, was arrested in London on the 3rd of February 2022 for violating United States sanctions against Russian oligarch Konstantin Malofeev; Hanick became the first person criminally indicted for such a violation during the Russo-Ukrainian war. Brian Murphy, acting intelligence chief at the Department of Homeland Security from March 2018 until August 2020, stated that he had been instructed to stop reporting on Russian interference and redirect assessments toward China and Iran instead.

• 7. Pushback and Inoculation

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  NATO established a facility in Latvia specifically to monitor and counter Russian disinformation. In March 2015, European heads of state agreed to create the European External Action Service East Stratcom Task Force, which publishes weekly reports on its website EU vs Disinfo. Between September 2015 and November 2017, the site and its partners identified and debunked more than 3,500 pro-Kremlin disinformation cases. The United States government established the Global Engagement Center within the State Department in 2016 to counter foreign propaganda. Research has also tested psychological defenses. One study examined whether inoculation techniques could help people of Russian descent living in the West resist pro-Kremlin narratives; it found that having a Russian identity and exposure to Russian-language media correlated with greater susceptibility. The inoculation treatment improved participants' ability to recognize disinformation, led them to view it as less credible, heightened their sense of Russia's responsibility for the war in Ukraine, and strengthened their solidarity with Ukraine. In December 2024, the European Union proposed sanctions against more than a dozen individuals and three entities for their roles in Russian disinformation and hybrid operations, signaling that the legal and institutional response was still actively expanding.