Russia’s President Vladimir Putin attends a news conference after trilateral meeting with Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev and Armenia’s Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan in Sochi, Russia October 31, 2022.
Sergey Bobylev | Sputnik | via Reuters
Russia conducted malign influence operations within the 2022 U.S. midterm elections and is using increasingly clandestine means to “penetrate the Western information environment,” the U.S. intelligence community said in a latest report Wednesday.
Moscow may even work to “strengthen ties” to Americans in media and politics as it really works to perform “future influence operations,” the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said in the newest edition of its annual assessment of worldwide threats to U.S. national security.
The 2023 report got here 4 months after probably the most recent midterm elections, where concerns about Russian influence efforts were more muted as compared with the 2 previous presidential election cycles in 2016 and 2020.
The intelligence community found that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign within the 2016 election with a “clear preference” for then-candidate Donald Trump, who would go on to win that race.
Trump — who during that campaign had called on Russia to seek out his then-rival Hillary Clinton’s emails — later questioned whether Russia interfered within the 2016 election. During a gathering with Putin in 2018, Trump indicated that he believed the Russian leader’s claim that the Kremlin didn’t meddle within the 2016 race — essentially siding with Putin’s stance over his own intelligence community’s assessment. Trump later backtracked on those remarks.
Ahead of last November’s midterms, researchers reportedly identified Russian efforts to interfere by utilizing social media accounts posing as Americans to stoke partisan anger and undermine trust within the electoral process. The FBI and the Department of Justice’s cybersecurity agency had warned ahead of the midterms that foreign actors were more likely to try to spread disinformation before and after Election Day.
The office, which oversees the nation’s 18 intelligence agencies, added that this latest warning about Russian election meddling was starker and more certain than in its previous report.
In 2022, for example, the office determined that Russia “almost definitely” sees U.S. elections as opportunities for malign influence to influence its foreign policy goals. Moscow may even “probably” attempt to cultivate relationships with U.S. figures in politics and the media “in hopes of developing vectors for future influence operations,” it said at the moment.
Within the 2023 edition, the agency dropped the words “almost definitely” and “probably” from its assessment.
The report added, “Russia’s influence actors have adapted their efforts to increasingly hide their hand,” using a “vast ecosystem of Russian proxy web sites, individuals, and organizations that seem like independent news sources.”
Through creating original content or seizing on preexisting divisive discourse, Moscow “intensifies that content to further penetrate the Western information environment,” in accordance with the assessment. “These activities can include disseminating false content and amplifying information perceived as useful to Russian influence efforts or conspiracy theories.”
Russia’s already-tense relations with the U.S. and other Western powers have been hugely strained by the country’s invasion of Ukraine. The intelligence community warned in its threat assessment that Russia, which holds the world’s largest stockpile of nuclear weapons, is constant to develop long-range nuclear-capable missiles.
