Russia has stepped up its online efforts to derail military funding for Ukraine in the United States and Europe, largely by using harder-to-detect technologies to bolster arguments for isolationism ahead of the US election, disinformation experts and estimates say information.
In recent days, intelligence agencies have warned that Russia has found better ways to hide its influence operations, and the Treasury Department issued sanctions last week against two Russian companies it said supported the Kremlin’s campaign.
The stepped-up operations, conducted by aides to President Vladimir V. Putin and Russian military intelligence, come at a critical time in the debate in the United States over support for Ukraine in its war against Russia. While opposition to additional aid may have started without Russian influence, the Kremlin now sees an opportunity.
Russian operatives are laying the groundwork for a stronger push to support candidates who oppose aid to Ukraine or who call for the United States to withdraw from NATO and other alliances, US officials and independent researchers say.
Investigators say companies working on the “Doppelgänger” network — and Russian intelligence agencies copying the tactics — are using the techniques to replicate and distort legitimate news sites in order to undermine ongoing aid to Ukraine.
These techniques are subtle and far more skillful than what Russia attempted in 2016, when it created Facebook posts or tweets with the names of non-existent Americans and used them to fuel protests about immigration or other serious issues.
The loosely linked “Doppelgänger” creates fake versions of real news websites in the United States, Israel, Germany and Japan, among other countries. It often promotes websites previously linked to Russia’s military intelligence agency, known as the GRU
The result is that much of the original speech is protected by the First Amendment — says a member of Congress who says that resources sent to Ukraine should be used to patrol the United States’ southern border. But the aid is designed in Russia or by Russian influence.
Mr. Putin has delegated responsibility for a growing number of influence operations to a key lieutenant, Sergei Kiriyenko, according to US and European officials. The Finance Ministry last Wednesday imposed sanctions on people associated with Mr. Kiriyenko’s businesses.
Researchers at Alethea, an anti-disinformation firm, have identified a group linked to the GRU using sophisticated techniques to spread similar messages on social media. An Alethea report echoed a recent assessment by US intelligence agencies that said Russia would continue to “hide its hand better” while conducting influence operations.
“The network demonstrates an evolution of Russian targets with their intelligence operations,” Lisa Kaplan, the company’s founder and chief executive, said in an interview. “Where the Russians previously sought to sow chaos, they now appear to be focused solely on influencing democracies to elect candidates who do not support the aid mission to Ukraine — which in turn supports isolationist, protectionist candidates and policies.”
“This long-term strategy, if effective, will lead to reduced support for Ukraine worldwide,” he said.
U.S. officials note, however, that these techniques make it particularly difficult to trace — and take down — Russian operations.
In the 2016 election, the Internet Research Agency, a Russian troll farm waging an intelligence war against the United States, broadcast thousands of social media posts pretending to be from Americans. By the 2020 election, the National Security Agency had learned how to disrupt operations inside Russia.
Moscow moved to shut down the Internet Research Service after its founder, Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, staged a short-lived mutiny against the Russian military last year. People connected to the group remain active. But U.S. officials and experts say it is no longer Russia’s primary influence effort.
“The Internet Research Service in many ways was just a placeholder for what became a much more extensive outreach effort in traditional media and social media,” said Clint Watts, general manager of Microsoft’s Threat Analysis Center.
The latter efforts are more directly controlled by the Kremlin. Before the Treasury Department sanctions last week, the State Department described efforts by two Russian companies, the Social Design Agency, a public relations firm, and Structura National Technologies, an information technology firm, to create disinformation campaigns.
US intelligence agencies do not believe the Kremlin has begun its full influence effort. Mr. Putin will likely shift at some point from anti-Ukraine messaging to influence businesses that more directly support the candidacy of former President Donald J. Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee.
Mr. Putin is not likely to mount a major presidential bid until after party conventions this summer, officials and experts said.
“What we’ve seen is that the Russians, and a number of other adversary countries, are thinking about how and when they could influence the election,” said Jim Himes, D-Connecticut and senior member of the House Intelligence Committee.
Mr Putin argues that the United States has tried to influence Russian politics, including in this month’s presidential election, in which he was unsurprisingly re-elected by a landslide. It is not clear how much Mr. Putin views the US sanctions imposed after the death of opposition leader Alexei A. Navalny as a form of interference in his politics.
“Putin believes in his heart that we are interfering in his election,” Mr. Himes said. “Things like reaching out to dissident groups or amplifying Navalny’s message. Putin sees all this as interference on the part of the US. He sees things like senators and congressmen criticizing his election as interference in the election.”
Russian activity that captures American attention is not limited to influence operations. Russia’s SVR, the intelligence agency that was most active in the 2016 election and that was behind the “SolarWinds” hack that gained access to several government agencies and major US companies, is engaged in a months-long attack on Microsoft. The effort appears to be aimed at gaining access to emails and corporate data.
And US officials say ransomware attacks continue to increase from Russian soil.
A wave of such attacks led President Biden and Mr. Putin to the only summit between the leaders in 2021. An effort to work together to curb those attacks collapsed as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine began the following year. Today, hacking campaigns generate millions of dollars for criminal groups, often serving the Kremlin’s agenda to disrupt American health care, government services, and utilities.
In its annual threat assessment, intelligence agencies said Russia is trying to sow discord between voters in the United States and its allies around the world, and that the war in Ukraine “will continue to feature heavily in its messaging.”
“Moscow sees US elections as opportunities and has conducted influence operations for decades,” the intelligence report said. “Russia is considering how the 2024 US election results could affect Western support for Ukraine and will likely try to influence the election in ways that better support its interests and goals.”
Russia is likely to be the most active foreign power seeking to influence the presidential election, although China and Iran have also stepped up their efforts, Mr. Himes said.
“It’s important to remember that the nature of election meddling is very different when you’re talking about the Russians,” Mr. Himes said. “The Russians are orders of magnitude more intense and more focused on what we’ve seen than the Chinese, the Iranians and others.”
After the 2016 vote, Democrats and Republicans hotly debated whether Mr. Putin simply wanted to create chaos in the American electorate or actively supported Mr. Trump. Intelligence agencies concluded in this election and in 2020 that Russia tried to boost Mr. Trump.
Intelligence agencies believe the Russian government is again favoring the election of Mr. Trump, largely because of his skepticism about aid to Ukraine. But how explicitly Russia’s influence operations will support Mr. Trump or discredit Mr. Biden is unknown, according to U.S. officials.
