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Russia has intensified its online efforts to derail military funding for Ukraine in the United States and Europe, largely by using harder-to-trace technologies to amplify arguments for isolationism ahead of the U.S. elections, according to disinformation experts and intelligence assessments.<\/p>\n
In recent days, intelligence agencies have warned that Russia has found better ways to hide its influence operations, and the Treasury Department issued sanctions<\/a> last week against two Russian companies that it said supported the Kremlin\u2019s campaign.<\/p>\n The stepped-up operations, run by aides to President Vladimir V. Putin and Russian military intelligence agencies, come at a critical moment 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.<\/p>\n Russian operatives are laying the groundwork for what could be a stronger push to support candidates who oppose aiding Ukraine, or who call for pulling the United States back from NATO and other alliances, U.S. officials and independent researchers say.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Investigators say that firms working in the \u201cDoppelg\u00e4nger\u201d network \u2014 and Russian intelligence agencies duplicating the tactics \u2014 are using the techniques to replicate and distort legitimate news sites in order to undermine continued aid to Ukraine.<\/p>\n These techniques are subtle and far more skillful than what Russia attempted in 2016, when it made up Facebook posts or tweets in the names of nonexistent Americans, and used them to fuel protests over immigration or other hot-button issues.<\/p>\n The loosely linked \u201cDoppelg\u00e4nger\u201d creates fake versions of real news websites in the United States, Israel, Germany and Japan, among other countries. It often promotes websites previously associated with Russia\u2019s military intelligence agency, known as the G.R.U.<\/p>\n The result is that much of the original speech is First Amendment-protected \u2014 say a member of Congress declaring that resources being sent to Ukraine should instead be used to patrol the southern border of the United States. But the amplification is engineered in Russia or by Russian influencers.<\/p>\n Mr. Putin has given responsibility for a growing number of influence operations to a key lieutenant, Sergei Kiriyenko, according to American and European officials. The Treasury Department last Wednesday imposed sanctions on people associated with Mr. Kiriyenko\u2019s operations.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Researchers at Alethea, an anti-disinformation company, have identified a group affiliated with the G.R.U. that is using hard-to-detect techniques to spread similar messages on social media. A report by Alethea echoed a recent assessment by American intelligence agencies that said Russia would continue to \u201cbetter hide their hand\u201d while conducting influence operations.<\/p>\n \u201cThe network demonstrates an evolution of Russian objectives with their information operations,\u201d Lisa Kaplan, the firm\u2019s founder and chief executive, said in an interview. \u201cWhere the Russians previously sought to sow chaos, now they appear to be singularly focused on influencing democracies to elect candidates that do not support sending aid to Ukraine \u2014 which in turn supports isolationist, protectionist candidates and policies.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThis long-term strategy, if effective, would result in reduced support for Ukraine globally,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n American officials note, however, that these techniques make identifying \u2014 and calling out \u2014 Russian operations particularly difficult. <\/p>\n In the 2016 election, the Internet Research Agency, a Russian troll farm that waged information warfare against the United States, spewed out thousands of social media posts, pretending they were from Americans. By the 2020 election, the National Security Agency learned how to disrupt the operations inside Russia.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Moscow moved to shut down the Internet Research Agency after its founder, Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, staged a short-lived mutiny against the Russian military last year. People affiliated with the group remain active. But U.S. officials and experts say it is no longer the main Russian influence effort.<\/p>\n \u201cThe Internet Research Agency in many ways was just a place holder for what became a much more expansive information effort in traditional media and social media,\u201d said Clint Watts, the general manager of Microsoft\u2019s Threat Analysis Center.<\/p>\n The latest efforts are more directly controlled by the Kremlin. Before the Treasury sanctions last week, the State Department outlined what it said were efforts by the two Russian companies<\/a>, the Social Design Agency, a public relations company, and Structura National Technologies, an information technology firm, to create disinformation campaigns.<\/p>\n American intelligence agencies do not believe the Kremlin has begun its full-bore influence effort. Mr. Putin will probably shift at some point from the anti-Ukraine messaging to influence operations that more directly support the candidacy of former President Donald J. Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Mr. Putin is not likely to order a major effort in the presidential election until after the party conventions this summer, officials and experts said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cWhat we\u2019ve observed is the Russians, and a number of other adversarial countries, thinking about how and when they might influence the election,\u201d said Jim Himes, Democrat of Connecticut and a senior member of the House Intelligence Committee.<\/p>\n