Journal of Democracy, Volume 26, Number 4, October 2015, pp. 40-50
(Article)
DOI: 10.1353/jod.2015.0074
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The Kremlin’s
Information War
Peter Pomerantsev
Peter Pomerantsev, senior fellow at the Legatum Institute Transitions
Forum, writes extensively on twenty-first-century propaganda.
He is the author of Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The
Surreal Heart of the New Russia (2014).
“If Stalin was 80 percent violence and 20 percent propaganda,” Russian
journalism professor Igor Yakovenko once told me, “then Putin is
80 percent propaganda and 20 percent violence.” Media are crucial to
Vladimir Putin’s rule. When he was first appointed prime minister in
the late 1990s, Putin was considered by many to be a bland nobody with
few political prospects. But after a war in Chechnya and a massive TVmakeover
that recast him as a strong military leader, Putin managed to
win the 2000 presidential election and later cement his hold on power.
One of his first moves after becoming president was to capture television
and put it under his direct control. Russia’s media moguls—both
those who had supported Putin’s rise and those who had opposed him—
were arrested or forced into exile.
Russian television had begun spinning political pseudorealities as
early as 1996, when oligarchs such as Vladimir Gusinsky and Boris
Berezovsky helped to keep President Boris Yeltsin in power by broadcasting
claims that the candidates running against him were part of a fascist-communist
menace. Yet for most of the 1990s, Russia’s oligarchs
opposed one another, creating a sort of perverse system of checks and
balances among the various campaigns of disinformation. With power
centralized under Putin, however, the Kremlin could run both television
and politics like one vast scripted reality show.
At the center of the show was the president himself: Putin bare-chested,
riding on a horse; Putin stroking tigers; Putin in leather, riding a Harley.
The staged images of Putin as B-movie hunk were used to cultivate
his image as superhero-czar and to set him above the fray of real politics
(a regular set piece on Russian news has Putin scolding government
Journal of Democracy Volume 26, Number 4 October 2015
© 2015 National Endowment for Democracy and Johns Hopkins University Press
Authoritarianism Goes Global (II)
41Peter Pomerantsev
ministers and regional governors for failing the country). From 1999
to 2011, the man running this show was Vladislav Surkov. Officially
the deputy head of the presidential administration, Surkov was actually
in charge of everything from the arts to religion to political parties and
civil society. Every Friday, Surkov met with the heads of the major news
channels to tell them what the week’s main stories should be and which
political figures would be allowed on television.
This system has only become more stringent since the start of the war
with Ukraine in 2014. According to “Messages of Russian TV: Monitoring
Report 2015,” an EU-funded study of Russian news channels conducted
by NGOs from seven countries, the president and government
receive mainly positive or neutral coverage from Kremlin-controlled
channels, while opposition members are covered only rarely and usually
negatively. The study reports that in March 2015 almost 32 percent of
Channel One’s coverage was devoted to Ukraine, compared to just 12.7
percent devoted to domestic politics, 4 percent to the economy, and 1.3
percent to social issues.1
Television news has thus become grand theater, juxtaposing the
“chaos in Ukraine” with Putin-guaranteed stability in Russia. Russian
news has featured fake televisions items that were later exposed by journalists—for
example, staged interviews with Russian “victims” (who
were really actors) of alleged atrocities by Ukrainian “fascists,”2
and
an invented tale about a child being crucified by Ukrainian forces.3
A
leading Russia media-studies professor told a European Endowment for
Democracy project funded by the Dutch and Latvian governments that
“the Kremlin has blurred the line between fact and fiction” with such
efforts, “making news and current affairs [seem] like an engaging, sensationalist
drama.”
Surkov and his successors have run domestic politics much as
they have television, turning the political process into pure spectacle.
Surkov even had direct telephone lines to “opposition” politicians, telling
them what to say and where and when to say it—always with the
goal of making Putin look better by contrast. The Russian parliament
thus became a place of choreographed speechmaking: “The Duma is
not a place for debate,” Duma speaker Boris Gryzlov declared in 2003.
Surkov likewise controlled civil society, creating tame NGOs, cultivating
liberal elites, and even sponsoring radical modern-art festivals,
while simultaneously fostering nationalist youth movements such as
Nashi that beat up modern-art curators and labeled liberals as traitors.
This strategy gave the Kremlin ownership of all forms of discourse,
allowing it to spin them to its own advantage and ultimately to render
them toothless and absurd.
Under Surkov’s successor, Vyaceshlav Volodin, the discourse has
been ratcheted up: Liberals are now described as a dangerous “fifth
column,” and the imperialist far right has been mobilized as a violent
42 Journal of Democracy
avant-garde. But the Kremlin still guides all the narratives, allowing it
to frame any argument in the way that best suits its needs at any given
time, for any given situation. Thus political talk shows regularly feature
nationalists attacking Kremlin-sanctioned liberals. This is what Andrew
Wilson calls the “highly developed industry of political manipulation,”
which in the post-Soviet world is commonly known as “political tech-
nology.”4
Are Russians buying the Kremlin’s narrative? This might be the
wrong question. As Václav Havel wrote in “The Power of the Powerless,”
the Soviet bloc was not sustained by fervent belief in the system,
but by acquiescence in a common discourse that coopted the population—a
case of propaganda signaling what was “correct” behavior
rather than achieving ideological indoctrination. Likewise, the point of
Putin’s “managed democracy” is not to convince anyone that Russian
democracy is real, but to send a message to the population about how
they should behave. Russia watchers are often puzzled by a seeming
contradiction: Why does Putin, who is extremely popular, rig elections,
when he would most likely win them anyway? Would he not gain more
credibility by staging a closely fought runoff, “proving” that he was
democratically elected? As Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes explain,
these questions misunderstand the role of presidential elections in Rus-
sia.5
Their purpose is to burnish the image of Putin as untouchable, an
image that would only be tarnished by serious competition.
The Kremlin wants to show that it has total control over the script. This
principle is also behind the regime’s use of show trials. The trials of independent-minded
oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky and opposition leader
Alexei Navalny both were characterized by absurdity—Khodorkovsky
was accused of having stolen oil from himself, and Navalny allegedly
took part in corrupt business deals from which he made no profit. In both
cases, the sentencing judge used the testimony of defense witnesses as
proof of guilt. But this absurdity is the point—the Kremlin can say “black
is white” and “white is black,” and no one can contradict it.
The underlying goal of the Kremlin’s propaganda is to engender cynicism
in the population. Cynicism is useful to the state: When people
stop trusting any institutions or having any firmly held values, they can
easily accept a conspiratorial vision of the world. The state-television
channels actively encourage such a vision—for example, by finding the
hidden hand of the CIA behind all the world’s prodemocracy movements.
In showing that democracy is so easily manipulated, that everyone
and everything is for sale, the Kremlin is dashing people’s hopes for
the possibility of an alternative politics while simultaneously insisting
that the West is just as corrupt as Russia.
The Kremlin peddles conspiracy theories to get this point across. Particularly
noteworthy in this regard is RTR’s weekly news show Vesti
Nedeli, hosted by Dmitry Kiselev, head of the new Rossiya Sevodnya
43Peter Pomerantsev
(Russia Today) news agency.6
On the show, Kiselev offers a mash-up
of truths assembled and interpreted in ways that rewrite reality: For example,
a Swedish children’s TV show about sex education must be a
sign that Europe is mired in sexual perversion; and the fact that Navalny
spent time at Yale must mean that he is working for the United States.
Similarly, the online videos “Why America Needs a Big War in Europe”
and “What Awaits Russia If Putin Puts Troops in Ukraine” purportedly
reveal baroque conspiracies in which the Russian nationalists who are
agitating for war in Ukraine turn out to be working for the West, which
wants Russia to be pulled into war in the Donbas.7
This is not classic
“agitational propaganda”; rather, it aims at producing apathy, distrust,
and a vague sense of paranoia.
A final key element in the regime’s continued control is corruption,
which helps to keep the current vertical governing structure intact. By doling
out financial favors and preferential treatment, the president keeps his
cronies and other oligarchs in line. Preparations for the Sochi Olympics,
which straddled the presidencies of Dmitri Medvedev and Putin, provide
a good example. While Medvedev was president, “his” oligarchs were
granted the top positions and won the most lucrative contracts. When Putin
became president again in 2012, Medvedev’s people were pushed out
and Putin’s oligarchs reclaimed the favors and top spots.
Courting the Left and the Right
The Kremlin uses this mix of political technology, fluid ideology, and
corruption not only domestically but also in managing foreign relations.
During the Cold War, the Kremlin cultivated ties mainly with ideologically
similar leftist groups. Today, the Kremlin forges alliances with and
funds groups on both the left and the right: European right-wing nationalists
are seduced by Russia’s anti-EU message; Europe’s far left is enticed
by the prospect of fighting U.S. hegemony; and U.S. religious conservatives
are attracted to the Kremlin’s stance against homosexuality. The
Kremlin’s fluid use of ideology allows it to ally with an array of actors
and to promote a range of principles that foster divisions within the West.
The Kremlin retains deep institutional ties to former and current communist
parties throughout Eastern Europe. Ukraine even banned its communist
party, believing it to be a proxy for the Kremlin. The Left party
(Die Linke) in Germany also has been outspoken in its defense of Russian
positions. According to NATO, Russia has also managed to manipulate
green movements by funding European ecological groups whose antifracking
agendas coincide with the Kremlin’s desire to keep Europe dependent
on Russian gas.8
Yet at home, the Kremlin is clamping down on
anticapitalist leftist groups and arresting ecological activists.
On the right, the Kremlin has built alliances with radical social conservatives
and anti-EU nationalists. Right-wing political figures and
44 Journal of Democracy
groups on both sides of the Atlantic—from U.S. conservative columnist
Patrick Buchanan to French right-nationalist leader Marine Le Pen
(whose party has received funds from Moscow9
), to Britain’s anti-EU
politician Nigel Farage, to Hungary’s anti-Semitic Jobbik party, to the
U.S.-based anti-LGBT coalition World Congress of Families—have
proclaimed their admiration for Putin, in turn receiving plenty of airtime
on Russian-controlled airwaves.10
Far-right activists, white supremacists,
neo-Nazis, and anti-Semites from across Europe and the United
States have appeared with Kremlin-connected ideologues at conferences
in Europe, while Kremlin advisors have presented lectures to European
and U.S. far-right parties in Yalta.11
In addition to ideological appeals, the Kremlin also wields financial
incentives to draw in allies. For example, Jörg Haider, the now-deceased
leader of the far-right Freedom Party of Austria, once accepted €900,000
in return for helping Russian businessmen to secure their residency permits.
According to Anton Shekhovtsov, “Putin’s Russia cooperates with
European far right parties partly because the latter help Russian political
and business elites worm into the West economically, politically and
socially, and . . . for them, the far right’s racism and ultra-conservatism
are less important [than its] corruptibility.”12
Shekhovtsov also notes that the financial transactions do not necessarily
need to be direct bribes. Businesspeople associated with far-right
movements can also be given preferential treatment when dealing in
Russia in return for their political support. For example, one of the first
European businessmen to do business in Crimea after its annexation by
Russia was Frenchman Philippe de Villiers, leader of the Euroskeptic
party Movement for France, who will build theme parks in Moscow and
Crimea.13
According to Shekhovtsov, Putin’s cooperation with Europe’s
far right is driven only by the desire to achieve his economic and political
aims, not by ideological kinship.14
Despite its relative weakness, the Kremlin has learned the art of what
Nicu Popescu and Mark Leonard call “asymmetric interdependence”—
advancing Russia’s interests by making other states reliant on its money,
markets, and trade. Energy is often the Kremlin’s trump card. A Swedish
Defense Agency study found that, between 1992 and 2006, Russia
cut off energy to countries in Central and Eastern Europe 55 times. Officially,
Russia claimed these cutoffs were caused by technical problems.
Yet they almost always happened when there was an election that Russia
wanted to influence or an energy deal that it wanted to promote.15
Controlling the Message
Russia’s international television broadcaster, RT, provides an international
forum for uniting the various groups that the Kremlin works with.
According to its own statistics, the channel now reaches 600 million peo-
45Peter Pomerantsev
ple globally and 3 million hotel rooms across the world. It boasts of having
a billion hits online, making it one of YouTube’s most popular news channels.
It has an enormous budget (believed to be more than US$300 million),
and broadcasts in Arabic, English, German, and Spanish. Although
RT’s actual viewership is far lower than what it claims and its billion hits
are not necessarily for political programs,16
the channel’s programming is
worth examining for what it reveals about the Kremlin’s overall thinking.
Programming about Russia makes up only a small part of RT’s output.
Its schedule focuses on what it calls “other” or “unreported” news,
which is the network’s special niche. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange
has had a show on RT, as has left-wing Scottish politician George Galloway.
Leftist U.S. political theorist and linguist Noam Chomsky is a frequent
guest. The channel devotes generous attention to 9/11 conspiracy
theories, and it won an Emmy for its reporting on the Occupy Movement
in the United States. RT regularly features figures from the right,
such as UKIP’s Nigel Farage. Some of RT’s right-wing “experts” have
ties to extremist or fringe groups that would make them personae non
gratae on other channels. For example, Holocaust denier Ryan Dawson
has appeared on RT as a “human-rights activist,” and neo-Nazi Manuel
Ochsenreiter as a “Middle East analyst.”17
Nevertheless, RT is not uniformly
“antihegemonic.” It also welcomes establishment figures such as
former CNN host Larry King, who at one time had a show on RT and
was widely featured in its advertisements.
Viewers that first come to RT for its anti-Western slant are then fed
other programming that strays beyond even the wildest “opinion” television.
Recently, Spanish-language RT featured a report that considered
whether the United States engineered the Ebola outbreak18
—a modern
echo of 1980s Soviet dezinformatsiya about the CIA being behind the
AIDS epidemic. RT contributors have called Ukraine’s government a
right-wing junta and claimed that Ukrainian nationalists are threatening
Jews.
The channel edited an interview with Misha Kapustin, the rabbi of
Simferopol in Crimea, in a way that gave the impression that he was
leaving Crimea because of a wave of anti-Semitism from Ukrainian nationalists.
In fact, Kapustin has condemned Russia’s actions in the region,
encourages Western sanctions against Russia, and told the Times
of Israel that he was actually leaving Crimea because of Russian aggression.
“There is no imminent danger to Jews in Crimea,” the heads of the
Ukrainian Jewish Committee said in a public statement; “the situation
is being manipulated by the Russian government to make the world believe
they are protecting us.”19
It is not just RT that spreads such disinformation.
As Adrian Chen reported in the New York Times, the Kremlin
uses “troll farms” and bots to create and spread fake stories online—for
example, that there were Ebola outbreaks in the United States and ISIS
attacks on U.S. towns.20
46 Journal of Democracy
In and of themselves, such disinformation campaigns may seem farcical.
Indeed, if their aim is to build classic soft power, which is all about
attractiveness and trust, then they are surely counterproductive (Putin’s
approval rating has been falling in Western countries since the conflict
in Ukraine began). But if their aim is less to convince and persuade and
more to muddle the information space and sow doubt and confusion,
then perhaps these efforts are succeeding in terms of Russia’s vision of
“information-psychological” warfare.
According to retired Rear Admiral Vladimir Pirumov, former head
of the Directorate for Electronic Warfare of Russia’s Main Naval Staff,
information war means “securing national policy objectives both in
peacetime and in wartime through means and techniques of influencing
the information resources of the opposing side.” The enemy’s information
systems are not the only targets of information warfare; it also aims
to influence the psyches of enemy populations through “disinformation
(deception), manipulation (situational or societal), propaganda (conversion,
separation, demoralization, desertion, captivity), lobbying, crisis
control and blackmail.”21
Russia’s Disinformation Campaigns
The 2011 edition of the “Information-Psychological War Operations”
handbook instructs intelligence officer trainees to act like “invisible radiation,”
where “the population doesn’t even feel it is being acted upon.”
Latvian scholar Janis Berzins, writing on the future of Russian warfare,
foresees a move from “direct clashes to contactless war,” from “war in
the physical environment to a war in the human consciousness and in
cyberspace.” The weapons in this contactless, perpetual war might be
TV channels, energy companies, banks, Internet trolls, Russian expatriate
groups that can incite unrest abroad—in other words, a “combination
of political, economic, information, technological, and ecological
campaigns.”22
For an example of how this might work, we can look at what happened
in Estonia in 2007. Ethnic Russians—the vast majority of whom
are descendants of people forcibly moved there by Stalin to break Estonian
nationhood—account for roughly 25 percent of Estonia’s population.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Estonia enacted a law
requiring residents who arrived after 1946 and their descendants to pass
Estonian-language tests to gain full citizenship. The ethnic Russian
population did not see themselves as colonizers, however, and resented
this requirement. They watch Russian TV, which broadcasts the official
Russian line that Estonia had “voluntarily” given up its independence
in 1944.
Every year in Tallinn, Russian nationalists and war veterans would
meet at the statue of the Bronze Soldier, commemorating the Soviet vic-
47Peter Pomerantsev
tory in World War II. They would sing Soviet songs and drape the statue
in Soviet flags. Some Estonians, however, considered the statue to be
a symbol of Soviet occupation and took offense. Estonian nationalists
began to organize countermarches, and one writer threatened to blow
the statue up. In March 2007, the Estonian parliament voted to move the
statue to a military cemetery.
Russian media and politicians went into overdrive. “Estonian leaders
collaborate with fascism!” exclaimed the mayor of Moscow. “The
removal of the statue is a fascist orgy,” argued the Russian Communist
Party. “The situation is despicable,” claimed Russia’s foreign minister.
Russian media nicknamed the country “eSStonia,” signaling that
the country was dominated by Nazi sympathizers, and ethnic Russians
camped out to protect the Bronze Soldier.
On the night of April 26, ethnic-Russian crowds started throwing
Molotov cocktails at police. Riots broke out, there was mass looting,
and one man died. Russian media claimed that he was killed by police
(he was not). They also spread rumors that some Russians had been
beaten to death at the ferry port, while others were tortured and fed psychotropic
substances during interrogation. On April 27, Estonian government,
newspaper, and bank employees arrived at work to find their
computer systems down as a result of the largest cyberattack in history.
Estonia was disabled.
Today, many Estonians are convinced that the media coverage, rioting,
and cyberattacks were coordinated from Moscow, although this cannot
be proven. “Patriotic hackers” with links to Kremlin youth groups
and Russian MPs took credit for the attacks, but claimed to be working
independently. Ethnic-Russian NGOs in Estonia claimed to have
planned the protests. When I interviewed Estonian president Toomas
Ilves last year, he said, “Sometimes we wonder whether the point of the
attacks [was] to make us sound paranoid and unreliable to our NATO
allies, and thus undermine trust in the alliance.”
The aims of such information operations are often opaque, as they
are designed to produce second- and third-order effects. This strategy
has kept the Estonians forever guessing at the Kremlin’s real intentions:
“When Russian politicians make threats about being able to conquer
Estonia, does that mean they would ever invade?” asks President Ilves’s
former security advisor Iivi Masso. “Are they just trying to demoralize
us,” he wonders, “or do they want Western journalists to quote them,
which will send a signal to the markets that we’re unsafe,” causing investments
to plummet?
It is not just in Russia’s near abroad, or even just in Europe, that Russia’s
information war is being waged. In October 2014, Putin and Argentina’s
President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner inked a deal to have
RT news broadcast in Spanish on Argentine television. “Our peoples
can communicate without any intermediaries,” Kirchner said in a joint
48 Journal of Democracy
video conference with Putin, claiming that national media (that is, the
media critical of her government) and international media do not show
the true Argentina or true Russia.
Putin echoed this statement, noting
that “the rapid progress of electronic
media has made news reporting enormously
important and turned it into a
formidable weapon that enables public
opinion manipulations.”23
RT’s
partnerships are not limited to Latin
America. For example, the channel
has also been pooling stories with
Syrian state television, including a
report of Syrian rebels gassing themselves
in order to fake a chemical attack by President Bashar al-Assad’s
forces.
It is hard to say how effective the Kremlin’s approach is—or indeed
even what its goals are. But another reason that the Kremlin’s thinking deserves
attention and analysis is the fact that other neoauthoritarian regimes
are adopting similar approaches. China’s use of the media to control its citizens,
for example, has become increasingly supple. And just as the Kremlin’s
use of ideology is fluid, so too is that of the ruling Chinese “Communist”
Party (CCP). Today’s CCP manages to champion both Confucius
and communism, and to support the Shanghai stock market while praising
Maoist propaganda songs. Moreover, China’s propaganda, like Russia’s,
is as much about signaling as it is indoctrination.24
As a U.S. government
report concludes, China’s information tactics are “guided . . . by the belief
that whose story wins is more important than whose army wins.”25
The Kremlin’s current strategy for keeping control—manipulating
all facets of the political process, adopting whatever ideological stance
is expedient for a given situation, and buying loyalty with money and
favors—has created a cynical citizenry, shaped by propaganda and conspiracy
theories, that is bereft of hope. It also leaves Russia’s international
adversaries and allies alike uncertain of what to expect. Increasingly,
illiberal regimes across the world are adopting similar strategies
and uniting to create global networks of pseudorealities. The world’s
liberal democracies must rise to the challenge by finding ways to counter
these false narratives with true ones.
NOTES
1. Memo 98 et al., “Messages of Russian TV: Monitoring Report 2015” (2015), http://
eap-csf.eu/assets/files/Monitoring%20report_Russian%20TV.pdf.
2. Paul Gregory, “Russian TV Propagandists Caught Red-Handed: Same Guy, Three
Different People (Spy, Bystander, Heroic Surgeon),” Forbes, 12 April 2014; Lucy CrossThe
Kremlin’s current
strategy for keeping
control has created a
cynical citizenry, shaped
by propaganda and
conspiracy theories, that
is bereft of hope.
49Peter Pomerantsev
ley, “The ‘Aggrieved Housewife,’ the ‘Soldier’s Mother’ and the ‘Kiev Resident’: Did
Russian Television ‘Use Actress to Portray Five Different Women’ As It Reported Normal
Ukrainians Backed Kremlin,” Daily Mail, 5 March 2014.
3. “Refugee from Slovyansk Remembers How the Young Son and Wife of a Rebel
Were Executed Before Her Eyes” (in Russian), Channel 1, 12 July 2014, www.1tv.ru/
news/other/262978.
4. Andrew Wilson, “‘Political Technology’: Why Is It Alive and Flourishing in the
Former USSR?” OpenDemocracy, 17 June 2011, www.opendemocracy.net/od-russia/
andrew-wilson/political-technology-why-is-it-alive-and-flourishing-in-former-ussr.
5. Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes, “An Autopsy of Managed Democracy,” Journal
of Democracy 23 (July 2012): 33–45.
6. Joshua Yaffa, “Dmitry Kiselev Is Redefining the Art of Russian Propaganda,” New
Republic, 1 July 2014, www.newrepublic.com/article/118438/dmitry-kiselev-putins-favor-
ite-tv-host-russias-top-propogandist.
7. See www.youtube.com/watch?v=if0eXbIprnw and www.youtube.com/
watch?v=9cQ2ddv4qQU, respectively.
8. Sam Jones. Guy Chazan, and Christian Oliver, “Nato Claims Moscow Funding AntiFracking
Groups,” Financial Times, 19 June 2014.
9. See John Lichfield, “€40m of Russian Cash Will Allow Marine Le Pen’s Front
National to Take Advantage of Rivals’ Woes in Upcoming Regional and Presidential Elections,”
Independent (London), 27 November 2014, www.independent.co.uk/news/world/
europe/40m-of-russian-cash-will-allow-marine-le-pens-front-national-to-take-advan-
tage-of-rivals-woes-in-upcoming-regional-and-presidential-elections-9888509.html.
10. For more on the European right, see Dalibor Rohac, “Europe’s Neoreaction Is Scarier
Than You Think,” 6 August 2014, The Umlaut blog, http://theumlaut.com/2014/08/06/
europes-neoreaction-is-scarier-than-you-think/?utm_content=buffereb0f7&utm_
medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer.
11. Tom Porter, “Putin Nationalist to Appear with US White Supremacists at FarRight
Conference,” 31 August 2014, www.ibtimes.co.uk/putin-follower-appear-us-whitesupremacists-far-right-conference-1463350;
and Robert Beckhusen, “As Russia Invades
Ukraine, the Kremlin’s Far Right Allies Meet in Yalta,” 31 August 2014, https://medium.
com/war-is-boring/as-russia-invades-ukraine-the-kremlins-far-right-allies-meet-in-yal-
ta-94a30929c35.
12. Anton Shekhovtsov, “Freedom Party of Austria,” personal blog, 20 June 2014,
http://anton-shekhovtsov.blogspot.co.uk/2014/06/freedom-party-of-austria-far-right.
html.
13. “French Politician to Build Historic Amusement Park in Crimea,” Moscow Times,
15 August 2015, www.themoscowtimes.com/article/505178.html
14. Anton Shekhovtsov, “The Kremlin’s Marriage of Convenience with the European
Far Right,” OpenDemocracy, 28 April 2014, www.opendemocracy.net/od-russia/anton-
shekhovtsov/kremlin%E2%80%99s-marriage-of-convenience-with-european-far-right.
15. Mark Leonard and Nicu Popescu, “A Power Audit of EU-Russia Relations,” EFCR
Policy Paper, 7 November 2007.
16. See Robert Orttung, Elizabeth Nelson, and Anthony Livshen, “How Russia Today
Is Using YouTube,” Washington Post, Monkey Cage blog, 23 March 2015, www.wash-
ingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2015/03/23/how-russia-today-is-using-youtube.
50 Journal of Democracy
17. Adam Holland, “Ryan Dawson, RT’s ‘Human Rights Activist,’ A Holocaust Denier
Who’s Friends With Hate Criminals,” Interpreter, 10 June 2014, www.interpreter-
mag.com/ryan-dawson-rts-human-rights-activist-a-holocaust-denier-whos-friends-withhate-criminals;
and Holland, “RT’s Manuel Ochsenreiter: The Neo-Nazi Representing
Germany on Russian TV News,” Interpreter, 21 March 2014, www.interpretermag.com/
rts-manuel-ochsenreiter.
18. Karen Méndez, “Centro de investigación biológica de EE.UU. Fort Detrick,
¿detrás del brote de ébola?” RT, 7 August 2014, http://actualidad.rt.com/actualidad/
view/136298-centro-investigacion-biologica-eeuu-fort-detrick-brote-ebola.
19. “Junta Government in Kiev Trigger for Mine That Will Explode Sooner or Later,”
RT OpEdge, 26 April 2014, http://rt.com/op-edge/155112-washington-policy-europeukraine;
“Pushed to Leave,” RT, 15 March 2014, http://rt.com/news/jews-jewish-ukrainenationalist-106/;
Victor Davidoff, “Putin’s Fabricated Anti-Semitism in Ukraine,”
Moscow Times, 13 April 2014, www.themoscowtimes.com/opinion/article/putin-s-fabricated-anti-semitism-in-ukraine/497950.html;
Amanda Borschel-Dan, “Crimea’s Sole
Rabbi Advises Jews ‘Not to Become Targets,’” Times of Israel, 2 March 2014, www.
timesofisrael.com/crimeas-sole-rabbi-advises-jews-not-to-become-targets; and Daniel K.
Eisenbud, “Ukrainian Jewish Committee: Russian Claims of Anti-Semitism in Crimea
Are Lies, Propaganda,” Jerusalem Post, 3 October 2014, www.jpost.com/International/
Ukrainian-Jewish-Committee-Russian-claims-of-anti-Semitism-in-Crimea-are-lies-pro-
paganda-344828
20. Adrian Chen, “The Agency,” New York Times, 2 June 2015, www.nytimes.
com/2015/06/07/magazine/the-agency.html.
21. V.S. Pirumov, Informatsionnoe Protivoborstvo (Moscow, 2010), quoted in Timothy
L. Thomas, Recasting the Red Star (Fort Leavenworth, Kan.: FMSO, 2011), 158.
22. Janis Berzinš, “The New Generation of Russian Warfare,” Aspen Review (Central
Europe), no. 3 (2014): 63–67.
23. “Russia Today TV Channel Starts Broadcasting in Argentina: Vladimir Putin and
President of the Argentine Republic Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner Launched Russia
Today TV Channel’s Spanish-Language Broadcasts on Argentina’s National Television
via TV Linkup,” transcript, 9 October 2014, http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/tran-
scripts/46762.
24. For more on China’s propaganda efforts, see Anne-Marie Brady’s essay “China’s
Foreign Propaganda Machine” on pp. 51–59 in this issue.
25. China: The Three Warfares, prepared by Stefan Halper for Andy Marshall, Office
of the Secretary of Defense, Washington, D.C., May 2013, 31.