Russia accused of online campaign to fix Macedonia vote

RUSSIA is waging a covert propaganda campaign to torpedo a referendum in Macedonia this weekend that could pave the way for the small Balkan country to join Nato and the EU.

Macedonians vote on Sunday over a proposed change of name to North Macedonia to resolve a 27-year diplomatic stand-off with Greece.

Athens objected to the name Macedonia for the former Yugoslav republic as it implied a territorial claim on a region in Greece with the same name.

Moscow opposes any Nato enlargement in the Balkans, which it regards as its sphere of influence, and has allegedly flooded social media in Macedonia with false accounts calling for a boycott of the vote. Thousands of fake Twitter and Facebook accounts using the hashtag #Bojkotiram – Macedonian for boycott – have appeared, the country’s Investigative Reporting Lab has said.

The aim appears to render the vote meaningless if it can reduce the turnout to under 50 per cent of voters. A recent poll found 57 per cent planned to vote, but many people in Skopje said they

were still unsure if they would. Some of the false accounts try to stir up friction between the Slav majority and its ethnic Albanian minority, which makes up a quarter of the population.

Albanians are overwhelmingly in favour, seeing EU membership as a means of tackling poverty and discrimination, but that is unpopular with Slavs who resent having to change the country’s name at the behest of Greece. The tensions erupted into an Albanian insurgency in 2001.

“Russia is doing everything it can to stave off more countries joining the

West,” said Heather Conley, director of the Europe programme at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies think tank in Washington. “In Macedonia, that includes exploiting weaknesses that exist. The aim is to sow complete confusion and to make the West look as dysfunctional as possible.”

British officials warned earlier this month that Moscow may try to influence the referendum as it is alleged to have done in the US election.

In July, Athens expelled two Russian diplomats accused of trying to stoke opposition within Greece to the accord

with Macedonia. Greek officials said they had “irrefutable evidence” that Russia was trying to interfere.

The US openly accused Moscow of trying to influence the outcome. Visiting Skopje, the Macedonian capital, last week, James Mattis, the US defence secretary, said there was no doubt that the Russians had “transferred money and that they were also conducting broader influence campaigns.”

Yesterday, Gjorge Ivanov, the Macedonian president, urged citizens not to vote, calling the name change a “flagrant violation of sovereignty”.