Claims of Russian interference in US election ‘blabber and fantasy’

MOSCOW has disputed US allegations that it ran an unprecedented multimillion dollar campaign to undermine the 2016 presidential election, calling them “blabber and fantasies”.

Sergey Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, told an international security conference in Munich he had “no response” to the accusations made by Robert Mueller, the special counsel who is investigating alleged Russian meddling in the US election.

Mr Lavrov said: “Until we see the facts, everything else is just blabber.

“I’m sorry for this not very diplomatic expression. There is this irrational myth about this global Russian threat, traces of which are found everywhere – from Brexit to the Catalan referendum.”

But speaking immediately after him, HR McMaster, Donald Trump’s national security adviser, said: “The evidence is now really incontrovertible.”

He said the US was becoming “more and more adept at tracing the origins of this espionage and subversion”.

An extraordinary US indictment, released on Friday, criminally charged 13 Russians with an elaborate plot aimed at disparaging Hillary Clinton and helping Mr Trump.

The 37-page document went into forensic detail about a huge social media campaign by the St Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency, combined with on-the-ground Cold War-style politicking. It said Aleksandra Krylova and Anna Bogacheva, two Russian operatives, had travelled as tourists through at least nine states in June 2014 to gather intelligence, equipped with “evacuation scenarios” if they were caught.

The operation, which included setting up fake political rallies and stealing the identities of Americans, was said to have been funded by Yevgeny Prigozhin, an ally of the Russian president, known as “Putin’s cook”.

Yesterday, Mr McMaster also rejected suggestions of working with Russia on cybersecurity.

Sergei Kislyak, Russia’s former ambassador to the US, told the conference the allegations by Mr Mueller were “simply fantasies”.