Putin ally boasts of meddling in elections
The leader of a notorious pro-Kremlin mercenary group that is accused of being President Vladimir Putin’s private army has warned that he will disrupt today’s US midterm elections.
Yevgeny Prigozhin, a former hot-dog salesman who rose to become a powerful businessman known as ‘‘Putin’s chef’’, is head of the Wagner Group, a private military contractor whose fighters have been accused of atrocities in Ukraine, Syria and Africa.
He is one of 13 Russians criminally charged for interfering in the 2016 US election to help Donald Trump win the presidency. He has now become the first Putin ally to admit such interference after years of denials from Moscow that it had sought to sow disinformation among American voters.
‘‘We have interfered [in US elections], we are interfering and we will continue to interfere, he said in a comment posted on the social media page of his catering company, Concord. ‘‘Carefully, accurately, surgically and in our own way, as we know how to do. During our pinpoint operations, we will remove both kidneys and the liver at once.’’
It came as Russian social media accounts sprung back into action before the midterms amid rising fears of a violent fall-out from disputed results.
Online disinformation has been targeted at Democratic candidates in closely fought Senate seats in states including Arizona, Ohio and Pennsylvania in an attempt to stir up an already tense atmosphere as Americans go to the polls.
The midterm elections will be seen as a verdict on President Joe Biden’s first two years in office and opinion surveys point to the Republicans regaining control of Congress, which will stymie his agenda.
Researchers who tracked the reactivation of ‘‘sleeper’’ Russian-backed accounts said that Moscow’s aim was both to deepen polarisation and to push for a Republican-controlled Congress that could be less likely to approve funds for Ukraine.
The FBI and the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency issued an alert last month warning of the threat of disinformation spread by ‘‘dark web media channels, online journals, messaging applications, spoofed websites, emails, text messages and fake online personas’’.