Kremlin’s new cyber weapons spark fears and fantasies

From Donald Trump’s election to Brexit and the Catalan crisis, accusations that the Kremlin is meddling in Western domestic affairs have heightened fears over Russian hackers, trolls and state-controlled media. While the first accusations against Moscow came following a 2016 hack attack on the US Democratic Party’s servers, they rapidly multiplied after Trump’s election, revealing a whole range of tools used by the Kremlin to serve its interests. In the latest episode of the saga that is dominating Trump’s presidency, Russian state television channel RT, accused of broadcasting Kremlin propaganda abroad, complied with Washington demands in November to register as a “foreign agent” in the US.

A few weeks earlier, social media giant Twitter announced it would stop distributing content sponsored by RT and linked news agency Sputnik while Facebook and Google promised to do more to fight Moscow’s “disinformation”.

Panic has spread across the Western world: Madrid is worried about Russian-controlled “manipulation” of the Catalan crisis, while British analysts see signs of Russian influence in the Brexit vote and concerns are growing in Germany and France over possible interference in various polls.

The Kremlin, meanwhile, has dismissed the accusations as “hysterical” and “Russophobic,” insisting there is no hard evidence for any of the charges.

“Russia spends a lot of money on this (information war) and we constantly see more players,” said Russian investigative journalist Andrei Soldatov, editor of Agentura.ru, a website specialising in security issues.

In 2014, Russian media reported on a new, powerful Kremlin tool: a “troll factory” in Saint Petersburg. Officially called the “Internet Research Agency,” it was reportedly linked to Russian security services and ran thousands of fake accounts on social media in an attempt to influence public opinion.

But Mark Galeotti, a security expert and researcher at the Institute of International Relations in Prague, wrote in Tablet magazine in June that the Kremlin’s operation in 2016 “was about weakening Washington, not deciding who would sit in the White House” and aimed to “undermine the legitimacy of the American government, its capacity to act”.

Russian hackers, the Kremlin’s shadiest instruments, have been accused of targeting the US Democratic Party, the US National Security Agency, the party of France’s Emmanuel Macron and the World AntiDoping Agency.

“The Kremlin has not gained so much from these operations, they are mainly just noise,” said Soldatov.