The latest lies from suspected Russian government trolls involve the creation of the coronavirus, according to an investigation by The Daily Beast. It’s just the latest in a long string of attempts to destabilize Russia’s traditional foes.
Ukraine has been a particularly bright target for the trolls from Russia’s Secondary Infektion propaganda campaign, who have been spreading mistruths about COVID-19 infections in Ukraine, and trying to paint the government in Kyiv as a threat to Europe with forged documents and fake screenshots. So who are they lying about and how are they spreading their fakes?
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Trolls spreading COVID lies
The Daily Beast investigation found Russian trolls trying to pin the coronavirus on a U.S.-funded lab in Kazakhstan, but we aren’t the only organization with eyes on the Secondary Infektion campaign. Cybersecurity firm FireEye has been tracking Russian disinformation trolls from the group and found that they have published a handful of fake stories about the coronavirus outbreak in Ukraine.
“They’re leveraging COVID as a theme to pursue their usual agenda—discrediting the U.S., trying to damage its image. There’s also the attempt to shape perceptions domestically within near abroad countries as to the ability of their governments to handle pandemics,” says Lee Foster, FireEye’s senior manager for information operations analysis.
“There’s some that seek to portray the Ukrainian health-care system as ill-equipped to handle the pandemic,” said Foster. “There’s others that accuse the U.S. of involvement in the initial outbreak in Ukraine related to work on Ukrainian biolabs with calls for an investigation into the operation of Ukrainian biolabs.”
One Secondary Infektion story Foster said FireEye found involved playing up recent protests in Ukraine about the repatriation of Ukrainian nationals from Wuhan after the outbreak began in China. It was an attempt, Foster added, to discredit the government’s response to the pandemic and stoke fear about the spread of the virus in Ukraine.
Ukraine vs. the World
In the network of over 20 stories identified by The Daily Beast, Secondary Infektion trolls spent a disproportionate amount of time focused on trying to divide Ukraine from its neighbors in Europe.
It’s the narrative version of what Russia has tried to do with its foreign policy towards the former Soviet state. Moscow has tried to stop Ukrainian integration with Europe so it would stay within Russia’s sphere of influence—an effort which helped sparked the Maidan revolution that booted pro-Russian parties from power.
In the years since, Secondary Infektion trolls have tried to rebrand Ukraine as a threat to its European neighbors. Trolls’ forgeries warned that Ukraine would use lethal aid from the U.S. to intimidate neighboring countries like Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Moldova. Others warned of fictitious plots by Ukrainian radicals to blow up gas pipelines
Competing histories and nationalisms
Many of the attempts to damage Kyiv’s brand hinged on a favorite Moscow talking point: that Ukraine’s desire to come out from under Russia’s shadow is because it’s fascist country of nationalist Nazi worshippers. During World War II, Ukrainian nationalists sided with the Third Reich against the Soviet Union and Russia has tried to paint Kyiv’s desire for European integration as the byproduct of its nationalists’ World War II history rather than a desire to be more open and democratic.
The trolls leveraged Ukrainian nationalists’ World War II history with at least two forgeries. Secondary Infektion propagandists tried to pit Polish and Ukrainian audiences against each other with a forged draft UN Security Council resolution purporting to come from Poland. The fake resolution, posted to places like 4Chan and Medium under the headline “Genocide strikes relations between Ukraine and Poland” in early 2018, spun a story about a nonexistent attempt by the Polish government to highlight Ukrainain Nazi collaborators at the UN.
Four months later, Secondary Infektion floated another forgery in the form of fake Ukrainian government documents vowing sanctions on Poland for the government’s prohibitions on promoting Ukrainian nationalists’ history. The Polish government’s Act on the Institute of National Remembrance bans the commemoration of Ukrainian nationalists during the war for their history of Nazi collaboration and the issue has been a subject of genuine tension between the two governments.
Occasionally, Secondary Infektion would try to play off other forgeries in order to pit Ukrainian nationalism against another country’s own chauvinism. In November 2018, a fake story posted to a Ukrainian blog claimed by a Ukrainian mother whose 12-year-old son was supposedly sexually assaulted and beaten to death by members of Ukraine’s ethnic Hungarian minority. The story, an attempt to stir up resentment of minorities in Ukraine, was quickly called out as a fake by Ukrainan news outlets.
It’s unclear who was behind that initial fake story, but Secondary Infektion used the attempt to stir up resentment of Hungarians in Ukraine for a phony story of its own trying to do the opposite—gin up Hungarians’ hatred of Ukrainians. The article took note of the calls for vengeance sparked by the original fake story to claim that it was an “informational campaign” by the Ukrainian government meant to “target Hungary.”
In a glimpse of the authors’ motive, the story ended with a rhetorical question: “How a country like Ukraine may hope to enter the EU?”
Divide and (not quite) conquer
Secondary Infektion’s fake stories stretch back much further than their recent attempts to capitalize on fears about COVID-19. In the course of reporting on the group, The Daily Beast identified a number of other subjects exploited by the group dating back years.
One of Secondary Infektion’s favorite topics when targeting British audiences was Brexit. As a British intelligence investigation reportedly concluded, Moscow has thrown its covert support behind the push for the U.K. to leave the European Union because it views a politically disunited Europe as preferable to one capable of speaking in one voice on foreign policy issues.
As the disinformation research firm Graphika has repeatedly documented, government-linked trolls from Secondary Infektion have pushed pro-Brexit content across a range of platforms. By late 2018, Britain had more or less irreversibly committed to leaving the EU and Secondary Infektion trolls switched to exacerbating the political tensions around Brexit rather than merely cheering it on.
In one effort identified by The Daily Beast, Secondary Infektion trolls forged a fake screenshot from the Daily Mail to claim that President Trump had pressured the U.K. to double its defense spending from 2 percent of its gross domestic product in order to make up for the shortfall in defense budgets among other NATO members—an apparent hardship because “Even 2% to military spending is already too much for UK amid Brexit.”
The story played to one of the caricatures at the heart of the U.K.’s Brexit debate—that Britain’s European allies were freeriders bleeding the U.K. of resources.
NATO has also been a favorite target for the Russian government-linked propaganda effort. In a June 2019 article, “Poland’s ambition leads EU to ecological disaster,” Secondary Infektion authors used a fake letter from Polish Law and Justice party leader Jarosław Kaczynski Admiral James Foggo, then the commander of NATO's Allied Joint Forces Command, to try and implicate both NATO and the U.S. in their decision to build a canal along Poland’s border with Russia—a move opposed by both environmentalists and the EU.
Election meddling
In Latvia, the trolls used a forged email from a frequent target of Russian ire, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), as part of their meddling effort. Under Vladimir Putin’s rule, Russia has taken a deep exception to U.S. efforts at democracy promotion abroad and viewed the attempt to spread representative government as a threat to Russia’s brand of authoritarianism.
Democracy promotion groups like the U.S. government-funded NED, which Russia formally banned from the country in 2015, have borne much of the brunt of that irritation. NED offers basic training on democratic norms to political parties in newly democratic countries and doesn’t meddle in foreign politics. But Moscow likes to paint it as the covert arm of the U.S. government, picking winners in elections abroad.
In 2018, as Latvians were preparing to vote for a new parliament, Secondary Infektion trolls projected Moscow’s own caricature of the NED onto an election in Latvia.
The trolls forged an email in broken English pretending that it came from Nadia Diuk, a former vice president at NED who subsequently passed away. The phony email promised NED’s support to Latvia’s right-wing nationalist party, the Nationalist alliance. “The NED experts will provide a detailed plan of actions on their arrival” to assist in “gaming your political opponents and preparing the people for rejecting the election results,” it pledged.
The idea that the NED would try to throw an election in Latvia, absurd on its face, relies on readers being ignorant of both what the organization does and where it works. The organization hasn’t had a meaningful presence in Latvia in years as the Baltic states long ago graduated from needing any assistance in coming out from under their Soviet past.
Christopher Walker, vice president for studies and analysis at NED, confirmed to The Daily Beast that the email published by Secondary Infektion was a forgery and denounced the attempt at smearing NED’s reputation. “What these things are aimed at is impairing free expression, distorting the political environment and otherwise sowing confusion,” he said. “Censorship, manipulating the media are really a core competence of authoritarian regimes.”
Planting seeds to harvest later
One of the most notable things about the Secondary Infektion stories is that they rarely escape the orbit of their original posters and haven’t for years. By the yardstick of Russia’s 2016 trolling effort, which involved the use of large numbers of social media personas to flood social media en masse, that would be a failure.
But what if Secondary Infektion trolls aren’t playing by that rulebook? That’s what Foster is curious about.
“I’ve wondered the extent to which they may have been seeking to plant those narratives out there and just let them stay dormant so that they can come and activate them at an appropriate time,” he told The Daily Beast. “They could come back two years later and say ‘look at this correspondence that was out there it was even floating online and no one would talk about this but there’s U.S. efforts to interfere in some country’s politics.’”
There’s some evidence that Russian disinformation actors have already carried out an operation that bears at least some similarity to those fears. In October 2016, Russian intelligence-linked hackers broke into the email account of David Satter, an American journalist whose reporting had irritated Putin’s government, and published them on the blog of a fake hacktivist group used as a front for Russian military intelligence. The leak of Satter’s real emails included a handful of tainted forgeries hidden within the leaked information for Russian-language media to find and use to try and discredit Satter.
