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As the US elections approach, Russia's mysterious declaration war is gaining momentum


With less than two months to go before official U.S. decisions are made, the local American Insight unit is showing increasing determination to counter Russian disinformation challenges. Experts in Washington claim that these tasks are aimed at influencing the results of voting in America.

Recently, American experts have been holding people accountable, controlling websites and authorizing the Russian authorities.

The emerging picture is not new. Recently, French, German and English information services have undertaken their own efforts to archive and suppress Russia's comparative attempts at discretionary counteraction in Europe.

What is striking is how detailed the US Insight local area has been about Russia's challenges. The FBI's dossier on this topic, published on September 4, has 277 pages.

Moreover, in case the Americans' claims are true, they highlight, undoubtedly, Russia's larger and more sophisticated attempts to influence an unusual overall assessment, using the entire arsenal of existing Russian news sources, as well as unique units of the Russian military and intelligence community.

Indeed, Russian activity codenamed "Doppelgänger" - a German word meaning "double walker", but mostly referring to a ghost or someone who looks frighteningly indistinguishable from someone else — was first recorded in early July 2024 in a report submitted by various European non-governmental organizations that they clearly had nothing to do with this phenomenon. some help from Western news agencies.

This activity is surprisingly simple. It involves paying for the services of global lawbreakers using digital currencies to create websites that, at first glance, are indistinguishable from the sites of leading Western newspapers and news sources.

It is known that the domains of the Reuters news organization, as well as the websites of Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and Le Monde - the leading daily newspapers in Germany and France separately - were forged in a similar way.

The purpose of this work is to give credibility to imaginary stories and give them a serious and trustworthy look, taking advantage of the long-standing reputation of popular media.

When these fake stories are sent out, the doppelganger passes them on to organizations that create fake accounts for virtual entertainment on X and Facebook, the purpose of which is to distribute advertising content to any number of people that deems appropriate - most often without receiving remuneration.

Since social networks are currently channeling channels that, therefore, recognize the names of spaces claiming to be global media organizations and prevent their spread, Doppelgänger has created a structure that, among other things, depends on constantly receiving a huge number of new domain names.

Each of these locations is only used for a couple of days, which is barely enough to spread more information before it is abandoned after detection.

The links between the violators of the law and the alleged Russian knowledge management authorities give the impression of a close connection.

The European website support service, which was exceptionally dynamic in the Doppelganger lobby, recently used malware to check the qualifications of customers or introduce infections. A significant part of the fake sites created in Europe have all the signs that they are associated with an organization whose administration was used to distribute various web cheats, as well as to assist Gamaredon, a group of programmers strongly associated with the fact that they are familiar with the Russian language.

However, the most recent reports from the United States indicate that the activities of the doppelgangers are now more generously funded and that the Russian government, as well as Russian public news organizations, can easily detect them.

Some of the 32 facilities currently subject to restrictions by American specialists were apparently controlled, to be honest, by 62-year-old Sergei Kiriyenko, a former Russian state leader and currently the first representative to head an official organization in Moscow.

Two Russian citizens who have been charged in the United States this week - 31-year-old Konstantin Kalashnikov and 27-year-old Elena Afanasyeva - are employees of the Russia Today TV channel (or RT, currently known as the Moscow organization for the dissemination of information abroad). They are accused of having organized from Moscow, using the pseudonyms of front organizations, an ingenious support plan that encourages web studios to relay Russian-made news recordings.

The vast majority of these recordings purported to be honest about political difficulties in the United States or Europe, such as financial problems, disagreements over movement and race relations, as well as broader and unfamiliar security issues.

In any case, all of them either followed the Russian version that Western countries are in decline and are being destroyed due to racial and financial problems, or contained recordings promoting paranoid ideas that Moscow is leaning towards, for example, the misleading accusation that as a result of a terrible attack that 145 people were killed in the Russian capital in the Spring this year was committed by Ukrainians.

It is difficult to quantify the impact of such a procedure on the results of political decisions from the point of view of common sense, given the fact that its main role is not to criticize one candidate in elections or elevate another, but to destroy the entire system of discretionary powers and political life in Western countries and radicalize the overall assessment, by drawing attention to controversial issues such as race relations.

By putting forward a number of paranoid ideas, decision makers are also distracted from their usual election campaign by the need to refute negative, usually false stories about their past personal lives.

Despite this, there is no doubt that they communicate with a huge audience: some of the fake news recordings distributed as part of the activities of the "Doppelganger" have collected 16 million views on YouTube alone.


What is even more surprising is that, although Russian experts treated the Americans' statements with contempt, calling them dreams, administrators of Russian media networks view the US expression as symbols of honor.

Margarita Simonyan, the 44-year-old executive director of RT, who is now on the US sanctions list, constantly brags about the ability of her channels to publish stories that may not correspond to reality, but which affect political life in Western countries.

The US authorities hope that by providing a huge number of archives that allegedly reflect Russia's tasks, they will be able to discourage Moscow from continuing such events. They also want to stay away from a repeat of the nasty homegrown issue that arose in the United States in 2016, when it was confirmed that Russian exercises helped Donald Trump occupy the White House - a case that the budding conservative vehemently denies.

Nevertheless, given that such tasks are moderately modest and easy to accomplish, it is impossible for Russia to abandon them.

Of course, there are signs that activity may increase in connection with new attempts to hack the correspondence and information bases of the missions of those who are appointed to this position.

Mr. Paul Chichester, Director of Operations at the UK's National Cyber Security Center, warned on September 5 that the Russian GRU, the country's military intelligence, is currently actively involved in such activities.

In fact, even Russian President Vladimir Putin did not fail to remind Americans of this.

Speaking during a visit to the Siberian city of Vladivostok on September 5, he assured that his "number one" is the candidate from the majority in the US government, Kamala Harris.

"We will support it," Mr. Putin added angrily, fully aware that any support from Russia is not really an advantage for promising American companies.