Threat or Threatened? Russia in the Era of NATO Expansion

Breaking Down the Complicated Relationship Between Russia and NATO

Russia’s Clash With the West Is About Geography, Not Ideology

Differential Effects of Capital-Enhancing and Recreational Internet Use on Citizens’ Demand for Democracy

This wasn’t expected, but also shouldn’t be a huge shock. Despite the US hyping Russia as a threat for decades, Russia hasn’t spent deeply on its military in years, and drawing down from Syria, they don’t have much costly overseas engagement.

The total of 300-plus pages suggests that Mr. Mueller went well beyond the kind of bare-bones summary required by the Justice Department regulation governing his appointment and detailed his conclusions at length.

“You threw us under the bus!” she yelled at Mr. Stamos, according to people who were present.

politicians looking for issues to drum up with have made a whipping boy out of the social networks

17,125,200 square kilometres

But events in Europe unfolded more or less according to Fukuyama’s prediction, and, on December 26, 1991, the Soviet Union voted itself out of existence. The Cold War really was over.

Instead of trying to force their messages into the mainstream, these adversaries target polarized communities and “embed” fake accounts within them. The false personas engage with real people in those communities to build credibility. Once their influence has been established, they can introduce new viewpoints and amplify divisive and inflammatory narratives that are already circulating. It’s the digital equivalent of moving to an isolated and tight-knit community, using its own language quirks and catering to its obsessions, running for mayor, and then using that position to influence national politics.

However, as the following diagrams will show, the middle is a lot weaker than it looks, and this makes public discourse vulnerable both to extremists at home and to manipulation by outside actors such as Russia.

"Putin was never very fond of the internet even in the early 2000s," said Andrei Soldatov, a Russian investigative journalist who specializes in security services and cyber issues. "When he was forced to think about the internet during the protests, he became very suspicious, especially about social networks. He thinks there's a plot, a Western conspiracy against him. He believes there is a very dangerous thing for him and he needs to put this thing under control."

Gatov, who is the former head of Russia's state newswire's media analytics laboratory, told BuzzFeed the documents were part of long-term Kremlin plans to swamp the internet with comments. "Armies of bots were ready to participate in media wars, and the question was only how to think their work through," he said. "Someone sold the thought that Western media, which specifically have to align their interests with their audience, won't be able to ignore saturated pro-Russian campaigns and will have to change the tone of their Russia coverage to placate their angry readers."

"There's no paradox here. It's two sides of the same coin," Igor Ashmanov, a Russian internet entrepreneur known for his pro-government views, told BuzzFeed. "The Kremlin is weeding out the informational field and sowing it with cultured plants. You can see what will happen if they don't clear it out from the gruesome example of Ukraine."

The trolls appear to have taken pains to learn the sites' different commenting systems. A report on initial efforts to post comments discusses the types of profanity and abuse that are allowed on some sites, but not others. "Direct offense of Americans as a race are not published ('Your nation is a nation of complete idiots')," the author wrote of fringe conspiracy site WorldNetDaily, "nor are vulgar reactions to the political work of Barack Obama ('Obama did shit his pants while talking about foreign affairs, how you can feel yourself psychologically comfortable with pants full of shit?')." Another suggested creating "up to 100" fake accounts on the Huffington Post to master the site's complicated commenting system.

According to the documents, which are attached to several hundred emails sent to the project's leader, Igor Osadchy, the effort was launched in April and is led by a firm called the Internet Research Agency. It's based in a Saint Petersburg suburb, and the documents say it employs hundreds of people across Russia who promote Putin in comments on Russian blogs.

The documents show instructions provided to the commenters that detail the workload expected of them. On an average working day, the Russians are to post on news articles 50 times. Each blogger is to maintain six Facebook accounts publishing at least three posts a day and discussing the news in groups at least twice a day. By the end of the first month, they are expected to have won 500 subscribers and get at least five posts on each item a day. On Twitter, the bloggers are expected to manage 10 accounts with up to 2,000 followers and tweet 50 times a day.

Russia's campaign to shape international opinion around its invasion of Ukraine has extended to recruiting and training a new cadre of online trolls that have been deployed to spread the Kremlin's message on the comments section of top American websites.Plans attached to emails leaked by a mysterious Russian hacker collective show IT managers reporting on a new ideological front against the West in the comments sections of Fox News, Huffington Post, The Blaze, Politico, and WorldNetDaily.The bizarre hive of social media activity appears to be part of a two-pronged Kremlin campaign to claim control over the internet, launching a million-dollar army of trolls to mold American public opinion as it cracks down on internet freedom at home.

RuNet Echo has previously written about the efforts of the Russian “Troll Army” to inject the social networks and online media websites with pro-Kremlin rhetoric. Twitter is no exception, and multiple users have observed Twitter accounts tweeting similar statements during and around key breaking news and events. Increasingly active throughout Russia's interventions in Ukraine, these “bots” have been designed to look like real Twitter users, complete with avatars.

In that sense, he observed, the biggest surprise in the relationship between China and the United States is their similarity. In both countries, people who are infuriated by profound gaps in wealth and opportunity have pinned their hopes on nationalist, nostalgic leaders, who encourage them to visualize threats from the outside world. “China, Russia, and the U.S. are moving in the same direction,” he said. “They’re all trying to be great again.” 

It is still not clear how many people attended the meeting. So far acknowledged in attendance: Trump Jr., Kushner, Manafort, Veselnitskaya, Akhmetshin and the publicist Rob Goldstone who helped set the meeting up

“With every attempt at transparency Donald Trump Jr. digs himself more deeply into the hole of criminality,” he told me via email. “He appears to have gone into that meeting—and likely others—looking for something of value—dirt on Hillary Clinton—from sources he should have stayed away from. His judgment was bad, to say the least.”

a more holistic view of their work, and Ukraine needed a more coherent response to the brazen, prolific organization that Sandworm had become. “The light side remains divided,” he says of the balkanized reaction to the hackers among their victims. “The dark side is united.”

On March 20, 2017, during public testimony to the House Intelligence Committee, FBI director James Comey confirmed the existence of an FBI investigation into Russian interference and Russian links to the Trump campaign, including the question of whether there had been any coordination between the campaign and the Russians.[24] He said the investigation began in July 2016 and was "still in its early stages".[25] Comey made the unusual decision to reveal the ongoing investigation to Congress, citing benefit to the public good.[93]

proletarianise

offenses.

economic planning regions

Separately, American intelligence agencies had intercepted communications of Russian officials, some of them within the Kremlin, discussing contacts with Trump associates.

But second, a sense of what could have been. What if Stalin hadn’t murdered most of the competent people? What if entire fields of science hadn’t been banned for silly reasons? What if Kantorovich had been able to make the Soviet leadership base its economic planning around linear programming? How might history have turned out differently?

First, amazement that the Soviet economy got as far as it did, given how incredibly screwed up it was.

Infrastructures, for Collier, are amixture of political rationality, administrative techniques, and material systems, and his interest isnot in infrastructure per se but in what it tells us about practices of government. Soviet electricityprovision, through this lens, is analyzed for how it reveals a system of total planning in a commandeconomy rather than for what it tells us about the effects of electricity on users in Russia.

Россия

Why is it that Putin has no problem getting his message out? The reason, of course, is that most of what Russians see and hear is Putin’s point of view and Putin’s point of view only.

Интересно, что в познеровском монологе на путинском ТВ картина дебатов выглядела несколько иначе. Мэтр отечественного телевидения заявил, что дебаты закончились "почти вничью" (49% за "диалог", 51% — против), после чего пустился в рассуждения о невежественной канадской аудитории, будто бы ничего не знающей о России и находящейся во власти пропаганды. Простим господину Познеру, что он — случайно или по старой советской привычке — "подрезал" процентик у оппонентов. Гораздо важнее, что он скромно умолчал о том факте, что изначально аудитория гораздо больше симпатизировала именно его позиции, а изменение настроений аудитории — это результат дебатов, которые Познер с Коэном проиграли, а не мифической антироссийской пропаганды. Подобное поведение иначе как потерей лица не назовешь. В конце концов, нет ничего постыдного в том, чтобы проиграть в честном поединке, а вот заниматься передергиваниями — это действительно позор.