Russia is actively working to break up NATO and the EU, undermine the west’s faith in the press and democratic institutions, foster fascist right wing activities across the west and spread russian oligarchy and mob control of businesses across the west and beyond to effectively destroy the U.S. and our allies. Meanwhile Trump refuses to criticize Putin in any manner and instead calls for partnership.
As Americanprogress.org summarizes:
Russia’s actions to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election and help then-presidential candidate Donald Trump win were similar to its activities to build a network of far-right political parties and movements in Europe. Russian President Vladimir Putin is using this network to advance his policy objectives at home and abroad.
In this effort, Russia is motivated by both the desire to lead a conservative revival against Western liberal democracies and a flawed interpretation of recent waves of popular uprisings against autocratic rulers that sees an American conspiracy behind them. Putin has adopted a deliberate strategy to directly challenge the liberal international order led by the United States. That global system helped end the historical pattern of devastating wars among major powers and brought much of the world an unprecedented era of peace and prosperity since the end of World War II.
And.
Key findings
- Russia’s covert influence operations are not simply mischief. Rather, they are a deliberate strategy to achieve its domestic and foreign policy objectives through unconventional means that has ideological, political, and strategic support from a broad section of leading Russian intellectual, government, and military figures.
- Russia deploys an array of tools to help its designated partners, actions that range from the relatively benign practice of elevating the profile of European far-right leaders to disinformation, propaganda, alleged illicit financing, and covert influence operations.
- Russia, in return, obtains a strikingly consistent level of support from these far-right, nationalist leaders, who all praise Putin as a strong leader and promote Russian policy objectives, even if it works against their own national interests and when the parties have no history of backing similar actions not related to Russia.
- President Donald Trump is following the same playbook as the Russian-backed far-right European leaders, adopting eerily similar language to theirs and pursuing the same policies that advance Russia’s objectives even when they are inconsistent with previous Republican policy positions. Trump or top Trump administration officials even met with four of these European far-right leaders during the presidential campaign or the transition.
Add to the above the recent Propublica/The Atlantic expose about the Russian intelligence services/political/oligarch/mob activities in Spain that now has “led Spanish officials to fear for their national security as well as law and order”.
At a time when Russian intelligence and criminal activities have become an urgent concern in the United States and Europe, the Spanish investigations of Petrov and other Russians offer a remarkable view of the way that some of the most powerful mafia bosses have operated, both in Russia and abroad. Building on ties that sometimes date to the last years of the Soviet Union, more sophisticated mob leaders have survived gang wars and crackdowns to amass extraordinary wealth and influence, while remaining almost as deferential to Putin’s government as the oligarchs he helped create. Rather than simply bribing police officials to facilitate their activities, bosses like Petrov have established themselves as business partners, money launderers and investment scouts for high-ranking officials who have amassed sizeable fortunes themselves, Western security officials say. Those relationships, in turn, have enabled crime bosses to expand their involvement in legitimate business and political activities that are linked to the Russian government.
In isolated cases, the mafias are also believed to have been used as instruments of Russian state power — running guns for the security services, killing enemies, or carrying out political skullduggery. But the blurring lines between state and criminal activities have taken on new significance as Russia has worked more aggressively to undermine its adversaries in Europe and the United States. In Spain, such concerns have grown especially around the current crisis over the campaign for independence in Catalonia, where Russian news and social-media operations have lately been accused of spreading disinformation to stoke the separatist fervor. Russian mobsters have been active in the region for years, Spanish officials say, working to build influence among Catalan politicians and businesspeople, and to take advantage of the rivalry between Catalan and national law-enforcement agencies.
Interviews with more than 20 Western law-enforcement and intelligence officials — including Spanish investigators who spoke publicly and in detail about the Russian cases for the first time — as well as a review of thousands of pages of court files and investigative documents, show the interplay of gangsters, spies, magnates and politicians in Russian power networks at home and abroad. The mafias’ ties to the Russian government, and particularly to the security services, have led Spanish officials to fear for their national security as well as law and order. “If you are someone important in the mafia in Russia, you don’t work on your own,” said Juan Rueda, a former Spanish police commander who led many of the investigations. Another senior police official added, “There is always the shadow of intelligence services behind them.”
Meanwhile Putin’s propaganda machine is running full force to divide the U.S.
“The long view of the Russian active measures program is chaos and disunity among the American government,” Clint Watts, a former FBI agent and cybersecurity expert who developed the Hamilton 68 dashboard, told NPR earlier this month.
AND
Russia’s efforts to push propaganda and disinformation, experts say, are nothing new and extend beyond the U.S. to nations in Europe. But they have seemed to evolve in recent months, increasingly infiltrating and engaging with alt-right and far-right Americans online.
Moscow’s aim is widely viewed as exploiting divides and sowing distrust of democratic institutions, the latter a conclusion reached by the U.S. intelligence community in its initial investigation of Russia’s interference in the presidential election, including overt efforts to push propaganda.
“Promoting content that is divisive – that is the ultimate goal here,” said Lee Foster, manager of information operations analysis at FireEye iSIGHT Intelligence.
“It’s the same in Europe, but the specific themes change,” Foster said. “There, one of the most prominent themes is migration and the refugee crisis.”
Putin’s support for right wing fascists is all across europe
Let’s put Putin’s most-recent denial of interference in the U.S. election in context. It came only a day after Spain’s defense minister announced that Russian hackers had sought to purposely damage his country by inflaming the issue of Catalonian independence. France, Germany, Estonia, Sweden, Poland, and Hungary, to name a few, have also uncovered dedicated Russian efforts to interfere in their political processes. Russian intelligence operatives have supported violent and far-right wing groups in Europe, and even attempted a coup and assassination attempt in Montenegro. Russia may well have also been involved in efforts to promote Britain’s exit from the European Union.
And when we now hear about 60,000 right wing fascists marching for the “White Europe of brotherly nations” in Poland in the largest parade of their Independence Day we must realize that Putin and Russia has been successful in their fighting an undeclared war against the U.S, Europe and the very concepts of western democracy, freedom and liberty.
So this is when the U.S. president steps up to lead our allies and fellow democracies to defend us against this geopolitical attack against our very way of life by the combined forces of the new Russian empire, right?
Nope, our Putin Oligarch wanna be says:
The orange idiot is such a fool that he believes Putin will help us with our problems while he instead is actively working to create a thousand times worse problems for us.
For some icing on the cake we now have a Russian spy and Putin ally in charge of security for our embassy and several consulates in Russia.
Meanwhile it appears that John McCain is the only republican politician in the nation who is a patriot to America over party.
We are so fucked.