The Kremlin has ramped up its meddling in US affairs ahead of the election (Picture: Wire)
Kremlin spin doctors have been planting thousands of fake news articles, social media posts and more since 2022 to increase tensions within America.
The worrying practice has been ramped up in recent years amid the Ukraine war and the 2024 US presidential elections, stirring fears over border security and racial tensions.
Moscow officials have spent the better part of a decade hiring troll farms – large networks of fake social media accounts – to spread disinformation and encourage conspiracy theories.
Many accounts on Facebook and X are ‘short-lived’ to avoid detection, documents reviewed by The Washington Post showed.
In one case, a ‘strategist’ for the Kremlin told a troll employee to pretend to be an American who lives in a suburb.
This fake American, the Kremlin crony suggested, ‘doesn’t support the military aid that the US is giving Ukraine and considers that the money should be spent defending America’s borders and not Ukraine’s’.
The Russians have interfered in the last two US elections (Picture: Getty)
‘They see that Biden’s policies are leading the US toward collapse,’ the documents read.
The more than 100 papers dated between May 2022 and August 2023 are the latest proof of increased Russian propaganda intended to destabilise countries and undermine support for Ukraine in the West.
An anonymous Republican staffer at Capitol Hill told the Post: ‘We are seeing a broad-based campaign that has multiple lines of effort, some of which work better than others.
‘The Russians don’t care. They are just trying to seed the environment.’
According to the metadata of the documents, obtained by European intelligence agencies, most were written by a team working for the Moscow PR firm Social Design Agency.
Rep Michael R Turner, a Republican from Ohio, previously said on CNN’s ‘State of the Union’ that it was ‘absolutely true’ Republican members of Congress had repeated Russian propaganda.
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He added: ‘We see directly coming from Russia attempts to mask communications that are anti-Ukraine and pro-Russia messages — some of which we even hear being uttered on the House floor.’
This year could be a ‘perfect storm’ for the Russian trolls, according to Paul Kolbe, who worked with the CIA for 25 years.
He told NBC that former president Donald Trump’s claims of a stolen 2020 election, deepening polarisation and sharp cuts in disinformation and integrity teams at X could spread more confusion.
He added: ‘I think, for a lot of reasons, we will see the same approach, but amplified and, I think, with some of the constraints that you might have seen taken off.’
Russian media has already latched onto narratives such as the border dispute with Texas and Mexico sending the US ‘into a second civil war’.
It’s just one example of stories Kremlin-supported media has amplified to push Vladimir Putin’s narrative.
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