I’m worried about the left’s demonization of America’s origins and the future of Western civilization, as many conservatives feel that the basic tenets of society as we’ve known it are under attack.
Source: Scott Jennings, “Opinion: Why I’m voting for Donald Trump,” Los Angeles Times, 1 November 2024
Rhiannon Giddens’ opera Omar was presented at Carolina Performing Arts in February 2023. In this video, take a deep dive into the opera’s creation and hear from cast members about their experiences. To learn more, visit: https://southernfuturescpa.org/projects/omar/ Omar was co-commissioned and co-produced by Spoleto Festival USA and Carolina Performing Arts at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Additional co-commissioners include LA Opera, Boston Lyric Opera, San Francisco Opera, and Lyric Opera of Chicago.
Source: Carolina Performing Arts (YouTube), 2 October 2023
“Video has come out from Bucks County, Pennsylvania showing a ballot counter destroying ballots for Donald Trump and keeping Kamala Harris’s ballots for counting,” an account called “Dan from Ohio” wrote in the comment section of the far-right website Gateway Pundit. “Why hasn’t this man been arrested?”
But Dan is not from Ohio, and the video he mentioned is fake. He is in fact one of hundreds of inauthentic accounts posting in the unmoderated spaces of right-wing news site comment sections as part of a Russian disinformation campaign. These accounts were discovered by researchers at media watchdog NewsGuard, who shared their findings with WIRED.
“NewsGuard identified 194 users that all target the same articles, push the same pro-Russian talking points and disinformation narratives, while masquerading as disgruntled Western citizens,” the report states. The researchers found these fake accounts posting comments in four pro-Trump US publications: the Gateway Pundit, the New York Post, Breitbart, and Fox News. They were also posting similar comments in the Daily Mail, a UK tabloid, and French website Le Figaro.
“FOX News Digital’s comment sections are monitored continuously in real time by the outside company OpenWeb which services multiple media organizations,” a spokesperson for the company tells WIRED. “Comments made by fake personas and professional trolls are removed as soon as issues are brought to our attention by both OpenWeb and the additional internal oversight mechanisms we have in place.”
Breitbart replied to WIRED’s request for comment in Russian: “Пожалуйста, скажите Newsguard, чтобы они пошли на хуй.” In English, this means “please tell Newsguard to go fuck themselves.”
The Gateway Pundit and the New York Post did not respond to a request for comment from WIRED.
“The actors behind this campaign appear to be exploiting a particularly vulnerable part of the media landscape,” McKenzie Sadeghi, the AI and foreign influence editor at NewsGuard, tells WIRED. “Comment sections designed to foster reader engagement lack robust security measures, allowing bad actors to post freely, change identities, and create the illusion of genuine grassroots campaigns rather than orchestrated propaganda.”
The disinformation narratives being pushed by these accounts are linked to Storm-1516, according to Newsguard. Storm-1516 is a Russian disinformation campaign with a history of posting fake videos to push Kremlin talking points to the West that was also connected to the release of deepfake video falsely claiming to show a whistlelbower making allegations of sexual assault against vice presidential candidate and Minnesota governor Tim Walz. (WIRED first reported that the Walz video was part of a campaign by Storm-1516. A day later, the US government confirmed WIRED’s reporting.)
Links to the video were posted by multiple accounts with names like “Disobedient Truth” and “Private Patriot” in the comment section of outlets like Breitbart and the Gateway Pundit.
“More bad news for the Dems: Breaking: Tim Walz’s former student, Matthew Metro, drops a shocking allegation- claims Walz s*xually assaulted him in 1997 while Walz was his teacher at Mankato West High School,” the comments read.
The links posted in the comments came hours before the video was shared on social media platforms like X, where it racked up millions of views.
After the Bucks County video went viral, researchers quickly traced it back to Storm 1516. US intelligence agencies then confirmed Russia was behind the fake video.
Russian influence operations have, in the past, made use of comment sections to boost their narratives, including during their campaign to disrupt the 2016 elections. This is the first time this tactic has been reported as part of Russia’s efforts to disrupt the 2024 presidential election.
“Replying in threads is a tactic that can have an impact with very little investment,” Darren Linvill, codirector at Clemson University’s Media Forensics Hub, tells WIRED. “By inserting disinformation into an unrelated conversation it might be seen, even if the account being used has no followers and was just created yesterday. It also doesn’t matter if the account you are using is caught and shut down because you haven’t lost an investment, you can just create another account five minutes later.”
The fake comments, Newsguard found, are also then used in reports from Russian state-backed media outlets to bolster claims about how Western audiences are responding to a particular incident.
After the Trump assassination attempt in July, Tsargrad TV published an article titled “Biden’s Trace in Trump’s Assassination Attempt. Americans Agree with the Kremlin’s Version: ‘Russians Are Right.’” The article outlined how Americans believe that the Biden administration played a part in the shooting, citing “comments to articles in Western media” as evidence.
NewsGuard’s researchers identified 104 articles in Russian state media that cited comments from Western news outlets as evidence to back up their claims between January and August of this year.
“This tactic allows bad actors to reduce the risk of detection and embed propaganda in a subtle, seemingly organic way, blending it into the casual commentary of supposed everyday Western readers,” Sadeghi said. “The repetition of the same claim across multiple formats and contexts can create a sense of familiarity that may lend the narratives an appearance of credibility.”
The network of accounts has also been used to seed other narratives, including one earlier this month where dozens of comments in the New York Post and Breitbart claimed, without evidence, that Ukrainian president Volodmyr Zelensky had used Western military aid to purchase a car that once belonged to Adolf Hitler.
That claim has been spread by the network of inauthentic websites controlled by former Florida cop John Dougan, who now lives in Moscow and runs a network of pro-Kremlin websites. Dougan’s network of websites have previously shared disinformation narratives from Storm-1516.
Source: David Gilbert, “A Russian Disinfo Campaign Is Using Comment Sections to Seed Pro-Trump Conspiracy Theories,” Wired, 1 November 2024. The emphasis is mine. ||| TRR
Learn about Rhiannon Giddens’s opera Omar from the perspective of North Carolina scholars.
Source: Carolina Performing Arts (YouTube), 8 April 2024
This very disturbing story about Russian grassroots lucre in wartime was published on the front page of yesterday’s print edition of the New York Times. I’m quoting it in full here for the benefit of non-subscribers.
On the other hand, as perhaps only I am in a position to know, there is something disturbing about how certain of the sources for this story boldly claim eyewitness-like knowledge of events in the Russians provinces which they couldn’t possibly have witnessed, while also cashing in on the chaos unleashed by Russia’s vicious war against Ukraine, only from the opposite side of the world.
I’m also troubled that PS Lab, which was founded long before the war, is portrayed here as an outgrowth and brainchild of those selfsame academic entrepreneurs at George Washington University. ||| TRR
Expensive new cars and motorcycles crowd the streets. Apartment prices have more than doubled. And once-strapped residents are suddenly seen wearing fur coats and carrying ostentatiously overflowing grocery bags.
That is how one resident of a small, long-impoverished industrial city in Siberia describes her hometown these days. The explanation for the burst in prosperity lies in the isolated cemetery, with rows of Russian flags marking the new graves of soldiers killed in Ukraine, and also downtown, where a billboard lists the scores of local men who went to fight.
“I was stunned by how many,” said the resident, the wife of a middle-aged firefighter who enlisted last summer without telling her beforehand. “Money from the war has clearly affected our city.”
The Kremlin has been showering cash on men who enlist. It wants to avoid an unpopular draft, while also addressing the lack of men with sufficient patriotic zeal to join up. There are large signing bonuses, fat monthly salaries and what Russians call “coffin money,” a substantial payment to the families of the tens of thousands of soldiers killed in battle.
The money is changing the face of countless Russian backwaters like the Siberian city. “The allure of extremely high salaries and other benefits has been a major factor in attracting voluntary recruits, especially from relatively poor regions,” said a report issued this year by the Bank of Finland’s Institute for Emerging Economies.
By improving the standard of living among Russia’s poor, the payments have spurred support for President Vladimir V. Putin and the war, researchers noted, while also changing the perception of fighters from patriots to “soldiers of fortune.”
The names and hometowns of the people living inside Russia who agreed to discuss these war payments are not being published to avoid possible legal problems for speaking publicly about the conflict.
Russia has stopped publishing various economic statistics, leaving only a patchwork of indicators about the effects of the war payments. Some studies have documented the influx, however.
For example, the Bank of Finland researchers found that the number of bank accounts in Russia’s poorer areas surged over the past year. Nationwide data was too uneven to establish a concrete correlation with signing bonuses and enlistment data, the study said, but general estimates of casualties by region coincided with the areas experiencing high growth in bank depositors.
Also, in recent months, recruitment posters across Russia changed noticeably, replacing patriotic themes with financial offers. State TV and advertisements on social media carried the same messages.
“Pride of Russia,” some ads used to say, naming the soldier pictured, or “Homeland Begins with Family,” showing a soldier silhouetted with a mother and child. There were comparisons to heroic feats during The Great Patriotic War, as World War II is known in Russia.
Now, a ruble sign dominates the posters, which display the large sums on offer for signing a military contract. Payments vary by region.
“The people who wanted to join out of patriotic sentiment have mostly already been recruited and died or were wounded,” said Oleg Jouravlev, one of the founders of PS Lab, a group of mainly sociologists organized under the Russia Program at George Washington University to study attitudes toward the war. “There are not many like that left in Russia.”
On July 31, Mr. Putin issued a decree more than doubling the contract signing bonus from the federal government to 400,000 rubles, or more than $4,000, from 195,000 rubles. At least 47 regional governments followed suit after he encouraged them to match the reward, according to a survey by the independent media outlet iStories, with the average signing bonus nationwide quadrupling in the past eight months.
U.S. officials estimate that Russia is recruiting 25,000 to 30,000 new soldiers a month, roughly equal to the number of dead and wounded. As soon as local governments see interest lagging, they jack up the financial incentives, experts say.
This past month, the frontline Belgorod region broke all records with a signing bonus amounting to more than $30,000, well above the previous leader, Moscow, at about $20,000. The lowest bonuses are around $500.
The larger sums constitute a small fortune in many of the less developed towns and villages of Russia — where the average salary is a few hundred dollars per month — especially when combined with a frontline fighter’s monthly salary starting at 210,000 rubles, or about $2,100.
A study of the payments for Re: Russia, an online platform for political and economic analysis, found that the signing bonus equals roughly the average annual per capita income in Russia, and the monthly salary is three times the average wage. Rural wages are significantly lower than those in big cities.
“The money is a social elevator for those who went to war,” said Ayan, a resident of Buryatia, a Siberian region with a considerable proportion of people living below the poverty line and high levels of personal debt.
Coffin money payments amount to almost $150,000 per family, enough to buy an apartment in all but the most expensive Russian cities. While an apartment is often the main goal, recipients say they buy all kinds of things, including new teeth, breast implants and vacations.
The war payments are especially attractive to impoverished, middle-aged men who see them as their last chance to escape a lifetime of debt, said Ivan Grek, the director of the Russian Program at George Washington University. Beyond that, people getting the money are eating in restaurants, and buying cars, electronics, clothes and property.
Government statistics from early 2024 show a 74 percent growth in ordinary Russians across the country purchasing cars compared with the same time period last year, Mr. Grek noted, while those paying off consumer debts jumped to 21 percent, up from about 9 percent before the war.
“There is the spirit of a party out there,” he said, even if the source of the money limits the euphoria. His program recently sent three researchers to live for a month in small Russian communities to gauge perceptions of the war. “Now they have a car, they can drink and eat, it is a whole new life for them,” he said.
Artem, a soldier who fled Russia, estimated that 60 percent of the men in his unit signed up because they had unpaid loans. “Almost all of them had problems with alcohol and debt,” he said.
Some experts question whether the spiraling payouts are sustainable and expect that the draw, like patriotism, will eventually fade. Overall, war payments to Russian soldiers — whether for signing, injury or death — will amount to at least 7.5 percent of federal spending for the year, according to Re: Russia.
The sister of a dead officer from Makhachkala said that while he was alive he kept telling her that the death payment would take care of her, their mother and his daughter: “‘Buy an apartment,’ he said, and I told him, ‘You are a moron! Don’t even say such things.’”
Despite the shattering grief after his death, the sister said, the money makes it feel as if her brother is watching over them posthumously. “He did everything he wanted for us,” she said.
The money often has a trickledown effect. A resident of North Ossetia said that a couple of years ago his local plumber had applied to emigrate due to the lack of work. But recently, he said, the plumber told him, “I’ve never had so much work in my life,” with war widows buying new apartments or refurbishing old ones.
The firefighter from Siberia, aged 46, had gone heavily into debt over failed foreign exchange trades, according to his son. After losing several fingers in an industrial accident, he had burned through a $25,000 settlement and a considerable chunk of his disability pension. The father sold the family car to raise money, but ultimately the man filed for bankruptcy before enlisting.
A few days after the first interview for this article, the firefighter’s wife, who had not heard from him in a month, received a military report saying that he had been shot in the chest and killed on July 30, just four days after he deployed in Ukraine. Two younger soldiers trying to rescue him also died, but no bodies have been recovered.
“You are signing your death warrant,” his son said of his father’s decision to enlist. “It was a foolish decision to abandon my mother and my sister and cause everyone so much pain. Money is irrelevant in this situation.”
Source: Neil MacFarquhar and Milena Mazaeva, “Russia Showers Cash on Men Enlisting in Ukraine War, Bringing Prosperity to Some Towns,” New York Times, 2 November 2024. The emphasis is mine. ||| TRR
News from Ukraine Bulletin no. 120 (4 November 2024)
DOWNLOAD THE BULLETIN AS A PDF HERE
In this week’s bulletin: An Arab-Ukrainian perspective/ A Lithuanian view on Russian aggression/Evidence of Russian war crimes/ persecution of Crimean Tatars/ forced abductions/ miscarriages of justice/ Cultural genocide in Kharkiv/ UN report on torture as a war crime.
News from the territories occupied by Russia:
Reporters without Borders demand Russia ends torment of Crimean Tatar journalist sentenced to 14 years for defending human rights (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, 1 November)
Russian FSB abduct Ukrainian from her mother’s funeral in occupied Crimea (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, 31 October)
Ukrainian POW sentenced to 18 years as Russia mass produces legally nonsensical ‘terrorism trials’ (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, 30 October)
Horrific sentences where any Ukrainian will do in Russian-occupied Crimea (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, 29 October)
Russia secretly buries the bodies of the Ukrainian teenagers it murdered in occupied Berdiansk (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, 28 October)
The situation at the front:
Russia deploys 7,000 North Korean soldiers to areas bordering Ukraine (Ukrainska Pravda, 2 November)
Russia’s cultural genocide in Kharkiv (Ukraine Solidarity Campaign, 29 October)
News from Ukraine – general:
Over 1,700 children missing due to war in Ukraine – Interior Ministry (Ukrainska Pravda, 29 October)
ZMINA took part in the presentation of the Shadow Report to the European Commission’s report on Ukraine (Zmina, October 29th)
Humanitarian deminers’ union join independent union confederation (Confederation of Free Trade Unions, 28 October)
Absence of extrajudicial procedure hinders access to Ukrainian documents for TOT residents – Alena Lunova (Zmina, 26 October)
Ukraine: Love+War, a Review (Turning Point, 16 October)
War-related news from Russia:
Verkhneuralsk political prison (Solidarity Zone, 2 November)
“For 72 days I was electrocuted, beaten, not allowed to eat or sleep”: how Russian convicts are driven to “meat-grinder assaults” (The Insider, 31 October)
The story of Roman Nasryev and Alexei Nuriev (Solidarity Zone, 31 October)
Special Demographic Operation: how Russian authorities are restricting women’s reproductive rights (Posle.Media, 30 October)
“Human safaris” and havoc on the “home front”: How Russian soldiers kill Ukrainian civilians, fellow Russians — and even each other (The Insider, 30 October)
Analysis and comment:
Serhii Guz: civil society and labour in Ukraine in the third winter of all-out war (Ukraine Information Group, 3 November)
Hanna Perekhoda: ‘Russian political elites are openly promoting a global project’ (Links, 1 November)
In the Shadow of Empires: From a ‘Hezbollah Stronghold’ to ‘Denazified’ Ukraine, the Experience of an Arab-Ukrainian (Turning Point, 30 October)
New Law Raises Religious Freedom Concerns (Human Rights Watch, 30 October)
Lithuania: ‘for us, the fear of being occupied is more real’ (People & Nature, 29 October)
Research of human rights abuses:
Finland to try Russian neo-Nazi Rusich mercenary for war crimes in Ukraine (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, 1 November)
Torture by Russian authorities amounts to crimes against humanity, says UN Commission of Inquiry (UNHCR, 29 October)
Ukrainian POWs tortured for ‘confessions’ to Russia’s war crimes and for show trials (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, October 28th)
International solidarity:
We have completed fundraisers for €7680 (Solidarity Zone, 2 November)
Fundraiser for scary drones (Solidarity Collectives, 30 October)
Upcoming events:
Thursday, 7 November, 19.00. On Zoom. Emergency Forum on the US presidential election with Tanya Vyhovsky (Vermont State Senator), Bohdan Ferens (SD Platform Ukraine) and Alex Sobel MP. Ukraine Solidarity Campaign.Information and registration here.
Monday, 18 November, 18.00. “Political prisoners in Russia and the Occupied Territories of Ukraine”. Panel discussion with speakers from Memorial, Kharkhiv Human Rights Protection Group and others. Queen Mary University, London, Centre for Eurasian, Russian and East European Studies. This is a hybrid event with in-person and on-line attendance. Register on eventbrite here
This bulletin is put together by labour movement activists in solidarity with Ukrainian resistance. To receive it by email each Monday, email us at 2022ukrainesolidarity@gmail.com. To stop the bulletin, reply with the word “STOP” in the subject field. More information at https://ukraine-solidarity.org/. We are also on X, Facebook and Substack, and the bulletin is stored online here.
Source: Ukraine Information Group
John Oliver’s compelling but soberly made case for voting for Kamala Harris was pointed out to me by my fellow exile from fascist Russia, Mark Teeter. ||| TRR
Expo of war materiel captured in SMO opens in Petersburg on National Unity Day; visitors handed volunteer army service recruiting brochures
Visitors to the Russia Is My History Park were shown equipment from the Kharkiv and Sumy fronts, including an American Abrams tank and a Bradley IFV. The city hall media outlet Petersburg Diary reports that the exhibition was organized at the behest of Governor Alexander Beglov.
Beglov himself attended the opening. In his speech, Beglov said that, in the SMO [special military operation], the enemy’s vehicles “burn just like they burned during the Great Patriotic War.”
“Only three of the twenty-two ‘death machines’ [on display] are Ukrainian-made. All the rest were made in America, Canada, Europe and even by our neighbors in Finland, who basically have always lived at our expense,” Fontanka quotes the head of the city as saying.
Fontanka reports that there were so many visitors in the park that it was difficult to get close to the [captured] equipment. Those who came to the expo were handed propaganda booklets about volunteering for the army. Volunteers who are sent to the SMO zone are now promised 2.1 million rubles [approx. 19,500 euros] in a lump sum and 210 thousand rubles [approx. 1,950 euros] monthly.
Source: Rotunda (Telegram), 4 November 2024. Translated by the Russian Reader. The emphasis, above, is Rotunda’s.
Ken Field, “Presidential election 2016: dasymetric dot density.” Courtesy of WIRED