Quote:Bots and Russian trolls spread misinformation about vaccines on Twitter to sow division and distribute malicious content before and during the American presidential election, according to a new study. Scientists at George Washington University, in Washington DC, made the discovery while trying to improve social media communications for public health workers, researchers said. Instead, they found trolls and bots skewing online debate and upending consensus about vaccine safety.

Quote:Detectives investigating the murder of a Russian exile in London believe he was previously the target of a poisoning attempt carried out by two mysterious men from Moscow who visited him in a Bristol hotel room, the Guardian has learned. Nikolai Glushkov, a friend of the late oligarch Boris Berezovsky and a prominent Kremlin critic, was found dead in March at his home in New Malden, south-west London. He had been strangled. Glushkov is now thought to have survived a previous attempt to kill him by poisoning in 2013, the Guardian can reveal. Detectives are reinvestigating the incident as part of their inquiry into Glushkov’s murder, which took place a week after the novichok poisoning in Salisbury of Sergei and Yulia Skripal.

Quote:The Bellingcat investigation has found the following –
– Satellite images presented by the Russian Ministry of Defence claiming to shown Ukrainian Buks linked to the downing of MH17 on July 14th and 17th are in fact older images from June 2014.
– The discrepancies visible in the Russian MoD satellite map imagery which shows they are incorrectly dated are visible in publicly available imagery on Google Earth.
– Error level analysis of the images also reveal the images have been edited.
– This includes a Buk missile launcher that was removed to make it appear the Buk missile launcher was active on July 17th, and imagery where Buk missile launchers were added to make it appear they were within attack range of Flight MH17.

With this new report all four major claims made at the Russian Ministry of Defence press conference have now been shown to be false:
– The flight path was not altered in the way claimed by the Russian Ministry of Defence. Data from the Dutch Safety Board’s preliminary report and other sources show Flight MH17 made no major course changes such as the one described in the Russian Ministry of Defence press conference.
– The Russian Ministry of Defence claimed the video of the Buk missile launcher presented by the Ukrainian Ministry of Interior was filmed in the Ukrainian government control town of Krasnoarmeisk. This has been proven to be untrue, with analysis of the video showing it was filmed in the separatists controlled city of Luhansk.
– Radar imagery was described as showing an aircraft close to Flight MH17 after it was shot down. Experts interviewed by various media organisations have stated this is almost certainly debris from Flight MH17 as it broke up over Eastern Ukraine.
– Satellite imagery shows Ukrainian Buk activity around July 17th. As this report shows, those claims are untrue, and were based on fabricated satellite imagery.

Quote:A close ally of Vladimir Putin has promised to make a “nice juicy steak” out of the opposition leader Alexei Navalny in a bizarre threat posted on the YouTube channel for Russia’s National Guard. Viktor Zolotov, a former bodyguard to Putin who now heads Rosgvardiya, Russia’s internal military force, challenged Navalny to a duel during a six-minute rant in which he denied corruption allegations made by the opposition leader. “Nobody has ever given you the spanking you deserve, so hard that you felt it in your liver,” the senior Russian official said in the video, which was posted online on Tuesday.

Quote:German doctors treating a member of the Russian protest group Pussy Riot say his symptoms suggest it is “highly probable” that he was poisoned, but are confident he will make a full recovery. Pyotr Verzilov, one of four members of Pussy Riot who invaded the pitch dressed in police uniforms during the World Cup final in Moscow to protest against excessive Russian police powers, fell ill following a court hearing last Tuesday. He was rushed to Berlin on Saturday night for treatment. His early symptoms included loss of vision and being unable to walk or talk. “It is highly probable that he was poisoned,” a doctor at the Charite hospital in Berlin told a news conference on Tuesday, adding that there was no other explanation as to why Verzilov was in such a condition.

Quote:Russian diplomats held secret talks in London last year with people close to Julian Assange to assess whether they could help him flee the UK, the Guardian has learned. A tentative plan was devised that would have seen the WikiLeaks founder smuggled out of Ecuador’s London embassy in a diplomatic vehicle and transported to another country. One ultimate destination, multiple sources have said, was Russia, where Assange would not be at risk of extradition to the US. The plan was abandoned after it was deemed too risky.

Robert Mueller, the special counsel conducting the investigation, filed criminal charges in July against a dozen Russian GRU military intelligence officers who allegedly hacked Democratic party servers during the presidential campaign. The indictment claims the hackers sent emails that embarrassed Hillary Clinton to WikiLeaks. The circumstances of the handover are still under investigation. According to Mueller, WikiLeaks published “over 50,000 documents” stolen by Russian spies. The first tranche arrived on 14 July 2016 as an encrypted attachment. Assange has denied receiving the stolen emails from Russia.

Quote:Investigative journalists have claimed to have identified one of the two suspects in the Salisbury poisoning as a highly decorated officer in Russia’s military intelligence service (GRU). The online investigative sites Bellingcat and The Insider identified one of the two suspects – previously named as Ruslan Boshirov – as Colonel Anatoliy Chepiga, a veteran of Russian special forces who was awarded the country’s highest state award, Hero of the Russian Federation. Chepiga was a veteran of the war in Chechnya and was given the honour in December 2014, when Russian officers were active in the Ukraine conflict.

Quote:The refusal of Macedonia’s voters to endorse a change in their country’s name seems, at first glance, to be a matter of purely local interest. But the result of Sunday’s referendum will be widely seen as a significant victory for Vladimir Putin, a setback for the EU and Nato, and another disturbing example of Russia’s ability and willingness to influence the democratic process in western countries. Western officials warned before the vote that Moscow was trying to depress turnout in the referendum in order to invalidate the outcome. In the event, more than 90% of those voting backed the name change. But turnout was about 36%, short of the 50% required to make the decision binding on parliament.

Zoran Zaev, Macedonia’s prime minister, has vowed to press ahead, but will face stiff opposition from nationalists. Increased instability and division suit Russia’s game plan, according to western analysts. If the referendum had been successful, it would have resolved a dispute with Greece that has blocked Macedonia’s route to EU and Nato membership. As elsewhere in the western Balkans, notably Serbia, Kosovo and Montenegro, Moscow is determined to prevent further expansion of western influence.

For students of the 2016 US presidential election, Russia’s methods in Macedonia look highly familiar. Disinformation campaigns and “fake news”, cyberwarfare and hacking, phoney Facebook and Twitter accounts and secret cash payments – the modern equivalent of communist-era “red gold” – are all alleged to have been used. Russia denies interfering. But western diplomats claimed last month that 40 new posts a day were appearing on Facebook encouraging a referendum boycott. Postings asked “are you going to let Albanians change your name?” – a blatant attempt to stoke tensions with majority-Slav Macedonia’s ethnic Albanian minority. In one incident, football supporters opposed to the name change fought police in Skopje. Some later admitted they had been paid to cause trouble by shadowy figures. A photograph was circulated on social media showing the bruised face of a popular singer. It falsely claimed she had been beaten by police.

The paradox is that, whatever their country is called, a large majority of Macedonians support EU and Nato membership, according to a recent survey. That prospect has receded, at least for now. In the continuing Europe-wide contest for power and influence, Russia just scored again.

Quote:President Vladimir Putin has called Sergei Skripal, the Russian former double agent poisoned in Britain, a scumbag and a traitor who betrayed Russia. Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, were found slumped on a public bench in the English city of Salisbury in March. Britain says they were poisoned with a nerve agent administered by Russian intelligence officers. A woman later died from what British police say was contact with the poison, which her partner found in a discarded perfume bottle. Russia denies any involvement in the affair, which has deepened its international isolation. “I see that some of your colleagues are pushing the theory that Mr Skripal was almost some kind of human rights activist,” Putin said at an energy forum in Moscow. “He was simply a spy. A traitor to the motherland. There is such a concept – a traitor to the motherland. He was one of those. “He’s simply a scumbag, that’s all.”

Quote:The Russian military intelligence agency accused of the attempted assassination of former spy Sergei Skripal has carried out a swathe of attacks in the UK and abroad on political institutions, financial systems, transport networks and the media, according to the British government. This secret international cyberwar has included the targeting of the US presidential elections which brought Donald Trump to power, according to a new report from the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), as well the anti-doping watchdog in world sport. The report follows the statement by Theresa May that Britain and allied countries will work together to expose the work of the GRU and the methods it uses.

Quote:The Trump administration on Thursday indicted seven Russian intelligence officers on a slew of federal charges for allegedly conducting malicious cyber operations against the United States and its allies. Officials with the Justice Department’s national security division and the FBI announced the charges  Thursday  morning, shortly after officials in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands revealed a secret joint intelligence mission that thwarted a Russian intelligence operation targeting a global chemical weapons watchdog at The Hague, called the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. U.S. officials allege that some of the Russians caught in the operation at The Hague participated in a global hacking campaign against individuals and organizations in the U.S., Canada and Europe. These include attacks on Olympic organizations, including the World Anti-Doping Agency and the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, as well as attacks on a U.S. nuclear power company in Pennsylvania. The Russian hackers allegedly targeted Westinghouse, which officials noted supplies nuclear power to Ukraine. Officials would not comment on the motivation of that attack, or whether it was successful.