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2023-12-14 Caucasus/Russia/Central Asia
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'Baba Yaga is against.' How the fugitive opposition is preparing for the Russian presidential elections
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Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited.
by Mikhail Zakharov
[REGNUM] The Duma commission to investigate the interference of foreign states in the internal affairs of Russia records: after the start of the presidential campaign, the activation of NATO intelligence services, non-governmental organizations controlled by them and “agents of influence” began. This was stated by the head of the commission, State Duma deputy Vasily Piskarev.
Attempts are being made to organize illegal actions on Russian territory, provocateurs are being trained, in particular in the Baltic countries and Georgia, and pseudo-observers are being trained at foreign expense, Deputy Piskarev listed.
“They are forming a base to disrupt the elections... And here the “waiters” who have settled are not sleeping, they are simply hiding ,” noted the head of the Central Election Commission, Ella Pamfilova .
“The main goal of the Russian emigrant opposition is to delegitimize the elections in March 2024,” the foreign agent media outlet Voice of America quoted another foreign agent, former State Duma deputy Dmitry Gudkov , who emigrated through Ukraine to Bulgaria.
According to the Duma commission on countering interference, Mikhail Khodorkovsky joined the work of “delegitimization”, who non-publicly resumed the work of the Open Russia structure (an organization recognized as undesirable in the Russian Federation).
By 2023, the backbone of this structure has been “evacuated” from Russia and distributed in EU countries, an RT source reported in early December . The professional media studio is located in London (on Baker Street), and the work of Khodorkovsky’s network is carried out mainly through Lithuanian companies.
The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) published a statement back in October calling on European countries to consider Vladimir Putin “illegitimately elected” if he wins the vote in March.
In the opposition camp itself, disagreements have emerged regarding election tactics.
At the beginning of autumn, foreign agent blogger Maxim Katz (former municipal deputy of the Moscow Shchukino district from Yabloko, now living in Israel) told the foreign agent publication Meduza: taking into account the presidential campaign, the oppositionists should join forces. Katz is confident that there are enough citizens in Russia who sympathize with liberal politicians, and pro-Western media resources need to start working together and agree on a common strategy for working with the audience.
It was proposed to start the fight with a meeting in London, which Katz scheduled for October 8. Key functionaries of the Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK, the structure of Alexei Navalny , recognized as a terrorist and extremist , by a court decision included in the list of extremist organizations and banned in the Russian Federation), foreign agents Maria Pevchikh and Leonid Volkov (included in the list of extremists and terrorists) were invited .
“Get together the three of us, then convince the active opposition, then convince opinion leaders who sympathize with us. And then, together, we can convince the 30 million people watching us. And then, together with them, convince 60 million neutral-minded people,” Katz voiced his ambitious plans.
However, instead of unification, numerous mutual accusations of blackmail, spam attacks, lies, manipulation, inaction and ineffective approaches followed.
Navalny personally put an end to it. From Vladimir colony No. 9 (where he is serving a sentence for economic crimes), the founder of the FBK told Katz: “ go to hell with your coalitions,” because this is “an imitation of activity ” and “a fake.”
However, the public quarrel only says that the ambitious “Navalny team”, working from London (where Pevchikh lives) and Vilnius (where Volkov often appears) intends to act separately, without coordinating actions with Khodorkovsky’s structures, with the organizers of the “Vilnius Forums” or other emigrant centers.
Another scandal helped expose the Navalnists’ tactics. In mid-November, a foreign agent living in Brazil, one of the former leaders of the unregistered Libertarian Party, Mikhail Svetov, accused Navalny’s structures of owning a so-called bot farm - networks of well-paid (from 1.2 thousand to 1.8 thousand euros) paid commentators on social networks, which, by analogy with “troll factories,” are called “elf factories.”
The duties of the “elves” include publishing at least 120 posts or comments of the required content per day. The work is carried out through fake accounts on VKontakte and other social networks, obtained through phishing (stealing passwords) or purchased on the dark side of the Internet.
Recently, Navalnists, in connection with the March elections, launched another campaign “for Russia without Putin,” where Zhdanov’s bot farm may well be used as a tool. Navalnists call on their like-minded people who remain in Russia to paint graffiti, put up leaflets, make phone calls, but most importantly, spread propaganda on the Internet.
Work on social networks is on a grand scale. The high-ranking curators of the “elf factory” are representatives of the Free Russia Foundation, an undesirable organization in Russia with a head office in Washington and branches in Tbilisi and Vilnius. The immediate leader of the bot farm is called Oleg Stepanov, the former head of Navalny’s Moscow “headquarters” (“Navalny Headquarters” is a foreign agent recognized as an extremist organization in Russia).
In addition to working to discredit the elections, the non-systemic opposition will actively exploit the topic of SVO and mobilization and try to attract relatives of those mobilized and themselves, lawyer Ilya Remeslo told IA Regnum . The expert cites the example of the “Way Home” project, which posed as a community of wives of SVO participants, but in reality was the product of foreign media specialists and FBK employees.
“ Their idea is that they are trying to incite the relatives of those mobilized against the authorities, demanding the immediate withdrawal of all those mobilized from the front, which threatens disaster for Russia ,” says Remeslo. But they made a number of mistakes; it turned out that the project was directly carried out by those who work for Navalny, “and that’s where they got burned.”
Another “sector of attack” is interethnic relations. Ex-FBK employee Vitaly Serukanov recalled in a commentary to IA Regnum about the recent events in Dagestan, inspired by ex-State Duma deputy Ilya Ponomarev (foreign agent, included in the list of terrorists and extremists) and the Ukrainian special services.
Serukanov also recalled the intensification of the theme of “decolonization of Russia” with the creation of “post-Russian independent states,” which is regularly promoted in the emigrant environment. On the eve of the elections, this thesis is quite in demand among Western patrons of the opposition, Serukanov notes.
And after the elections, Remeslo believes, the non-systemic opposition, together with foreign politicians, will certainly take up the idea of recognizing the elected president as illegitimate.
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Posted by badanov 2023-12-14 00:00||
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