Disinformation Warfare, Part One - The Troll Farm | Investigation
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This is True Spies, the podcast that takes you deep inside the greatest secret missions of all time. Week by week, you'll hear the true stories behind the operations that have shaped the world we live in.

You'll meet the people who live life undercover. What do they know? What are their skills? And what would you do in their position? I'm Rhianna Needs, and this is True Spies from Spyscape Studios.

The ideology and the so-called motivations that you had before, which is building a socialist utopia or a socialist prison, that ideology has been stripped away. And all you have is kind of the pulsating emotional core of the desire to humiliate. I think we have to understand the magnitude of the challenge. Disinformation Warfare, Part One, The Troll Farm.

St. Petersburg, 450 miles northwest of Moscow, 2015. A concrete building sits unassumingly at a quiet intersection. It looks like any other office, but its windows are blocked by heavy drapes. There's no sign on the door, and there's an unusual number of security cameras. On the second floor, a journalist sits unnoticed at her desk.

She was one of the first journalists to really not just talk about this place because people had heard of it, but actually tell us how it worked. There are plenty of rumors about what goes on inside this building. Every floor is full of computers crammed into narrow rows, which are manned around the clock. The workers' hours are closely monitored. Smoking breaks are regulated. Those who work there call it the Internet Research Agency.

The journalist's name is Lyudmila Savchuk. She flicks her long curly hair over her shoulder to mask her plan. In her palm, she holds the firing pin that could blow the lid off Russia's propaganda strategy in the modern age, exposing the damage it's causing to the world. It's a flash drive, ready and waiting to download the evidence.

because the Internet Research Agency's employees have been doing their part to undermine democracy in the West, little by little. Their main vehicles: social media and news websites. For a few months now, Gliedmiller Savchuk has been working undercover as part of a "special projects" team, writing horoscopes and astrology articles.

She meant to build up an audience by not talking about politics, just talking about seeing your future and dreams and all that kind of stuff, but then would drop in things that would make Putin look great. So, you know, I have had a dream that Germany and Europe will fall and only Russia will remain standing. Other messages dispersed among Liedmiller's horoscopes include suggestions that the European Union is just a vassal of the United States and that Ukraine, which Russia is already invading, is governed by fascists.

Leidmiller's co-workers even launch online attacks against her journalist friends, making audiences doubt the authenticity of the facts they publish. At night, Leidmiller's friends and family regurgitate the things that she writes during her working day. The influence of the building feels inescapable. There are as many techniques as there are causes.

Before it was shut down in the summer of 2023, the Internet Research Agency, or IRA, also came to be known as the Troll Farm. It attacked, in great numbers, anyone that didn't fall in line with the Kremlin's worldview.

It created what looked like real social media accounts and communities. It posted antagonistic memes, commented on news broadcast videos, retweeted disinformation, and fueled bile in the comments section on newspaper websites. It sowed distrust in democracy and government. It was the ultimate influencer. And what made the farm especially powerful?

It was very hard to prove where this content, and these people, had come from, and who in the world was responsible. There's a public interest to expose the deeply sort of unethical, secretive and malign activities of this organization. When Leidmiller took up her undercover position in 2015, nobody yet understood the scale on which the farm was operating.

But soon to come was the 2016 US presidential election, Brexit, and an escalation of the assault on Ukraine. Disinformation experts believe that each of these events were affected by the handiwork of the people in this building. But when Liedmille took the flash drive full of evidence home with her, broke the story to the world, the world didn't respond as she'd expected.

This is the first of a special two-part True Spies miniseries in which we're doing something a little different. We're looking at how Russia's government uses various techniques to influence people, shape their thoughts and opinions, incite action, obscure facts, and carry out disguised attacks. Next week, we'll focus on the repercussions of these tactics on American democracy.

This week, however, we're exploring their effects closer to home, inside Russia itself and on its neighbours. Let's meet our expert guide to Russia and its influence operations. My name is Peter Pomerantsev. I am a non-fiction author specialising on propaganda. I look a lot at Russian propaganda, how it's changed in today's world, how we can fight it.

Peter's relationship to the Russian influence machine goes back a long way. So my parents were from the Soviet Union. My mother is from Kiev and my father is from Chechnya, so it's town in western Ukraine. And they were very politically active in the 1970s. My mother was a documentary maker. She reported from Chechnya quite a lot in the 90s. So she saw the sort of the early period.

violence that it was capable of. And my father was arrested by the KGB for reading illegal books. They were fighting against censorship. Peter's father dismissed all charges against him as baseless and unproven. He refused to give evidence about his friends, family and acquaintances. The tug of war between freedom of speech and censorship was a fight that Peter's parents, and many like them, coalesced around.

They knew and understood their enemy.

For them, the right to information and expression meant everything. There was a simple formula, just get more speech out there and democracy will win. But even when it wasn't overtly restricting Soviet citizens' liberties, the KGB created an environment of paranoia which worked to the same end. So when my father was being interrogated by the KGB for a year, everybody was preparing that he would be put away like most of his friends had been.

The Soviet regime concealed information regarding political arrests and interrogations, property searches, trials, beatings on the street and abuses in prison. But Peter's family developed surprising ways of communicating information with one another. My grandmother sort of developed this code based on sausages. If Peter's father were imprisoned, his mother told him,

She'd keep him abreast of what was going on in the outside world through the food she brought him during her visits. If his sausages were cut left to right... It means that we managed to get news about your arrest out to the greater world. It's been announced on international radio. Your name is being heard at conferences, which is very important. And if they were cut right to left... That means we failed. So sausages became a tool of communication.

The KGB were masters of intimidation and mind games. A KGB photographer lingered inconspicuously at the back of the wedding ceremony of Igor and Lina, Peter's parents. The couple finally escaped the constant surveillance in 1978 when they fled to West Germany. They later emigrated to London.

The Cold War ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Restrictions on foreign books and films were lifted, and historical records were declassified and released. The truth about the Chernobyl nuclear disaster finally came out. But the West's economic prosperity never materialized as promised in Europe's east.

Many citizens of the new Russia became disillusioned by the economic crisis, rapid privatization, corruption, the first Chechen war, and Premier Boris Yeltsin's very public drinking problem. In the same year, a new name joined the administration, one Vladimir Putin.

And now we're in a completely different world. And what that's changed, I think, beyond the obvious technology, is a kind of theory about the relationship between information and democracy. Forty-five years have now passed since Peter's parents fought for their freedoms. Gone are the days of total information suppression. We live in a world where there's an abundance of information. We're sort of drowning in information and disinformation. And how do we deal with that challenge? It wasn't meant to have any serious negative side effects.

Putin has held the prime ministership, or the presidency, in Russia since 1999 and has overseen constitutional amendments that allow him the possibility of remaining in power for many more years to come. It was pretty clear to me by 2010 that Russia was hurtling towards...

some sort of what I called at a time a postmodern dictatorship, because it wasn't a dictatorship like we'd known them before. They had different parties, allegedly. They had different media, allegedly. They had debates on television, allegedly. But really, it was becoming more and more centrally controlled. Putin's Kremlin offered a muscular vision for Russia, promoting a tightly controlled narrative about the president's own capabilities and that of the country's state apparatus.

Now, with online technology, Kremlin-backed agents could coordinate people to rise up, to fight against whoever they deemed the enemy, mobilize them to protest for the regime. It's also made it easier to suppress voices that speak out against the regime. Dissenters like Alexei Navalny and members of the protest and performance art group Pussy Riot have been imprisoned, the former dying in an Arctic prison.

But the Kremlin also employed less obvious methods. They sort of respond by overloading the information space with chaos, confusion, disinformation, and kind of blot out the chance to find truth that way. And you could call it a censorship through noise. The truth was supposed to set people free.

As Peter said, there used to be a formula. Just get more speech out there and democracy will win. I think now we see that you can have so many different voices that democracy starts to get broken into polarised bubbles which can't communicate with one another. And that sense of a sort of common community can dissolve as well. The old maxims, the ones Peter's parents lived by, no longer apply.

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Hello, listeners. This is Anne Bogle, author, blogger, and creator of the podcast, What Should I Read Next? Since 2016, I've been helping readers bring more joy and delight into their reading lives. Every week, I take all things books and reading with a guest and guide them in discovering their next read. This is Anne Bogle, author, blogger, and creator of the podcast, What Should I Read Next?

They share three books they love, one book they don't, and what they've been reading lately. And I recommend three titles they may enjoy reading next. Guests have said our conversations are like therapy, troubleshooting issues that have plagued their reading lives for years, and possibly the rest of their lives as well. And of course, recommending books that meet the moment, whether they are looking for deep introspection to spur or encourage a life change, or a frothy page-turner to help them escape the stresses of work, or a book that they've been reading for years.

school, everything. You'll learn something about yourself as a reader, and you'll definitely walk away confident to choose your next read with a whole list of new books and authors to try. So join us each Tuesday for What Should I Read Next? Subscribe now wherever you're listening to this podcast and visit our website, whatshouldireadnextpodcast.com to find out more. We're going to check back in with Liedmiller at the internet research agency Troll Farm in a minute.

But first, let's look at Russia's motivations for operating like this. Propaganda is one of these words which has been so overused over the last 100 years. And I think now is particularly overused during this new wave of propaganda that has emerged in the digital era.

According to Peter, that word itself, propaganda, has now become weaponized by the Russians. I mean, they often frame things as an answer to what they say others are doing to them. That's quite classic for them. So human rights NGOs, the BBC, all these sort of tools are part of a coordinated information war against Russia to undermine Russia. And therefore they have to strike back. Everything is dismissed as propaganda that you don't like.

Today's autocratic leaders are doing things differently to their forebears. If before you had a socialist or communist ideological utopia that you at least reference as your motivation, now it's just raw emotions and quite naked desire to dominate, to humiliate others, and that's embraced very openly. But if the presentation is more outwardly aggressive, the tools these autocrats use are often far subtler.

You need lots of things to keep people distracted, scared, entertained. You need to crawl into different audiences and treat different audiences with different messages. Social media allows the Kremlin to target specific sections of society all over the world. A very easy and cheap way of doing this is fabricating and spreading conspiracy theories. Conspiracy theories muddle the facts.

challenge the historical record and reshape how people perceive the world. Often these theories do not support ideology. They replace it. I testified to Congress that Russian propaganda was a problem in 2015, certainly before Brexit or the US election. Authoritarian regimes now maintain control by pushing forward narratives that undermine people's trust in functional, honest systems.

This is known as white jamming. When autocrats white jam their people, audiences start to see a questionable, if difficult to prove, motive behind even the most harmless action, as we'll see in Estonia and eastern Ukraine shortly. As their cynicism grows, their belief in the feasibility of alternatives wanes, as does the belief in their own power to make a difference.

Those who deal in disinformation can concoct this feeling of malaise and serve it on a global scale. They manipulate discourse online, through various tools, through online publications, through various laws, through troll farms. So it's a much richer approach to controlling society through information and disinformation. We started our story at the desk of Russian journalist Lidmila Sabchuk.

who first infiltrated St Petersburg's Internet Research Agency in 2014, a troll farm that uses online influence techniques to mold public opinion. She was a journalist and activist, and she'd become aware that critics of the Kremlin were being attacked online, and she'd heard about this troll farm. She managed to get in there, pretend to work there, while all the time collecting evidence about it. And a friend invited her to work there. She'd been a journalist. Said, come and do this job instead.

The manager had concerns about Leidmiller's investigative background. They need journalists that would toe the farm's political line and not question it. Leidmiller waves this off. Oh, come on. Who here hasn't done that sort of work back in the past? It's kind of like journalism, but, you know, a bit more innovative. But it pays really well. Once Leidmiller settled into her work at the farm and spent a few months there, she came to realize the existential danger it now posed to the outside world.

The farm goes into overdrive.

Influence is achieved not by having a few powerful influencers with many followers, but by many small ones communicating incessantly. Say it was the Ukrainians who were behind it, or these guys, or the Western spy agencies who were behind it. Say it's a false flag. Muddy the waters as much as you can in all your messaging. Employees at the farm were not secret service officers or PR gurus.

Many were young journalists from solid educational backgrounds who, Leidmiller observed, didn't hesitate to smear, ridicule and shame those they were told to target. Leidmiller was stunned by the scale of the attacks. As we'll see, entire countries would be brought to their knees. She was conflicted, as she'd made friends there, but she had to stick to the mission.

She inserted the flash drive into her computer, hand hovering to conceal it, hair hanging loose over her shoulder to thwart prying eyes. Now, she had all the information she needed.

who did what, how many people worked there, what sort of instructions they were given. And she did absolutely heroic, heroic work. Leidmiller anonymously handed over the information to two journalists from two independent Russian newspapers.

She expected that ordinary Russians would be outraged that they were being manipulated by the farm, and that the entire globe would be outraged at the extent to which Russia was influencing people's behavior beyond its borders. But Liedmiller was disappointed with the reaction. There was a kind of acceptance of it. Of course, this is what happens. When she returned to work the next day, the farm was in a frenzy, denying its own existence.

No troll factories exist. And these are all fabrications by paid-for journalists. Management scoured surveillance video footage and interviewed the workers to find them all. Leidmiller left the farm before she was discovered and came out publicly as the person who'd infiltrated it. She thought it was outrageous and people just accepted it. People from her side accepted it. And she was very confused by that.

The farm then pointed its eye at her, claiming she was a spy, a traitor, even a sexual deviant. Her friends also turned on her. When the death threats and abuse became too much, she visited a psychotherapist, who asked her if she was a paid-for traitor. A second psychotherapist repeated the refrain.

She had left the farm only to find its online influence was everywhere in the real world. Meanwhile, the site on which the farm stood made preparations to expand to three times its size before setting its sights on the US presidential election in 2016. Only then, when its reach had so clearly extended far beyond Russia itself, would the West listen to Liedmiller.

When the story of the troll farms broke in the West, which was after 2016 and Russian interference in the US elections, through the very same troll farm, there was outrage, but it was very politicized. People who were against Donald Trump were outraged. People who were for Donald Trump said, oh, everyone does this and it didn't have any influence anyway. But then it was very hard to do anything about it legally. According to the Computational Propaganda Research Project at Oxford University...

Over 30 million Americans shared the IRA's sensationalist, divisive and unfounded information among their friends, families and communities. Before it set its sights across the Atlantic, the farm honed and perfected its influence techniques. Of course, the Kremlin didn't technically own this farm. It's in private ownership.

The person who did own it is intriguing for several reasons. So this, the Internet Research Agency was owned by Evgeny Prokoshin? Yes. You heard that right.

Yevgeny Prigozhin. Who was, until recently, one of Putin's businessmen who delivered various services for Putin. Propaganda. He ran a mercenary company for him and he also catered the Kremlin's food. He was the Kremlin's chef, in a way. He was a businessman and this was a business. Listeners might be more familiar with his role as leader of the Wagner Group, a private military organisation with close ties to the Kremlin.

In June 2023, Prokosin turned his fighters on Moscow, saying that the Ukraine war was based on lies, lies his farm had helped to spread. Two months later, Russia announced that Prokosin had died in a plane crash. The details were confusing, with many conflicting reports of what happened.

But researchers and analysts determined an explosion brought down the plane. Nobody can say for sure who's responsible. So, the Russian state didn't own the troll farm. A mercenary did. The Kremlin had plausible deniability if accused of actioning these online influence operations. There is no law in most countries banning disinformation. Lies are not illegal.

Tech companies now talk about wanting to curb something they call coordinated inauthentic behavior. The legal bit might be interference in an election in an illegal way, but simply sitting around and producing tens of thousands of fake accounts on Twitter or Facebook, that's not a bookable offense. The various attempts to regulate the space are highly complex.

In 2013, the events at Kyiv's Maidan Nezalezhnosti, or "Independent Square," marked the initiation of a new tactic adopted by the Kremlin to defeat an opponent by setting off a chain of events intended to cause its internal decline. Ukrainian President Yanukovych had abruptly abandoned a long-standing promise to sign a European Union Association Agreement.

Instead, taking a multi-billion dollar loan from the Kremlin. His police then beat up students, protesting for less corruption in government in Kyiv's Independence Square. When Peter was writing his book, "This is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality,"

He met a journalist named Tetiana Martichak. She had been active during the protests. Tetiana was involved in one of the sort of positive uses of social media. It's not only used for negative things. Helping advanced people-powered protests, organizing protests, gathering people, motivating people to stand up. And obviously we saw that in the Arab Spring, which was a very idealistic moment when there was a lot of promise around the use of social media.

At her father's flat, Tetiana turned on her television. She was an activist who was gathering people to protest, which was a process that was both exhilarating but also very scary because at one point the protests got very violent and she was like, what does she do? Tetiana was a financial journalist who'd garnered a substantial following as the administrator of a Facebook page for one of the prominent political opposition groups.

As the uprising unfolded, it became clear to her that the internet was becoming a battleground and that her capacity to sway people's opinions could potentially impact the lives of many. This young woman, dressed in her pajamas at home, found herself shouldering a tremendous responsibility. The protests were broadcast on TV for everybody to see. Snipers were shooting at people indiscriminately.

Tetiana knew that with one quick post, she could mobilize many of her followers to come out onto the square. Does she keep on asking for people to come? Does that put them in danger? What is she, a soldier, an activist, a journalist? Tetiana ultimately refused to use her online influence to send more people to the square. 103 protesters died in the massacre. The Maidan uprising had ripple effects that Ukraine is still feeling today.

Yanukovych was ousted from power, eventually seeking refuge in Russia. Ukraine rolled back the constitutional amendments that he had enacted. Ukrainians dubbed these events the Revolution of Dignity. After the Revolution of Dignity in Kiev, which millions of people came to support and was very driven from below and really caught many politicians by surprise, you had something that was completely orchestrated in eastern Ukraine. The Kremlin had been made to look weak.

But long term, this was a setback, as opposed to an outright defeat. So it took steps to reassert its influence, beginning with the troll farm.

The narrative of the Maidan uprising was reconfigured by the trolls, who presented it as a broader story of Ukrainians being controlled by covert American forces, trying to bring about regime change. They churned out fake footage and wrote articles about how Iraq and Libya had had regime change thrust upon them by the West, and how its people had suffered as a result. The message was simple.

This could be on its way to Russia if you, the people, let it. A new influence technique was being tested by Russia. That of parodying people-led uprisings. Learn from the likes of Tetiana and the Maidan. Make your content look authentic, people-led. Inspire them to act of their own volition. A lot of time what the Russians do is sort of almost parody. And through parodying, you kind of devalue the former. Then...

Russia set its sights on Crimea. Where Russia used essentially mercenaries that it controlled to seize buildings, administrative buildings. Russian TV and social media feeds were inundated with invented stories about how a coalition of far-right Ukrainian nationalist organizations were preparing to target and harm ethnic Russians in Crimea.

Supposedly genuine Facebook community groups, created by the farm, inspired by the Maidan uprising, incited protest. A lot of that imitated the behaviors of a People Power revolution. Emotionally driven advertising angered ethnic Russians, sowing the seeds of doubt that Ukraine had abandoned them. The largest Crimean city, Sevastopol, became a focus for Russian activity.

The Kremlin arranged for pro-Russian Ukrainians, Cossack collectives, clergy from the Orthodox Church, and separatist political factions, many funded by the Kremlin, to hold demonstrations begging Russia for unification. To protect them from the far-right Ukrainians, even to protect them from being abandoned by the Ukrainian government. The troll farm was extremely active. To the people reading and watching online,

The movement felt organic. It felt like real people, your communities, were asking you to act and to call for reunification with Russia. So you had this sort of orchestrated imitation of what was going on in Kyiv, but actually very, very controlling, we now know. The Kremlin also organized a controversial referendum in which the majority of voters apparently supported rejoining Russia.

And then you had all these websites popping up saying this is the Russian Spring and this is a genuine people-powered movement and it's got nothing to do with Russia at all. Nothing to do with Russia. This is very local. Obviously being run from the Troll Farm in St. Petersburg and very few genuine protests. You maybe have a few organised protests which are then filmed, used for pictures and put on social media. In eastern Ukraine, disarray, hostility and fear escalated.

These copycat uprisings were built to order and used as the precursor to physical Russian intervention. The common practices of war had been flipped, all because Putin's trolls had conquered the digital landscape. They don't particularly deny it, by the way. It's like they want to seem as big and as scary as they can. They're like, you know, what are you going to do about it? During this period, Putin went on international television and asserted that there were no Russian soldiers in Crimea.

Later, he admitted on a television documentary that the soldiers, who displayed no insignia, had, in fact, belonged to Russian military units. The old truth was irrelevant. This was the new truth. You have to very quickly say, stop lying, and we're going to act based on our intelligence. Your propaganda games won't work with us. I mean, that's what you have to do. Whether we would do that, I don't know, but that's what you need to do.

The annexation of Crimea was labeled "the most amazing information warfare blitzkrieg in history" by the NATO Supreme Allied Commander, Philip Breedlove. A similar thing happened in the city of Severodonetsk, in Ukraine's easternmost region, the Donbas. In 2014, rumors stirred online that those same Ukrainian right-wing organizations were on their way to attack the statue of Lenin.

a symbol of the town's pro-Russian leanings. The whole story was made up. The town was seized by separatists backed by Russian special forces, and the blue and yellow Ukrainian flag was lowered. Propaganda is not always about persuasion. It's often about giving people the excuse to do what they want to do anyway, validating what you know certain groups want to do anyway. Estonia is a small country on the Baltic Sea, which also borders Russia.

In 1991, the country gained independence from the Soviet Union.

And in 2004, it joined both the EU and NATO. NATO is essentially a military defence pact, which thinks about war and very much the fear of physical invasion and a clear enemy doing an easily discernible thing. In 2007, pre-Crimea and Ukraine, the Kremlin exposed the divisions between Estonians and the Russians living there without firing a single bullet.

and without a single soldier entering the country. Estonia was kind of used as a sort of a place that the Russians wanted to show the countries around them that they hadn't escaped, that they were still vulnerable, and that Russia could still come for them and no one could do anything about it. A statue known as the Bronze Soldier sat in Estonia's capital Tallinn.

commemorating those who fell in the Soviet Red Army's final battle to push the Nazis out of Estonia. Since the Soviet times, every year on the 9th of May, a few Russian nationalists and war veterans would gather at a statue. Counter-marches occurred in the same spot. There's still a sizeable ethnic Russian population in Estonia that arrived there during the occupation. Roughly a third of the Estonian population consisted of Russians or Russian speakers.

Russian state TV, watched by over 70% of the population of Estonia, would claim the Soviet Union had never invaded Estonia, that it was actually Estonian communist forces who had invited the Soviet Union in. But since Estonia had sealed its independence, the Russian minority there had felt dispirited and disconnected. Prescriptions weren't available in Russian. Street signs were no longer written in their native tongue.

The statue was hardly contentious before Putin came to power. But in March 2007, the Estonian parliament voted to move the bronze soldier to a military cemetery for reasons of keeping the peace. Russian politicians and the media were disgusted. Keen to capitalize on the unrest, the troll farm activated and pulled at the societal schism that existed between Estonian and Russian populations.

Along with the conspiracy theories about the handling of the statue, that it had been cut in half, treated without respect, even demolished, the hyper-partisan Russian language media amplified narratives of exclusion, disenfranchisement and frustration of ethnic Russians in the area. Ordinary people were encouraged to head to the streets.

So they helped organize riots in Estonia. They had a massive propaganda campaign during the riots, which kind of stoking them, but also sort of claiming that ethnic Russians had been murdered by Estonians. As the statue's removal was underway on a cold night in April, it was halted by mobs of ethnic Russians pelting Estonian police with bricks and bottles. Estonia was advancing rapidly with technological investment and innovation.

But the day after the riots, employees of the Estonian government, newspapers, TV channels and banks arrived at work to find their computer systems down, crippled by a colossal cyber attack of the type known as denial of service. When you send so many messages at a website, making this very basic, that it kind of brings it down. So it was a kind of an example that we can bring your country to a standstill.

without really touching you. People couldn't access their money. The government couldn't function. Estonia had been paralyzed by the combination of propaganda, street riots and cyber attacks. Again, not one bullet had been fired. You can't immediately prove in a court of law sort of level that it is Russia behind them. And it might be quite obvious in many ways. There might be open fingerprints.

Estonia was now in NATO, and Article 5 states that an attack against one ally is considered as an attack against all. But all NATO member states must agree unanimously to invoke Article 5. So as Russia's influence widens, it becomes increasingly difficult to come to the aid of a member state that's been attacked.

If one of your NATO members is actually very pro-Russian, doesn't want to get involved and says, well, we don't really know who's behind this, then that will delay the response. So Estonia was left helpless by a non-violent and untraceable act. The pro-Kremlin youth group Nashi, a pro-Putin unit, claimed credit before defensively claiming the Russian government had had nothing to do with it. Patriotic trolling was the tactic.

The victim happened to be an entire country. So it's almost like a statement of we're so powerful we can get away with it. The more we admit to what they're doing, the more we need to respond. We still don't want to use the word war because that ties us into all sorts of commitments. And that means we have to do something. Estonia became a leader in cybersecurity and internet technologies in Europe and half-jokingly thanked its former Soviet master for perfecting its contingency planning.

Many other countries weren't so lucky. Russia does all sorts of conflict. In Syria, we saw them really doing a dry run for Ukraine in the sense of seeing how many war crimes they could commit, including backing Assad as he did, using barrel bombs to hit civilian objects, but then using their own air force to commit war crimes. And could they get away with it?

Since the Cold War, Russia has constantly been widening the battlefield. We see the propaganda effect is as important as any kind of physical effect. And I suppose what they've become the masters of, up until the invasion of Ukraine, was doing these quite focused efforts, which could be quite contained, but which told a huge story about impunity, how democracies were fragile, how you could stand up to the

the democratic elite countries and how the tide of history was changing. In that sense, they've always been about propaganda. They're trying to tell a story and deliver on effects through radical but quite controlled actions. The most recent full-scale assault on Ukraine signals another change of tack. This is one where it doesn't appear as if the propaganda brigades were in the loop about the invasion. It was kept to a small group of people right until the end.

And many people in the Russian system didn't know about it, including the foreign minister, by all accounts. Now that the war is underway, Putin's Kremlin promotes the idea that Ukraine was created by Russia and that the land it sits on is Russian.

that Ukraine's aggression has left it with no choice other than military intervention, and that NATO membership of Ukraine would serve as a direct threat to the security of Russia. Even though they had many disasters and they've been greatly diminished by this conflict, the fact is they're still standing and punching. And that might almost be enough. From imitating people-powered uprisings to flooding the online world with disinformation,

The weaponization of information is frightening, but there are forces out there fighting back. The paradox that we face is that we have to reveal and expose what Russia and others are doing without sinking into their cynicism. The ultimate guardians of democracy are its citizens. Look at the stories of Tetiana and Leadmilla. They stayed focused on reality, held their leaders accountable, and created their own spheres of influence.

But they very often lived in fear of their lives, targeted with labels like foreign agent and traitor. I think Russia was quite innovative in a negative way, but innovative in really utilising this both in domestic propaganda, firstly to go after dissidents, to go after people who oppose them, and then internationally as a core part of their international and foreign policy propaganda. MUSIC

Peter's parents lived in a world starved of information. And back then, it seemed hard to imagine the world would flip into an era of information abundance. But what do they make of this new world?

My parents, like many older dissidents, were onto Putin really early. So when I was living in Russia, 2001, 2010, they were pretty categorical already that Russia was going down a bad path. I was actually the naive Western. I was like, no, it's just a bumpy road to democracy. But 2008 was when the penny dropped, when Russia invaded Georgia, that something was deeply wrong. And by the time I'd left in 2009, 2010, I was just like, whoa, this is onto a path of somewhere very dark. I'm Rhiannon Needs.

Join me next week on True Spies for part two of our deep dive into Russian influence operations. Disclaimer. The views expressed in this podcast are those of the subject. These stories are told from their perspective and their authenticity should be assessed on a case-by-case basis.

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Ahead of the 2016 election battle between Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican Donald Trump, the farm immediately saw results by using an unusual tactic, playing both sides of the political spectrum. I believe at one point there was a protest, a real-life protest that Russia had supported in Texas with pro-gun people on one side of the street and anti-gun people on the other side of the street, and Russia had supported both sides and sent them both there.

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