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| Ibid. 148 Susan Ormiston, Sex Tape Scandal Was Work of Putin, Says Russian Political Activist Exposed in Video CBC News, Apr. 9, 2016. 149 Ibid. 150 Adrian Chen, The Agency The New York Times, June 2, 2015. broadcaster reporting from the Kyiv square, handing him a small statue. 143 The Kremlin’s portrayal of its September 2015 involvement in the Syria conflict followed a similar pattern—a carefully- constructed narrative of Putin as the responsible and humanitarian actor who was intervening to stop U.S.-generated chaos in the Middle East. 144 State-sponsored media painted it as a successful fight against ISIS, though facts on the ground indicated that Russian bombs were in fact targeting the Syrian opposition to Bashar al- Assad. 145 Russian security services have long collected compromising material known as ‘‘kompromat’’ on their own citizens and disseminated it through friendly, pro-Kremlin media. This tactic was instrumental in Putin’s 1999 rise to power (see Chapter 1) and has continued to be deployed brazenly during his tenure to smear opposition activists. For example, the Nashi youth group, with Kremlin support, was reportedly behind the release of a 2010 video reel showing Victor Shenderovich, a prominent satirist and popular host of a television show that lampooned Russian officials, having sex with a woman suspected to be a Kremlin honey trap.’’ 146 The scandal prompted the release of information from other liberal media and opposition figures who said they had been entrapped by the same woman. 147 In 2016, grainy footage aired on pro-Kremlin channel NTV showing former Prime Minister and head of the PARNAS liberal opposition party, Mikhail Kasyanov, and another Russian opposition activist, Natalia Pelevina, in bed in a room together and exchanging criticisms about other members of the oppo- sition. 148 Pelevina claimed that the video must have been compiled at Putin’s direction to destroy Kasyanov, whose party was contending upcoming parliamentary elections, describing it as spliced together from perhaps six months worth of secret footage and edited for maximum effect. 149 Fake news and internet trolling have been used by the Kremlin against Russian citizens and were ramped up considerably after the 2011-2012 anti-Putin protests, according to investigative reporting by The New York Times. Seton reining in social media and online platforms, which were used by the opposition to disseminate electoral fraud allegations and mobilize protesters, the Kremlin used software to monitor public sentiment online and flooded social media with its own content, paying fashion and fitness bloggers to place pro-Kremlin material among innocuous posts about shoes and diets.’’ 150 Representatives of Alexey Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Fund lamented to a New York Times journalist about the atmosphere of hate and the proliferation of pro-Kremlin hashtags that permeated Russia’s Internet space after the protests, which clouded VerDate Mar 15 2010 04:06 Jan 09, 2018 Jkt PO 00000 Frm 00035 Fmt 6601 Sfmt 6601 S:\FULL COMMITTEE\HEARING FILES\COMMITTEE PRINT 2018\HENRY\JAN. 9 REPORT FOREI-42327 with DISTILLER 30 151 Ibid. 152 ‘‘Russia Censors Media By Blocking Websites and Popular Blog The Guardian, Mar. 14, 2014. US. Department of State, Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2014: Russia, at 33; Alexei Anishchuk, Russia Passes Law to Force Websites onto Russian Servers Reuters, July 4, 2014; Glenn Kates, ‘‘Russia’s ‘Cheburashka’ Internet Probably Not, But Here Are Some Other Options Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, May 6, 2014. 154 Ilya Khrennikov, Russia Threatens to Shut Facebook Over Local Data Storage Laws Bloomberg Technology, Sept. 26, 2017. Andrei Soldatov & Irina Borogan, The Red Web The Kremlin’s War on the Internet, PublicAffairs, at 291-294 Sept. 2015. Andrei Soldatov & Irina Borogan, Inside the Red Web Russia’s Back Door Onto the Internet Extract, The Guardian, Sept. 8, 2015. 157 Download 0.63 Mb. Share with your friends:
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