It was Yevgeny Prigozhin who, in March 2021, offered half a million dollars to any Russian who would kidnap me back to Russia. This action fits the same pattern. Angered by my support for the Dossier Center and its investigation into his African machinations, he made a series of inflammatory public statements about me, none of which bore any relation to the truth. Yevgeny Prigozhin is not interested in the truth, of course, but he is interested in deflecting attention away from himself and – in this instance – from an announcement a few weeks earlier that the American authorities had issued a warrant for his arrest. The FBI had accused him and 12 other Kremlin operatives of ‘involvement in a conspiracy to defraud the United States … for the purposes of interfering with the US political system, including the 2016 Presidential Election’. The charges detailed Prigozhin’s role in the Kremlin’s cyber-hacking campaign to undermine Hillary Clinton’s election bid and the FBI was offering a $250,000 reward for information leading to his conviction.
When I was asked about the case by journalists from the Moscow Echo radio station, I said that Prigozhin seemed to be facing quite serious allegations that should be properly resolved by an open and impartial legal process. I expressed the hope that such issues might one day be addressed by an independent judiciary in the territory of Russia. Prigozhin’s response was typical. ‘I am a patriot and a good guy; and Khodorkovsky is a villain! He is a former oligarch who bribed the country’s top leadership in the 1990s and stole huge funds from the people … The American charges against me are for non- existent crimes, but Khodorkovsky killed people in large numbers!’ Asked why he thought it was he, rather than Khodorkovsky, who was being accused by the FBI, Prigozhin gave an enigmatic answer: ‘I am a scapegoat for the US authorities to cover up the massive gap between the deep state and the [American] people … the only way I will ever go to jail in the United States is if some traitor in [Russian] law enforcement decides to betray the motherland. Luckily, I don’t think that is a real possibility in Russia, because in our country there are many, many more patriots than there are liberals willing to take dirty money from the West.’
Anti-Western invective has become the go-to excuse for anything that reflects badly on Putin’s Russia. For many Russians, this rhetoric is enough to convince them that the motherland is under attack from hostile Western forces and that the patriotic response is to rally to the support of the Kremlin.
In early 2018, I was invited to the hearings organised by the US Republican Party, at which Mark Zuckerberg was asked how Facebook was dealing with the threat of fake news. His answer was that people should be provided with honest information and this would allow them to figure out the truth for themselves.
In his subsequent speech to the US Senate in April that year, Zuckerberg admitted that fake news was being used as a tool by agents acting on behalf of Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin to influence people’s thinking in the battle between the Kremlin and the West, and that Facebook and other platforms had been hijacked.
We build technical tools to try to identify when people are creating fake accounts – especially large networks of fake accounts, like the Russians have – in order to remove all of that content … But it’s clear now that we didn’t do enough to prevent these tools from being used for harm, as well. And that goes for fake news, for foreign interference in elections, and hate speech, as well as developers and data privacy.
Putin’s propagandists were promoting conspiracy theories and anti-Western paradigms, driving them into people’s minds by the ruthless use of fake accounts, fake postings and fake activist groups, amplified exponentially through the power of social media. Because Western democracy was itself in crisis, beset by doubt and self-questioning, it proved singularly vulnerable to the Kremlin’s subversion. Putin was able to use the disputes and conflicts that were dogging politics in the West, fanning extremist rhetoric and promoting radical views.
