Russia already hacking midterms; Russia in Africa: Death and diamonds; Maria Butina’s influence, and more

Russia’s latest attempt to smear Bellingcat over MH17: Unsuccessful (Polygraph)
On August 3, First Deputy Representative for of Russia’s Permanent Mission to the United Nations Dmitry Polyanskiy published an open letter in response to an article published in the Washington Post on the topic of combatting Russian disinformation. The article also quotes Polyanskiy himself. The Russian representative’s letter focuses on the open source investigation organization Bellingcat, which he accuses of promoting claims based on “fake evidence” and being funded by “American and Western funds that traditionally support anti-Russian campaigns.” This is yet another attack in a series, a Russian government campaign against Bellingcat targeted for its role in the investigation of the downing of the Malaysian passenger jet, which killed all 268 people abroad and for which Russia was officially incriminated.

Beyond the NRA: Maria Butina’s peculiar bid for Russian influence (Matthew Rosenberg, Mike McIntire, Michael LaForgia, Andrew E. Kramer, and Elizabeth Dias, New York Times)
In bringing charges against Maria Butina, 29, last month, federal prosecutors described her activities as part of a campaign, supported by Russian intelligence, to use gun rights as a Trojan horse to make her way into conservative groups and advance Moscow’s interests in the United States. While the charging documents focus on her alleged efforts to infiltrate the National Rifle Association, interviews with more than two dozen people in Russia and the United States show that her attempts at connecting with prominent American conservatives extended beyond making inroads with the gun-rights group. The interviews, along with previously unreported emails obtained by the New York Times, also reveal new details about her ties to the two older American men she relied on to make her way in the United States: Paul Erickson, a Republican operative with whom she struck up a romance, and George O’Neill, a Rockefeller relative and conservative writer.

Senate asks Julian Assange to testify in Russia investigation (Spencer Ackerman, Daily Beast)
WikiLeaks, a central figure in the 2016 election and the recipient of an email trove stolen by Russian intelligence, is ‘considering the offer.’

Twitter botnets are becoming more sophisticated (Justin Lynch, Fifth Domain) Twitter bots are becoming more sophisticated, at the same time that Trump administration officials are warning of an ongoing Russian disinformation campaign fueled by automated social media accounts. A wave of Twitter accounts are spoofing celebrity profiles, engaging in fraud and using verified profiles that have been hacked, according to new research from Duo Security, a protection company based out of Michigan. Researchers from there will present their research at the Black Hat conference this week in Las Vegas.

Why aren’t we worrying about Russia attacking our power supply? (Betsy McCaughey, New York Post) Kremlin-connected cyber-criminals are capable of turning off our electric power from afar while power-plant employees watch helplessly. In the last two weeks, the Department of Homeland Security held four briefings, including one in New York City on July 31, warning that Russian hackers are already practicing how to throw the switch and cause a blackout in the United States. We’d have no lights, no gas at the pump, no life support in hospitals, no mass transit, no food supply. Yet nearly all DC pols are ignoring the danger.

How Russia persecutes its dissidents using U.S. courts (Natasha Bertrand, The Atlantic)
Russia’s requests to Interpol for Red Notices—the closest instrument to an international arrest warrant—against Kremlin opponents are being met with increasing deference by the Department of Homeland Security.
The author examines “Russia’s abuse of Interpol and the American court system to persecute the Kremlin’s rivals in the United States” through the story of “Sasha” (a pseudonym), a pro-democracy activist who was detained in the tiny Russian republic of Kalmykia by plainclothes police, spent seven months in prison and “pleaded guilty without knowing why. In court weeks later, Russian prosecutors revealed the substantive case against him for the first time: Sasha, along with two others, had been accused and convicted of kidnapping someone, holding him in an apartment and beating him repeatedly with a hammer. Sasha maintains that he never learned who the alleged victim was… But he served a brief prison sentence and was released on probation in December 2012, at which point he fled to the United States on a B-2 tourist visa and applied for asylum at the end of 2013. … In October 2017, Sasha and his wife were driving to work in Atlanta when they were pulled over by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers.” They told Sasha that Interpol “had issued a Red Notice at Russia’s behest, alerting authorities that he had violated the terms of his probation by traveling to the U.S. years earlier. … Russia’s requests to Interpol to issue Red Notices—the closest instrument to an international arrest warrant in use today—against Kremlin opponents are being met with increasing deference by the Department of Homeland Security, according to immigration attorneys and experts in transnational crime and corruption” with whom the author spoke. According to the Justice Department, she writes, “‘the United States does not consider a Red Notice alone to be a sufficient basis for the arrest of a subject because it does not meet the requirements for arrest under the 4th Amendment to the Constitution’… But the Department of Homeland Security and U.S. immigration courts are effectively facilitating ‘backdoor extraditions,’ as one immigration attorney said, in their reliance on Red Notices as a basis for detention and, ultimately, removal. … Michelle Estlund, a criminal defense attorney who focuses on Interpol defense work [said]…, ‘There is a disconnect between our decision to not have an extradition treaty with Russia and the decision to allow Russia to circumvent the extradition process using Red Notices. The effect is that we are removing people to countries that we would not normally extradite to.’ … Two other Russian nationals currently being detained in the U.S. on the basis of a Red Notice argue that DHS and the immigration courts have relied exclusively on Russian charges—which they contend are politically motivated—to keep them detained and deny them bond hearings.”

Death, diamonds and Russia’s Africa project (Leonid Bershidsky, Bloomberg)
The killing of three reporters in the Central African Republic pulls a private, pro-Kremlin military company out of the shadows.
The author writes that “[t]he murder of three Russian journalists last week in a remote area of the Central African Republic, the world’s poorest country according to the World Bank, has turned a spotlight on what looks like a big Kremlin play for influence and resources in Africa. Where China has spent decades and billions of dollars trying to entrench itself there, Russia is offering its brute force and strong appetite for risk. It’s already making headway. The three journalists, Orkhan Dzhemal, Alexander Rastorguev and Kirill Radchenko, were in the Central African Republic working on an investigative film about the Wagner private military company. That’s a secretive Russian contractor linked by news reports to Yevgeny Prigozhin, a St. Petersburg catering entrepreneur close to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Prigozhin is also one of 12 people indicted in the U.S. along with the Internet Research Agency, a troll farm he funded that has been caught up in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. Wagner has provided mercenaries to fight in eastern Ukraine and Syria, and it’s probably also present in the Central African Republic and neighboring Sudan.” Back in March, Bershidsky writes, Russia said it was working with the CAR government “to explore the country’s natural resources on a concession basis. At the same time, … Russia had sent weapons along with five military and 170 civilian instructors to train the nation’s military forces. … The mining concessions and the ‘civilian instructors’ … appear to be more closely linked than the Foreign Ministry let on. Africa Intelligence, a Paris-based investigative and research outfit, reported in July that the government of the Central African Republic had begun extracting diamonds on an alluvial site not far from the capital, Bangui, with the help of a company called Lobaye Invest. The company, according to Africa Intelligence, is a subsidiary of the St. Petersburg firm M Invest, founded by Prigozhin. Africa Intelligence reported that Wagner fighters were delivering mining equipment to the site in armored trucks. … This is a business model Wagner has reportedly used in Syria, where it lends its private troops to the regime of President Bashar al-Assad, and in return receives a share of revenues from the oil wells and refineries the troops recover from regime opponents. … Like Syrian oil, Central African Republic diamonds are a commodity on which no ordinary business can get its hands. In the 1960s, the country exported half a million carats of diamonds a year, a volume that would make it the seventh-biggest exporter in the world today. … Another of the country’s major resources is gold, and the three Russian reporters died while trying to drive out to a gold mine, apparently to check on Russian presence there. … Putin’s Russia has sought to restore its Soviet-era influence throughout the developing world, and its activity in Africa is not limited to the Central African Republic. It’s worth watching for reports of Russian concessions in other nations, such as Sudan, Chad, Rwanda and Gabon. The Wagner business model is well suited to the region where a forceful presence can be a prerequisite for successful business—and where looking into how this business is conducted can easily get one killed.”

The Russia that Republicans love doesn’t exist (Christian Caryl, Washington Post)
The American right is mistaken when it idealizes Putin as a defender of “conservative values.” Whatever values Putin has are entirely situational — he’ll do whatever it takes to boost Russia’s power and his own (because the two are intertwined), Christian Caryl writes. American evangelicals who come to Russia seeking allies in the fight against unbelief have proven equally gullible, he adds: “Their official interlocutor, the Russian Orthodox Church, had a long history of collaboration with the Soviet regime, one that extends into the present. The church is less a religious community than an arm of the state, which repays that loyalty by making life hard for potential rivals. Putin would never allow evangelical Protestants or Catholics to compete in a free marketplace of religious ideas.”

Believe it or not, Trump’s following a familiar script on Russia (Robert Kagan, Washington Post)
It is one of Putin’s greatest triumphs that his narrative of grievance is widely accepted today in the American academy and by large segments of both political parties, notes Brookings analyst Robert Kagan. As Michael McFaul [in his new book] explains, however, it is mostly a myth, designed by Putin to justify his increasingly autocratic and personalistic rule to his own people, Kagan writes: “American and European actions after the Cold War did not prevent cooperation with Russia during the 1990s, after 9/11 or during the first two years of the Obama administration. The United States and Europe provided billions of dollars in aid to Russia and sought to help integrate Russia into the world economy. The United States created post-Cold War security and economic arrangements such as the NATO-Russia Council, the Group of Eight and the expanded Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe to strengthen ties with Moscow and give it a greater say in global councils.”

Leaked document: Putin lobbied Trump on arms control (Bryan Bender, Politico)
A list of issues he shared with Trump in Helsinki suggests Russia wants to continue traditional nuclear talks with the U.S.— but doesn’t answer all questions about their meeting.