ELECTION INTERFERENCEUkraine Offers Lessons for Russia’s 2024 Election Interference
For all the media attention on the domestic political dimensions, the Kremlin’s interference in the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections (and the 2018 midterms) included a significant focus on shaping U.S. policy toward Ukraine. Exerting influence on U.S. Ukraine policy Ukraine has long been a goal of Russian disinformation efforts, so American policymakers must prepare now for this influence effort to reemerge in 2024.
Vladimir Putin’s illegal, aggressive, large-scale war on Ukraine is a horrific reminder of his deep-seated desire to attack and control the country. The Russian government has been fixated on reasserting control of Ukraine since the 2014 Maidan Revolution, when Ukrainians took to the streets to oust Kremlin-friendly dictator Viktor Yanukovych.
Yet this has also been an overlooked theme of Russian election interference in the United States, as the authors detail in a new issue brief for the Atlantic Council. For all the media attention on the domestic political dimensions, the Kremlin’s interference in the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections (and the 2018 midterms) included a significant focus on shaping U.S. policy toward Ukraine. As Putin indicates that he is more willing than ever to use violence to control Kyiv, American policymakers must prepare now for this influence effort to reemerge in 2024.
In 2014, Ukrainian citizens organized and mobilized in protest against the Yanukovych regime, and they used internet technologies to aid in those efforts—including a EuroMaidan Facebook page and popular Twitter accounts @EuroMaydan and @EuroMaydan_eng (the English-language version). Putin already viewed opposition movements as illegitimate, instead believing they must be covertly orchestrated by foreign powers, and this belief had been hardened by the “color revolutions” that swept former Soviet republics in the early 2000s. Hence, when Ukrainians mobilized in 2014, including with the use of Western social media platforms, the Kremlin saw foreign efforts to undermine its control of Ukraine.
Moscow’s burgeoning online disinformation efforts—initially focused on delegitimizing Russian oppositionists—turned their sights on the post-revolution government in Kyiv. The Russian security services created illegitimate “news” outlets to smear newly elected Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko and his administration, as well as the Barack Obama administration supporting them—foremost, then Vice President Joseph Biden. For instance, a website called “South Front,” later revealed to be a front for the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB), ran an opinion article alleging that “the CIA had its hands all over” the Maidan Revolution. Ukraine served as a proving ground for tactics Russian intelligence agencies would eventually deploy to influence elections in the United States.
