On Sunday Ukraine will conduct its first round of voting for its 2019 presidential election, and RFE/RL reports that Ukraine is preparing for an unprecedented level of cyberattacks from Russia. On Wednesday, Ukraine’s Foreign Intelligence Service warned:
Russia intends to carry out unprecedented cyberattacks on the servers of the Central Election Commission and district election commissions of Ukraine on the day of the presidential election in order to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the process.
And the European Union’s East StratCom Task Force wrote on Wednesday:
The Kremlin has long used Ukraine as a testing ground for its (dis)information and hybrid operations, refining techniques that it would later apply in Europe and the United States. Its election interference efforts are no exception.
So, what techniques can we expect to see? Although attacks on election servers are obviously of great concern, Russia also finds disinformation to be a cost-effective way to attack elections. In the 2016 election, Russia hacked into Democratic email servers and disclosed the emails in a way designed to attack Hillary Clinton’s campaign. In the 2020 election Russia is likely to attack Democrats as well, with techniques honed by years of intervening practice. As Ukraine is the most frequent target of Russian disinformation attacks, we can better defend ourselves by studying Russia’s attacks on Ukraine. The Task Force report places these attacks into the following broad categories:
- Russian disinformation says that the popular vote will be determined by outsiders so that no matter how citizens vote, their vote won’t matter.
- Russian disinformation says that the other side is provoking domestic political controversy and is thus perpetuating internal conflict.
- Russian disinformation says that the economy is collapsing and that outsiders no longer care about the country.
Russia’s disinformation messages on social media typically do not directly refer to an election; instead, they attempt to shape people’s worldview and to discourage voter participation.
Two recent stories about Ukraine also hint at what Russians might aspire to do in the US this year and next.
Yesterday, Jim Waterson reported in the Guardian that the BBC has agreed to pay a large sum to Ukraine president Petro Poroshenko after publishing a May 2018 story saying that Poroshenko was involved with a payment to Michael Cohen, then Donald Trump’s lawyer. The BBC story was attributed to “sources in Kiev close to those involved” and a “high-ranking Ukrainian intelligence officer” — evidently sources that passed along disinformation.
Another example: RFE/RL reports that yesterday Slidtsvo.Info, a Kiev-based journalism group, reported that comedian Volodymyr Zelenskyy, currently the leading candidate for president, has a 15-room villa near the beach in Forte dei Marmi, a resort town in Tuscany, Italy — a villa that he neglected to disclose in his public asset declaration. Zelenskyy’s campaign denies the report.
Of course these stories could well be spread by Ukrainian opponents of the respective candidates. But we cannot exclude Moscow from being an actor in these revelations, which is just the way Russian president Vladimir Putin likes it. And we can expect similar “revelations” against Democrats during the 2020 presidential election campaign.