The more a society is polarized, the more vulnerable it becomes. intelligence community to prepare its own assessment of a potential Russian interference in the EU referendum and to publish an unclassified summary of it.īut why would Russia want to destabilize an internal situation in such remote (from Russia’s perspective) countries like Spain or the U.S.? The simplest answer is: divide et impera, or divide and rule. As for the Brexit vote held two years later, the committee did not obtain sufficient evidence of the Russian footprint from competent services. The first bullet point of the ISC’s press release concerning its inquiry reads: “Russian influence in the UK is the new normal.” The committee conclusively found that Russia had tried to influence the referendum on Scottish independence of Sept. The Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament has just made public a report titled “Russia,” which it drafted more than a year ago. Then there is Brexit and the Scottish independence referendum. No wonder, in December 2018, the French foreign minister revealed that the French security services were looking at the situation as part of an investigation into a possible Russian interference. Indeed, according to the study, between the start of riots in late 2018 and the spring of 2019, RT France - the Kremlin’s mouthpiece in France - posted two times more content to YouTube than all major French news outlets combined.īut worst of all, as found by Avaaz, the fake news related to the “yellow vests” movement reached roughly 105 million views on Facebook alone. Earlier that year, Avaaz, a U.S.-based nonprofit organization, had published a study suggesting that Russia had exploited the “gilets jaunes” protests to significantly expand its French-speaking audience. The German Marshall Fund’s Alliance for Securing Democracy found that in December 2019, Twitter accounts it connected to Russia used hashtags related to the movement to push narratives of discord and chaos, and to denigrate the West. Similar findings were presented with regard to the “yellow vests protests” in France. Regarding alleged Russian meddling in Catalonia, East StratCom Task Force, a unit of the European Union set up to counter the Kremlin’s disinformation efforts, saw a surge in false information published both in Russian and Spanish ahead of and after the referendum. Its name first emerged in an article posted in The New York Times last October, under the telling title “Top Secret Russian Unit Seeks to Destabilize Europe, Security Officials Say.” Later reports by the likes of Bellingcat suggested the members of the group had been implicated in the annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea a destabilization campaign in Moldova in 2014 the attempted poisoning of Bulgarian arms manufacturer Emilian Gebrev in 2015 and a failed coup in Montenegro in 2016.
![divide et impera units divide et impera units](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EdYBCWeXkAQNGvj.png)
The confidential investigation revolved around the role of “military Unit 29155” - a unit of the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence directorate - in the separatist drive in Catalonia. 21, 2019, El Pais - one of most circulated daily newspapers in Spain - reported that the Audiencia Nacional (Spain’s high court) had opened a probe into the alleged Russian footprint in the illegal Catalan independence referendum of 2017.