An article that appeared in August in an international media outlet, Pressenza, recycled a false Russian claim that the West was looting religious relics and art from a monastery in the Ukrainian capital, Kiev, one of the holiest sites in Russian Orthodoxy. .
The article stands out, U.S. officials said, not because of what it claims, but because of its source and its intended audience.
State Department officials have linked the article to what they describe as a covert information operation to spread Russian propaganda in Central and South America by producing articles that appear to originate from local media organizations, not the Russian government.
The operation is nascent, but the department’s Global Engagement Center is revealing the influence campaign in hopes of mitigating its effect in a region where Russia has sought to discredit the United States and erode international support for Ukraine.
The center, which since 2017 has focused on combating propaganda and disinformation, routinely details the Kremlin’s efforts, but identifying and trying to preempt a campaign when it has barely taken off is a new tactic. It reflects the understanding that false narratives are more difficult to counter once they have already spread.
“What we’re trying to do is expose Russia’s hidden hand,” James P. Rubin, the center’s coordinator, said in an interview in which he described the Russian effort in general terms.
Rubin said the department was acting “based on new information” but declined to elaborate. The campaign’s disclosure recalls the Biden administration’s release of intelligence findings on the Russian military before and after its February 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
It is part of an intensifying campaign to gain influence in parts of the world where American officials and analysts warn that Russia’s hostility toward the United States and its allies has found fertile ground.
The State Department last week released a report on the activities in Brazil of an international organization, the New Resistance, that espouses the views of Aleksandr Dugin, a former Soviet dissident who has become a prominent defender of Russia’s imperial ambitions. The organization, according to the report, promotes Russian disinformation, organizes seminars and training courses, and has supported paramilitary activities.
“Russia has exploited distrust in the United States by characterizing the latter as intent on resource extraction and supporting economic policies unsuitable for Latin America, offering Russia as a friendly and less intrusive alternative,” he said. another report published last week by the United States Institute of Peace, a nonpartisan research organization founded by the United States Congress.
The new campaign, Rubin and other officials said, involves two Russian companies and the Internet Development Institute, an industry association run by a former Kremlin official. All have close ties to the presidential administration of Russian leader Vladimir V. Putin.
The companies (Social Design Agency, a public relations firm, and Structura National Technologies, an information technology company, both in Moscow) have been identified as sources of disinformation campaigns.
Since July, the companies and their executives have faced punitive economic sanctions in the European Union for their role in disinformation about the war in Ukraine. That includes the creation of a news outlet, Recent Reliable News, which produced fake articles purporting to be from real news organizations, including The Washington Post, and promoted them widely online.
In the current campaign, according to the State Department, Russian companies aim to commission articles through a network of local writers and use artificial intelligence chatbots to amplify the articles on social media. The effort aims to cultivate media contacts in countries from Mexico to Chile.
“We expect them to carry out this information manipulation campaign to surreptitiously exploit the openness of Latin America’s media and information ecosystem,” said Rubin, who took charge of the Center for Global Engagement this year.
The Kremlin devotes significant resources to propagating its views on the war in Ukraine and denigrating the United States and NATO, using both overt and covert means. US intelligence officials recently warned of a concerted Russian effort within the United States to undermine political support for supplying weapons to the Ukrainian military.
The Institute for Internet Development, a Russian organization led by Aleksei Goreslavskywho previously oversaw Internet policy at the Kremlin, has indicated he plans to spend the equivalent of $32 million this year on war information efforts, according to two other State Department officials, who under department policy spoke under condition of anonymity.
Those officials said the new campaign was aimed at “whitewashing” Russian news and opinions through contacts who already write in Spanish, as well as Portuguese, for online news organizations in the region.
It was unclear how extensive the campaign would be, but the fact that it targeted so many countries suggested it would be ambitious. Officials cited Pressenza and the August article, which appeared in Spanish, French and English, as an example of the coordination that U.S. government agencies had identified.
The author, according to the firm, was Nadia Schwarz, identified as a correspondent from the media’s Moscow office.
It echoed accusations first aired a month earlier on Russian state news agencies (and have since been refuted) that Ukraine planned to remove relics and other valuables from the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra, a complex of churches and other buildings dating from the 11th century and recognized as a world heritage site by UNESCO.
“The West is trying to compensate, in part, for what it has spent in Ukraine,” the article quotes prominent analyst Rostislav Ishchenko as saying. Ishchenko, who faces sanctions in Ukraine, compared the situation to the long-running dispute between Peru and Yale University over artifacts taken from Machu Picchu in the early 20th century.
Officials also subpoenaed a journalist, Oleg Yasinksy, who lives in Chile and whose writings have appeared on the website RT en Español, the Spanish-language arm of the state television network. Mr. Yasinsky could not immediately be reached for comment through his X account.
Pressenza, which is in Quito, Ecuador, and describes itself as a media outlet committed to peace, human rights and nonviolence, did not respond to a written request for comment, nor did the Social Design Agency and the Institute for Internet Development.
Brian Liston, an analyst who studies Recorded Future, a cybersecurity firm based in Somerville, Massachusetts, said in an interview that Russia viewed information campaigns in Central and South America as a proportionate response to what it sees as U.S. influence efforts in Eastern Europe and the Baltics.
He said it remained to be seen how effective the State Department’s effort to “debunk” Russian propaganda would prove to be. He added that challenging false or misleading information in advance has worked well against specific events that can be anticipated or forecast.
“I think there are certain applications where debunking the narrative is effective,” he said. “I think it’s more limited to anticipating pre-planned events or things that can be accelerated rather than real time.”
