On January 17, 2019, Facebook announced that it removed several hundred accounts and pages from Facebook and Instagram that originated in Russia for “coordinated inauthentic behavior” targeting citizens in post-Soviet states and Central and Eastern Europe. According to the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, the activity, which began in 2013, “represented a systematic, covert attempt to improve  Rossiya Segodnya’s online audience across more than a dozen countries €¦ Sputnik was the main beneficiary.” The activity was designed to build relationships with social media users based on their special interests in order to develop audiences for Russian government-linked disinformation. The network included Sputnik employees who amplified Sputnik content but hid their affiliation. The first operation, which targeted Ukraine, involved 26 pages, 77 accounts, 4 Groups, and 41 Instagram accounts that shared local news stories to hundreds of thousands of followers. The second operation, which targeted the Baltics, Central Asia, the Caucasus, and Central and Eastern Europe, involved a network of 289 pages and 75 accounts that included numerous pages focused on general interest topics such as tourism, sports and politics. According to CNN, the accounts and pages spent around $135,000 on ads on Facebook between October 2013 and January 2019. Facebook’s head of cybersecurity policy, Nathaniel Gleicher, stated in a post “We identified some technical overlap with Russia-based activity we saw prior to the US midterm elections, including behavior that shared characteristics with previous Internet Research Agency activity.”