Russia has long been waging operations against democracies using all of the asymmetric tools ASD tracks—information manipulation, cyberattacks, malign finance, civil society subversion, and state economic coercion. The Kremlin’s geographic scope in conducting operations to undermine democracy continues to expand and its tactics continue to evolve. Find ASD’s work on Russia’s attempts to interfere in democracies on this page.
Civil Society in Ukraine’s Restoration: A Guide to CSOs Mobilizing for a Marshall Plan
Executive Summary Ukraine has one of the most vibrant civil societies in the world. In the decade since it launched and led the Revolution of Dignity, Ukrainian civil society has held successive governments’ feet to the fire while at the same time [...]
Kyiv’s Mobilization for Restoration: A Landscape Analysis of Ukrainian Government Authorities Organizing for a Marshall Plan
Executive Summary Ukraine has become a different country over the past decade. Compared to the closed post-Soviet oligarchy that it was before the 2014 Revolution of Dignity, Ukraine is now an open society governed as a vibrant democracy that resp [...]
How Kremlin narratives about Ukraine spread (or don’t) on U.S. political podcasts
Introduction In recent years, political podcasting has boomed in the United States, with new series emerging across the political spectrum. Due to the medium’s decentralized nature, it is difficult to grasp the total audience for these shows, but [...]
Red Lines Around a Free and Fair Polish Election
Executive Summary The October 15, 2023 Polish parliamentary election will not be fair. The country’s last fair election was in 2015, when the ruling Law and Justice Party (PiS) came to power and promptly set about undermining constitutional govern [...]
State of the European Union 2023: A More Political Speech with an Eye to the Future
In her last State of the European Union (SOTEU) speech for this Commission mandate, Ursula von der Leyen expectedly stayed mum on whether she intends to stand again. But it is difficult to take her address as anything but a carefully calibrated effo [...]
5 Takeaways from the War in Ukraine: Military Bloggers Dashboard
Over the course of the war in Ukraine, a loose network of Russian military bloggers on Telegram have provided a fervently nationalistic, though at times highly critical, view of Russia’s “special military operation”. Providing more unfiltered covera [...]
Russian State Media Is Not Rushing to Threads Despite Platform’s Lax Regulations
Meta’s Twitter-alternative, Threads, became the fastest app to reach 100 million users. It took five days. The app itself only took seven months to build, a remarkably short start-to-launch period that did not allow the few dozen engineers working o [...]
Josh Rudolph in MSNBC: Yevgeny Prigozhin Embodies the Rot Putin Wants to Force Back on Ukraine
While corruption has undermined Russia's war effort, anti-corruption efforts have made Ukraine more resilient. The abortive rebellion by Wagner mercenary group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin against Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin, has only rein [...]
Russia Floods Twitter with Propaganda about the Kakhovka Dam’s Collapse
Overview In the early hours of June 6, an explosion collapsed the Kakhovka dam, releasing a torrent of water across the Ukrainian countryside and igniting a blame game across social media. Evidence collected by the New York Times indicates that Russ [...]
ASD Data on Russian Propaganda on Dam Collapse Covered Exclusively in The Record
Russian officials and diplomats have been coordinating an unusually organized and large-scale disinformation campaign to discredit reports that the nation is responsible for the June 6 collapse of the Nova Kakhovka Dam, according to a new study. Disi [...]
Russia Didn’t Know How to Frame the Discord Leaks
Overview On April 13, the FBI arrested Jack Teixeira for his alleged involvement in leaking hundreds of classified documents. Teixeira, a member of the Air National Guard, reportedly shared the US intelligence assessments with his friends over the c [...]
Joseph Bodnar Discusses the Discord Leaks on Background Briefing
Background Briefing with Ian Masters · Navy Vet Behind Pro-Putin Site that Doctored and Spread Documents Stolen by a National Guard Airman We look into the role of a recent member of the US Navy, Sarah Bils, who runs a pro-Putin social media site D [...]