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.
Hamilton Toplines: August 8-14, 2020
Iranian, Russian, and Chinese state media and government accounts focused on an array of major developments last week. Iranian accounts continued to cover the aftermath of the Beirut explosion—including continued accusations of U.S. and Israeli invo [...]
Hamilton Analysis: The Vaccine Race: Russia’s Coverage of the Sputnik V Announcement
Overview On August 11, 2020, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced that Russia had approved the world’s first coronavirus vaccine, which it dubbed Sputnik V in reference to the Soviet Union’s famous orbital satellite—the world’s first in 1957. [...]
Hamilton Toplines: August 1-7, 2020
Heavy coverage of the explosion in Beirut was substantial enough to break through the coronavirus news cycle, reflected in the fact that #Beirut was the third most-used hashtag by Russian, Iranian, and Chinese state media and government accounts las [...]
Hamilton Analysis: How Russia and China Covered the TikTok Ban
Overview President Trump’s executive order last week outlining plans to effectively ban Chinese short-form video app TikTok from the U.S. market triggered a predictable backlash from China’s state media and government officials, who accused the U.S. [...]
Five Authoritarian Pandemic Messaging Frames and How to Respond
Summary As the coronavirus pandemic has spread around the world, authoritarian actors have engaged in robust information-manipulation campaigns. China—where the virus originated and spread due to the government’s initial cover up and mismanagement [...]
Congress Should Follow the Money Like the British Parliament
This article was originally published as a GMF Transatlantic Take on July 31, 2020. After the United Kingdom’s parliament released its recent report on Russian interference in British democracy, front-page headlines howled that it damns the governme [...]
Defend Democracy the Australian Way
This article was originally published as a GMF Transatlantic Take on July 23, 2020. With mounting evidence that Russia regularly interferes in British democracy while the U.K. government “actively avoids” investigating, the country needs a proven pl [...]
Hamilton Weekly Report: July 4-July 10, 2020
Overview The United States and its allies were, once again, the primary targets of negative messaging from Russia, China, and Iran’s diplomats and state media last week. Kremlin-funded media hammered the Baltic states for a second straight week afte [...]
Hamilton Weekly Report: June 27-July 3, 2020
Overview Besides the ubiquitous coverage of the coronavirus, Russia, China, and Iran’s state media and government messengers last week hit on familiar themes for each of their respective countries. For Russia, that meant elevating claims of “Russoph [...]
Kristine Berzina on the Open Skies Treaty on Al Jazeera
Senior Fellow Kristine Berzina explained that the Open Skies Treaty matters for U.S.-Russia bilateral relations, but the security concerns that the treaty was set up to address are also European concerns. [...]
A Note on Coming Updates to the Authoritarian Interference Tracker
The Alliance for Securing Democracy’s Authoritarian Interference Tracker maps and catalogs over 400 instances of Russian state-sponsored efforts to undermine democracy in over 40 countries. The Tracker documents five tools authoritarian regimes use [...]
Nad’a Kovalčíková Joins a Panel Discussion on Disinformation in Europe after Coronavirus on the Europe After Coronavirus Podcast
Program Manager and Fellow Nad’a Kovalčíková joined Jorge Tuñón of University Carlos III of Madrid and Emma Briant of Bard College to discuss disinformation in Europe after the Coronavirus "infodemic" on El País’ Agenda Pública and OpenEUDebate's Eu [...]