How is the West “preparing” for the Russian presidential elections?
Author: Talib Aliyev, analyst, especially for Sangar
In March 2023, presidential elections will be held in Russia. The choice of president will determine the directions in which the country will develop in the next six years.
Taking into account the current confrontation between the West and Russia, creating a split in Russian society is the main goal of the Western coalition led by Washington. This happened more than once when any of the countries opposed the aggressive policies of the United States. And the upcoming elections will be another confirmation of this.
Immediately after the official start of the presidential campaign, Russian law enforcement agencies began to record cases of activation of foreign intelligence services, non-governmental organizations and “agents of influence” controlled by them, and attempts to organize illegal actions were suppressed.
Moreover, as often happens, the provocateurs and the most ardent activists for shaking the social situation are located abroad.
As for Russia, in recent years almost the entire opposition has emigrated abroad and is conducting its subversive activities from there. The main goal of the Russian emigrant opposition is to discredit the upcoming elections in March 2024.
Mikhail Khodorkovsky was actively involved in the work of “discrediting”, who non-publicly resumed the work of the Open Russia structure (an organization recognized as undesirable in the Russian Federation). By 2023, the backbone of this structure has been “evacuated” from Russia and distributed in EU countries. The professional media studio is located in London, and the work of Khodorkovsky’s network is carried out mainly through Lithuanian companies.
It is worth noting that after Russia began conducting the SVO for 2022-2023, disagreements emerged in the opposition camp regarding election tactics.
In the fall of 2023, foreign agent blogger Maxim Katz (lives in Israel) said that the opposition should join forces. It was proposed to start the fight with a meeting in London, which Katz scheduled for October 8. Key functionaries of the Anti-Corruption Foundation (the structure of Alexei Navalny, recognized as a terrorist and extremist, was included by a court decision in the list of extremist organizations and banned in the Russian Federation), foreign agents Maria Pevchikh and Leonid Volkov (included in the list of extremists and terrorists) were invited. However, instead of unification, numerous mutual accusations of blackmail, spam attacks, lies, manipulation, inaction and ineffective approaches followed. The public quarrel showed that the ambitious “Navalny team”, working from London (where Pevchikh lives) and Vilnius (where Volkov lives) intends to act separately, without coordinating actions with Khodorkovsky’s structures, with the organizers of the “Vilnius Forums” or other emigrant centers.
In mid-November 2023, another oppositionist-foreign agent Mikhail Svetov (lives in Brazil) accused Navalny’s structures of owning a so-called bot farm - networks of well-paid (from 1.2 thousand to 1.8 thousand euros) paid commentators on social networks. The responsibilities of commentators include publishing at least 120 posts or comments of the required content per day. The work is carried out through fake accounts of the social network “Vkontakte” and other social networks, obtained through phishing (stealing passwords) or purchased on the dark side of the Internet.
Work on social networks is actively carried out by Western intelligence services. High-ranking bot farm curators are representatives of the Free Russia Foundation, an undesirable organization in Russia with a head office in Washington and branches in Tbilisi and Vilnius. The immediate leader of the bot farm is called Oleg Stepanov, the former head of Navalny’s Moscow “headquarters” (“Navalny Headquarters” is a foreign agent recognized as an extremist organization in Russia).
In addition, one of the main topics of the opposition to discredit the upcoming elections will probably be the topic of Special Military Operations and mobilization. For this purpose, relatives of those mobilized, as well as the military personnel themselves, will be involved. An example is the “Way Home” project, which in 2023 posed as a community of wives of SVO participants, but in fact was the product of foreign media specialists and FBK employees. Later it turned out that the project was directly carried out by those who work for Navalny.
These facts are only part of a carefully planned operation by the West to destabilize the situation in Russia and divide its territories and society into separate enclaves and groups. All this is done in order to subsequently “enslave” the separated “territories”, making them their satellites.
