Government of Russia

Researchers traced the content to a Kremlin operation that's been running since twenty twenty-three.

But this cycle, the Russians aren't just going after a presidential candidate.

Bloomberg found fake stories about twenty-nine of the thirty-six Democrats running for governor and twenty of the thirty-five running for Senate.

Then the bot farms come in.

He has a way to sell his diesel, a ticket to the G7, and a friend in the White House.

So if you needed another reason to come out and vote this November, well, there it is.

Let's, let, let's stick it to the Russians.

And speaking of helping Putin, we have an update on the Starlink blackout in Ukraine.

... with Ukraine, uh, and try to force Ukraine to accept Russian conditions.

But this time, this threat comes just before, I think, what may be the last major effort by the Kremlin to try to force Ukraine surrender, which will be the aerial attacks that we're already seeing but will expand over the winter.

I set all that up for context because what was interesting about the latest interview that President Zelensky gave, which was with the Financial Times, published this morning, of course, it's part of the, you know, uh, several engagements he had in London, but the Financial Times reporters who interviewed him said this was a different Zelensky in the sense that he came in with the attitude which is there was gonna be no attempt to, to try to bring Trump back in or to play up to Trump.

This was gonna be a defiant Zelensky.

And you might say, "Well, why, why would they do that? Why would this faction do that?" Trump, Witkoff, Kushner, maybe other officials like JD Vance, Stephen Miller.

Mm.

Because we now know that the Kremlin for weeks has been trying to manipulate the Americans because they fear the U.S. sanctions that were passed by Congress last month and because they want to have an open hand for their attacks.

They offered economic deals worth more than $20 billion to Witkoff and Kushner.

It doesn't solve the problem of digital pipes flowing both ways and it being accessible, thievable by groups like the U.S. Treasury.

That's exactly what we did to the Russians.

We took $300 billion.

They want it back.

Hmm.

So of course, it wasn't just the Russians who hacked our electoral system and made leave win the referendum.

Of course, I don't think anyone's thinking that.

But I think particularly over the course of the last few years, we've seen how much and how dramatically social media can influence people's perceptions of things, whether that's perceptions of migration, perceptions of crime, and how much of that is being influenced by forces outside of the United Kingdom.

Um, I was looking on social media earlier, and Carole Cadwalladr, who of course was the journalist, former Observer journalist, who kind of led the way on reporting on, um, on Russian interference in the Brexit referendum, uh, suggested that Stephen Doughty's response this morning was, like, absolutely the Downing Street line.

But there had been no investigation, so how would anybody actually know? And anyway, what does successful interference look like? Um, and so I think that the idea that Russia did interfere is, is right.

I mean, I remember Isabel Oakeshott, who wrote The Bad Boys of Brexit, is obviously the partner of Richard Tice, saying after she got hold of, um, a massive cache of leaked emails from, uh, Arron Banks, the Brexit donor, and his, um, his associate, Andy Wigmore, that it was clear that they'd been shamelessly used by the Russians.

After seeing those emails, she revealed that, in fact, there had been more meetings between the Russian ambassador at the time, around the time of Brexit, and Arron Banks.