Diplomacy Watch: Feds’ war on Russian interference gets real

On Monday, Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp owner Meta said that it was going to ban a number of Russian state media outlets, including RT (formerly Russia Today).

“After careful consideration, we expanded our ongoing enforcement against Russian state media outlets: Rossiya Segodnya, RT and other related entities are now banned from our apps globally for foreign interference activity,” Meta said in a statement.

This occurs just days after the Biden administration announced sanctions against RT. United States Secretary of State, Antony Blinken said that Russian media entities “are no longer merely fire hoses of Russian propaganda and disinformation. They are engaged in covert influence activities aimed at undermining American elections and democracies, functioning like a de facto arm of Russia’s intelligence apparatus.”

In its own statement, the State Department said “The United States supports the free flow of information. We are not taking action against these entities and individuals for the content of their reporting, or even the disinformation they create and spread publicly. We are taking action against them for their covert influence activities.”

Those covert activities, the agency charged, include RT employees allegedly working with Russian intelligence services to influence the election in Moldova, as well as to crowdfund weapons and supplies for the Russian military in Ukraine, among other activities.

Earlier this month the Department of Justice announced the seizure of 32 web domains it said were linked to the Russian government-directed foreign malign influence campaigns in violation of U.S. money laundering and criminal trademark laws. Two former employees of RT were indicted for their links to a U.S. media platform designed to covertly spread Russian disinformation via American influencers, according to the DOJ.

Despite Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg’s recent lamentations over what he called government pressure to censor posts relating to the pandemic during the COVID era, he is likely still smarting from two previous presidential election cycles in which Facebook was accused of not doing enough to manage Russian bots and misinformation (a problem that has been hotly debated for its actual impact on the elections).

Meanwhile, during an interview with MSNBC on Tuesday, Hillary Clinton was asked whether the U.S. government was doing enough to combat the kind of Kremlin-directed propaganda cited in the recent indictments. She suggested that government censorship was also necessary to combat Russian misinformation, even positing that Americans might be criminally charged for proliferating it.

“I also think there are Americans who are engaged in this kind of propaganda,” she said. “And whether they should be civilly or even in some cases criminally charged is something that would be a better deterrence, because the Russians are unlikely, except in a very few cases, to ever stand trial in the United States.”

The Quincy Institute’s Marcus Stanley pointed out the ironies last week in a report about the House passing an authorization for $1.6 billion for a program that would allow the U.S. government to pursue its own potentially covert information operations via foreign media and civil society sources to combat Chinese “malign influence” globally.

Stanley points out that in addition to potential foreign blowback from such legislation, “another problem raised by the proposed legislation is the possibility that anti-Chinese propaganda financed by this program will flow back into the American media space and influence American audiences, without any disclosure of its initial source of funding.”

Washington is more than happy to participate in covert message management, all while Antony Blinken claims that aggressive moves against Russian media entities are “shining a bright light on what the Kremlin is trying to do under the cover of darkness.”

In other Ukraine war news this week:

The New York Timesreported on Tuesday that Moscow’s troops have been engaging in a counter-offensive in Kursk, reclaiming a few villages and threatening Ukraine’s ability to hold onto the territory it has seized. At the same time, Russian soldiers in Ukraine have continued advancing on the eastern Ukraine city of Pokrovsk, which is a strategic hub for Ukraine’s forces, and if lost would greatly impact Kyiv’s ability to move men and supplies to the front and take away a key buffer for central Ukraine. This comes after Putin ordered all Kursk territory to be returned to Russia by October first.

The number of Ukrainians and Russians killed or wounded has reached around one million according to the Wall Street Journal. A Ukrainian estimate placed Ukrainian deaths at 80,000 and wounded at 400,000. Russian casualties are estimated to be as high as 600,000 dead and wounded. This staggering number is bound to have long-term effects on both nations, especially as Russia and Ukraine have seen population declines in recent years.

As Western powers discuss the possibility of allowing Ukraine to send long-range missiles further into Russian territory, Vyacheslav Volodin, speaker of Russia’s lower house of parliament affirmed that such an action would be extremely antagonistic. According to Reuters, Volodin said “What the European Parliament is calling for leads to a world war using nuclear weapons," on Telegram.

In this week’s Sept. 17 State Department briefing:

State Department spokesman Matthew Miller was asked whether the Biden Administration would be announcing anything regarding White House approval for the use of American-made long-range missiles in attacks deep inside of Russia. Miller said no. When asked if the administration felt there was an urgency for a decision soon, given Ukraine’s need to improve its position on the battlefield, Miller responded by saying the administration wants to “make sure that with everything that we provide them there’s a strategic rationale for doing so.”

“There is no one capability that ultimately, by itself, is the magic wand that is decisive in this conflict,” he added. “There are a number of different capabilities that taken together can help Ukraine win this war, and that’s what we continue to provide them, and we will continue to assess whether there are additional capabilities, additional tactics, additional techniques that we ought to provide to them. And when we assess that it is in their interest and the interests of the United States to do so, we’ll do so.”