Day: September 8, 2023

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Russia summons Armenia’s ambassador as ties fray and exercises with US troops approach


  • The Russian foreign ministry has taken the step of summoning the ambassador from its long-standing ally, Armenia, in protest against several recent developments, signaling tensions that are putting strain on their close relations.
  • In an official statement, the ministry pointed to what it described as a series of unfriendly actions by the Armenian leadership in recent days. 
  • The joint military exercises in question are set to commence on Monday, involving around 175 Armenian troops and 85 U.S. troops, with a focus on peacekeeping operations.

The Russian foreign ministry on Friday summoned the ambassador from longtime ally Armenia to protest upcoming joint military exercises with the United States and other complaints, highlighting growing tensions that are straining traditionally close relations.

“The leadership of Armenia has taken a series of unfriendly steps in recent days,” the ministry said in a statement, citing the exercises that will begin Monday, Armenia’s provision of humanitarian aid to Ukraine and its moves to ratify the Rome Statute that created the International Criminal Court, which this year indicted President Vladimir Putin for war crimes connected to the deportation of children from Ukraine.

The ministry also complained of remarks by the chairman of Armenia’s parliament that it regarded as insulting to ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova, who is noted for her harsh comments about other countries.

About 175 Armenian troops and 85 from the United States will start exercises on Monday focusing on peacekeeping operations.

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Landlocked Armenia has close military ties with Russia, including hosting a Russian military base and participating in the Moscow-led Collective Security Treaty Organization alliance.

However, Armenia has become increasingly disillusioned with Russia since the 2020 war with Azerbaijan. The armistice that ended the war called for a Russian peacekeeping force to ensure passage on the road leading from Armenia to the Nagorno-Karabakh ethnic Armenian enclave within Azerbaijan.

But Azerbaijan has blocked that road, called the Lachin Corridor, since late December and Armenia repeatedly has complained that Russian peacekeepers are doing nothing to open it. The road’s blockage has led to significant food shortages in Nagorno-Karabakh.

Armenia this year refused to allow CSTO exercises on its territory and it declined to send troops to bloc exercises in Belarus.

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Is the end of self-proclaimed Artsakh near? – Global Comment


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The self-proclaimed Republic of Artsakh – internationally recognized as Azerbaijan’s Karabakh region – is facing probably the most difficult period in its 32-year history. Baku seems determined, one way or another, to establish full control over the territory where ethnic Armenians make up the majority of the population, although they refuse to reintegrate into Azerbaijan.

On September 2, 1991, a joint session of the Councils of People’s Deputies of the former Nagorno Karabakh Autonomous Oblast and Shahumyan region – at the time both territories being part of the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic – proclaimed the Republic of Artsakh. To this day, not a single UN member, including Armenia, has recognized Artsakh (the Armenian name for Nagorno-Karabakh) as an independent state.

“After all, Karabakh is Azerbaijan. Does everyone recognize this? Everyone recognizes. Does anyone say it’s not? No”, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev said on July 23, talking about the humanitarian situation in the region that is still under the Armenian de facto control.

Reports suggest that a humanitarian disaster is unfolding in Nagorno-Karabakh. After establishing control over the Lachin Corridor – the only land link between Armenia and the Nagorno-Karabakh – in April 2023, Azerbaijan has cut off all shipments of food, fuel, and other critical supplies to the region from Armenia. As a result, according to local sources, the Karabakh Armenians are facing “mass starvation and total hunger”. Baku, however, denies such claims.

“The allegations on the humanitarian situation in the region are completely unfounded”, said Jeyhun Bayramov, Azerbaijani Foreign Minister, on July 25.

Baku offered to supply Nagorno-Karabakh via a crossing at the nearby Azerbaijani city of Aghdam. But the Armenians reportedly refuse take food from Azerbaijan, and have blocked the road leading from Aghdam to Nagorno-Karabakh’s capital of Stepanakert. The authorities in Baku insist that their refusal to accept aid from Azerbaijan demonstrates that the claims on the humanitarian situation are “political blackmail”.

Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, on the other hand, argues that Azerbaijan has “illegally blocked the Lachin Corridor”, and that it “should have no control” over the road. Various foreign powers, including Russia, have called on Baku to immediately re-open the Lachin corridor to humanitarian, commercial, and passenger traffic. Quite aware that no major global actor is willing to jeopardize its relations with energy-rich Azerbaijan over the Karabakh Armenians, Aliyev is unlikely to be ready to make any concessions to those he perceives as separatists.

“Why should goods to Karabakh be delivered from another country? This is illogical”, Azerbaijani leader stressed.

Baku sees the crisis in the region as an internal matter, and aims to absorb the ethnic Armenian-controlled territory into Azerbaijan. Karabakh Armenians, however, fear that that they have no future in Azerbaijan, emphasizing that “any status for Artsakh within Azerbaijan would be tantamount to ethnic cleansing”.

That is why they have repeatedly called for a UN-mandated peacekeeping mission to be deployed to the region as a “security guarantee”. In other words, the UN troops would likely replace some 2,000 Russian peacekeepers, who have been stationed in Karabakh since November 2020, which is when Armenia and Azerbaijan signed the Moscow-brokered ceasefire deal that ended the 44-day war the two nations fought over the mountainous region.

Under the 2020 agreement, Russia is supposed to ensure road transport between Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh, but the Kremlin proved unable to prevent Azerbaijan from blocking the Lachin Corridor. That is why many Armenians want the Russian troops out of the region, and that is one thing they have in common with Azerbaijanis. Baku is impatiently waiting for 2025, which is when the Russian peacekeepers’ mandate expires, and is unlikely to be willing to allow any other foreign mission in Karabakh.

Meanwhile, Baku is expected to continue pressuring Karabakh Armenians to either integrate into Azerbaijani society, or to leave the region. For Azerbaijani policy makers, the current crisis in Nagorno-Karabakh is a win-win situation. Some 120,000 Karabakh Armenians would not represent a serious threat to Azerbaijan – a country of around 10 million people – although there is no doubt that many in Baku would also be quite happy without them.

It is, therefore, not surprising that the self-proclaimed Republic of Artsakh’s president Arayik Harutyunyan resigned on September 1 as a result of what he described as “unstable geopolitical situation” and “Artsakh’s internal political and social environment”.

Along with his resignation, Harutyunyan also dismissed Gurgen Nersisyan as state minister, which is the second-highest-ranking executive position in Nagorno-Karabakh. In other words, they seem to have decided to abandon the sinking ship.

Although it is still unclear what effect the change in leadership will have on the situation in the region, there is no doubt that the conditions the Karabakh Armenians are living in will not improve in the foreseeable future, if it all. Sooner or later, Azerbaijan may attempt to break up the blockade of the Aghdam–Stepanakert road, even though such a move could lead to an escalation of the conflict.

But even with Armenia’s help, the self-proclaimed Artsakh Defense Army has zero chance against the Azerbaijani Armed Forces – one of the strongest militaries in the post-Soviet space. Quite aware of that, Pashinyan will almost certainly seek to avoid any large-scale confrontation with Azerbaijan. Instead, he may try to find a way to de facto abandon Nagorno-Karabakh, although in such a way that would allow him to safe face.

Image: EUMAs monitor within Armenia looking at Azerbaijan’s military checkpoint on the Lachin corridor and the blocked humanitarian convoy of trucks that was sent to Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh) by EU Mission in Armenia (EUMA), an entity of the European-Commission

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Spies — Russia, China and the long intelligence war with the west


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The secret report about Ukraine reached British intelligence in February. It said that the Russians knew the Ukrainians were “hostile to them and their ideas”, and that the Ukrainians wanted to know what foreign support they would receive. The spy who wrote the report continued: “I pointed out to him [the Ukrainian source] that no power would intervene against Russia now, and that the Russians . . . would never permit the Ukraine to separate itself entirely from Russia.”

Remarkably, that was written in 1922, a century before Moscow launched its full scale-invasion of Ukraine. It is also just one of the many revealing anecdotes that make Calder Walton’s book Spies such an engrossing history of the century-long intelligence war between the US, Britain and Russia. The book gains extra, grim relevance today given Russia’s assault on Ukraine and the unfolding cold war with China.

Walton is a British barrister, author and distinguished historian, currently at Harvard, who previously spent several years in MI5’s archives as a researcher for the official history of the UK’s domestic secret service. His own book ranges across continents and decades, from the 1917 Bolshevik revolution to the second world war, from proxy conflicts in the developing world to present-day Russian and Chinese cyberwarfare. Some of the material was declassified as recently as 2022. Interviews with intelligence officers add further actualité.

China and its spies, Walton writes, have become like the ‘Soviet Union on steroids’

What lessons does Walton learn from a hundred years of rival spookery? The biggest is how often the west failed to realise it was in a spy war at all — a failing as true of a century ago as today.

The cold war started long before 1947, when the phrase was coined by Bernard Baruch, a financier and adviser to several US presidents. As early as the 1920s, Lenin’s secret police, the Cheka, had more than 100,000 agents at home and a dedicated unit to co-ordinate operations abroad. In contrast, MI5’s counter-espionage unit had five officers. The US was little better. In 1929, secretary of state Henry Stimson had closed the government’s code-breaking department because “gentlemen do not read each other’s mail.”

Nor did cold war espionage end in 1991 with the Soviet Union’s collapse. If anything, Russian spying became “more aggressive”, Walton writes. In 2003, three years after Vladimir Putin, a former KGB agent and spy chief, became president, an estimated 2.5 per cent of Kremlin staff had a security background. By 2019, that number had reached an incredible 77 per cent.

Western countries acted as if they were unaware of the threat. Even as the Kremlin and its special services became, in Walton’s words, “the hooligans of international relations”, using all the tools of KGB trade craft — espionage, deep-cover illegals, money-laundering, assassinations, disinformation and other active measures — the west was looking elsewhere.

Book cover of Spies

It believed the cold war with Russia was over. Then, after the terrorist attacks of September 2001, western countries diverted the bulk of their security resources into counter-terrorism. By 2006, just 4 per cent of the work done by GCHQ, Britain’s cyber intelligence spy agency, was concerned with hostile foreign nations. By comparison, at the height of the cold war, 70 per cent of its work had focused on the Soviet bloc.

Spies contains valuable lessons for the present. As with the Soviet Union and Putin’s Russia, the US and its allies have been slow to recognise China’s threat. Its economic weight makes the country more challenging and potentially dangerous than the Soviet Union. Beijing, like Moscow, has also engaged in massive technological transfer from the west, or “spying and buying” as Walton calls it.

In 2021, the FBI opened a China-related investigation every 12 hours. This year, the British parliament’s intelligence committee warned that China’s spy services were the largest in the world. China and its spies, Walton writes, have become like the “Soviet Union on steroids”. Western intelligence is now “chasing a horse that has already bolted the stables”. He warns that it will be hard for the US and its allies to catch up.

Walton’s agents sometimes suffer from a needless spooned-on glamour that can spoil the book’s many sharply etched profiles: the word “handsome” appears 11 times, “debonair” twice, even “dashing” gets an outing. But his central conclusion is crisp and authoritative. Western countries insist they do not want a cold war with China. Yet as history shows, “western powers can be in a Cold War irrespective of whether they seek one and before they recognise it”.

Spies: The Epic Intelligence War Between East and West by Calder Walton Abacus £25, 640 pages

John Paul Rathbone is the FT’s security and defence editor

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North Korea-linked threat actors target cybersecurity experts with a zero-day


North Korea-linked threat actors associated with North Korea exploited a zero-day flaw in attacks against cybersecurity experts.

North Korea-linked threat actors were observed exploiting a zero-day vulnerability in an unnamed software to target cybersecurity researchers.

The attacks that took place in the past weeks were detected by researchers at Google’s Threat Analysis Group (TAG).

“Recently, TAG became aware of a new campaign likely from the same actors based on similarities with the previous campaign. TAG is aware of at least one actively exploited 0-day being used to target security researchers in the past several weeks. The vulnerability has been reported to the affected vendor and is in the process of being patched.” reads the advisory published by Google TAG.

The cyberspies used fake accounts on social media sites like X and Mastodon to get in touch with victims.

North Korea-linked threat actors

In one of the cases analyzed by TAG, the attackers carried on a months-long conversation with the target., The cyberspies used to propose a collaboration with a security researcher on topics of mutual interest.

Once the attackers establish contact with the target via a social media site, they move to an encrypted messaging app such as Signal, WhatsApp or Wire.

Once the attackers have established relationship with a targeted researcher, they sent a malicious file that contained at least one 0-day in a popular software package.

“Upon successful exploitation, the shellcode conducts a series of anti-virtual machine checks and then sends the collected information, along with a screenshot, back to an attacker-controlled command and control domain. The shellcode used in this exploit is constructed in a similar manner to shellcode observed in previous North Korean exploits.” reads the report published by Google TAG researchers security researchers Clement Lecigne and Maddie Stone. “The vulnerability has been reported to the affected vendor and is in the process of being patched. Once patched, we will release additional technical details and analysis of the exploits involved in line with our disclosure policies.”

North Korea-linked threat actors also used a custom standalone Windows tool that has the stated goal of ‘download debugging symbols from Microsoft, Google, Mozilla and Citrix symbol servers for reverse engineers.’ The source code of this tool was first published on GitHub on September 30, 2022 and it received several updates.

The tool was designed to enable the attackers to download and execute arbitrary code.

“If you have downloaded or run this tool, TAG recommends taking precautions to ensure your system is in a known clean state, likely requiring a reinstall of the operating system.” concludes the report that also include a list of actor controlled sites and accounts.

Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon

Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, North Korea-linked threat actors)

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WATCH: Biden Campaign Ad Highlights His Ability To Walk, Take Trips


President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign released an ad Thursday highlighting his ability to walk and take trips to other countries.

“He entered Ukraine under the cover of night, and, in the morning, Joe Biden walked shoulder to shoulder with our allies in the war-torn streets, standing up for democracy in a place where a tyrant is waging war to take it away,” the ad’s voiceover says.

Biden met with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky in February, which was “the first time in modern history that an American president went into a war zone not controlled by the United States,” the ad says, touting his “quiet strength.”

The ad, which emphasizes Biden’s ability to wake up early and take long train rides, is the campaign’s most direct engagement so far with the question of Biden’s age. Since he announced his campaign for reelection, his administration has attempted to portray him as having a youthful vigor. Sen. Chris Coons (D., Del.), who serves as the co-chair of Biden’s campaign, said on CNN Thursday that he hoped the president’s polling would improve when Americans see him “striding forcefully” in the ad.

Biden’s age has been his greatest weakness in polling. About three-quarters of Americans believe he is too old to serve another four years, according to two recent polls from the Associated Press and the Wall Street Journal. A CNN poll released Thursday showed every Republican candidate for president, except for Vivek Ramaswamy, leading Biden in a hypothetical general election matchup.

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WATCH: Nancy Pelosi, 83, Announces She’s Not Retiring


Former Democratic House speaker Nancy Pelosi (Calif.), who is 83 years old, told a gathering of volunteers on Friday that she has decided to run for reelection in 2024, citing the importance of promoting “the values of San Francisco.”

Pelosi later confirmed her decision on the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter.

Pelosi stepped down last November as speaker of the House, declaring that “the hour has come for a new generation to lead the Democratic Caucus that I so deeply respect,” though she resolved to serve out her term and did not make definitive statements about future runs. Pelosi, born in 1940, is the ninth-oldest member of Congress.

The former House speaker was cagey about her political future until the last minute. Pelosi told Politico Thursday that “I haven’t been thinking much about [retirement]—yet,” though she qualified the statement by saying, “But I will. When I need to, I will.”

Many Americans have grown frustrated with the advanced age of their political leaders, polls show. Seventy-seven percent of Americans believe President Joe Biden, three years younger than Pelosi, is unable to “effectively serve” for another four years due to his age, according to an AP-NORC poll. A CBS News poll similarly found that 73 percent of Americans believe there should be a maximum age cap placed on elected officials.

Pelosi has made a point to defend her aging Democratic colleagues. She suggested on Thursday that calls for 90-year-old California senator Dianne Feinstein to retire are based on sexism. Reports have long indicated that Feinstein is in a state of mental decline. The former speaker has also railed against conservatives for suggesting that Biden’s age makes him unfit for the presidency. She described Biden as a “kid,” dismissing age-related criticisms of the president as an “excuse.”

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Zimbabwe’s Mnangagwa Reappoints Controversial Vice President  


Zimbabwean President Emmerson Mnangagwa reappointed Kembo Mohadi on Friday as one of his two vice presidents. Mohadi had resigned from the same post two years ago, following media reports he had engaged in improper sexual relationships with married women, including one of his subordinates.

Mohadi and Constantino Chiwenga took the oath of office at the State House to be Zimbabwe’s two vice presidents for the next five years.

After being sworn in, Mohadi said only, “I am here to serve the nation. I have been serving the nation since the coming in of the second republic and will continue to do so.”

Chiwenga said it was a great day for Zimbabweans as a new year is starting.

“We start now a new year for government,” he said, “which we are going to start with zeal, energy and strength to build the Zimbabwe that we want in support of our president and his vision, which he has pronounced to the people of Zimbabwe, to Africa and the world at large: that Zimbabwe will be an upper-middle-income society by 2030.”

Some Zimbabweans took to social media to condemn Mnangagwa for reappointing Mohadi, given his history, but no one was willing to talk with VOA about it.

Linda Masarira, founder of the opposition Labor, Economists and African Democrats, said she was concerned about the absence of a female vice president.

“Consideration should be done especially when appointing executives of this country, taking into consideration that 54 percent of the voting population are women,” she said. “But we continue to structurally undermine women’s rights and women’s participation. … We are just demanding for at least one female president, a gender-balanced cabinet. There is no democracy without women. We will not tire to demand what is rightfully ours and what belongs to the women’s movement in Zimbabwe.”

Harare-based independent political analyst Gibson Nyikadzino said Mnangagwa appointed the two men to ensure that his goals are fulfilled in his final term.

“This is to ensure that the two vice presidents are going to be delegated the agenda to spear[head] the policy and vision of the president so that they pull in one direction,” he said.

Mnangagwa, who defeated Nelson Chamisa of the Citizens Coalition for Change in the disputed August 23 general election, is now expected to appoint ministers to make his cabinet full and lead Zimbabwe in his second and final term.

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Vulnerable to Attack, Haitian Journalists Flee


Home invasions, arson, gang attacks: As violence sweeps Haiti, the country’s journalists are being targeted.

In the past two weeks, at least five Haitian journalists have fled their homes in the Carrefour Feuilles neighborhood of Port-au-Prince.

Haiti has been affected by insecurity since the assassination of President Jovenel Moise in July 2021. In the aftermath of that, gangs have waged a violent battle for power in the capital.

The crisis led Human Rights Watch to say last month that “the Haitian government has failed to protect people” from the attacks, kidnappings and sexual violence taking place.

One of those who recently left their home is Arnold Junior Pierre, said the Committee to Protect Journalists or CPJ.

On August 31, gang members broke into the radio broadcaster’s home and set the building on fire. Pierre and 15 of his relatives fled to safety.

“I’m afraid for my life,” Pierre told CPJ, adding that he was not sure what specific coverage may have provoked the attack.

On July 31, a group of men attacked and beat Pierre while he covered a protest in the southwestern side of Port-au-Prince, and he said he also has received death threats from a police officer.

Also in July, assailants set fire to local station Radio Antarctique and several buildings, and two journalists were briefly kidnapped.

 

Some journalists estimate that as many as nine reporters have been kidnapped in Haiti since the start of the year.

The rising violence and targeting of media have journalism groups worried.

“We are watching with grave concern as the situation in Haiti reaches new levels of bloodshed,” said Cristina Zahar, Latin America, and Caribbean program coordinator for CPJ in a statement.

The New York-based organization says it believes more journalists will have to leave their homes because of insecurity.

Figures from the United Nations show the scale of the issue.

“Between January 1 and August 15 of this year, at least 2,439 people have been killed and a further 902 injured. In addition, at least 951 people have been kidnapped,” United Nations rights office spokesperson Ravina Shamdasani told reporters in Geneva last month.

In its 2023 assessment of Haiti, Reporters Without Borders, or RSF, said the country is one of the region’s most dangerous for the media, with reporters “increasingly vilified and vulnerable.”

“Haitian journalists were already risking their lives whenever they went into the field but now they are in danger even when at home,” Artur Romeu, director of the Latin America bureau at RSF said in a statement.

The watchdog said that at least six journalists were killed there in relation to their work in 2022.

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US Senate to hold hearings on Azerbaijan’s Karabakh


The US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations will hold hearings on the situation in Azerbaijan’s Karabakh region. 

The hearing will be held on September 14, News.Az reports citing the website of the US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations.

Senior Advisor for Caucasus Negotiations at the US Department of State Louis Bono and Acting Assistant Secretary at Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs of the US Department of State Yuri Kim are expected to deliver speeches at the hearing.

News.Az 

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The Last Hour of Prigozhin’s Plane


russia-jet-sec_AP23135451926278.jpg

At around 5:30 pm Moscow time on August 23, the Embraer Legacy 600 private business jet took to the skies. Launching from an airport near the Russian capital, the 13-seater plane, which has a white body and blue tail, has been linked to Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of the brutal Russian mercenary outfit Wagner Group.

At 5:46 pm, once the plane was clear of Moscow—an area where location-tracking GPS signals are frequently blocked—receivers belonging to flight-tracking network Flightradar24 started picking up signals from the Embraer Legacy. For the next 34 minutes, Prigozhin’s plane was sending out data about its altitude, speed, and autopilot settings that allowed its movements to be tracked.

During this time, the Embraer Legacy appeared to be fine. It reached a cruising altitude of 28,000 feet before briefly climbing to 30,000 feet, and it was traveling at around a ground speed of around 513 knots. Its flight path headed northwest, away from Moscow and in the direction of Russia’s second-largest city, St. Petersburg.

At 6:19 pm, around 30 seconds before the plane stopped transmitting data altogether, it plunged 8,000 feet toward the ground. Its last recorded altitude was 19,725, as it flew by the Kuzhenkino village in the Tver Region. The descent was “dramatic,” according to Flightradar’s analysis.

Since the plane smashed into the earth, killing all those onboard, Russian aviation services, Telegram channels linked to Wagner, and the country’s state-controlled media have reported that Prigozhin was listed as a passenger. The country’s aviation agency named the Wagner boss among 10 people on the plane, along with other senior Wagner members, including cofounder Dmitri Utkin and three crew members.

Officials, according to Russian state media, are investigating the crash and what may have caused it, and have reportedly recovered the bodies. It has been widely speculated that the plane could have been shot down by Russian air defenses, perhaps in response to Prigozhin’s attempted coup two months ago. No evidence to back this up has been presented yet, with Russian president Vladimir Putin saying he has sent his condolences to the families of the dead and investigations are looking into what happened. (One anonymous Western intelligence official told The New York Times that they believe Prigozhin was on the plane. Meanwhile, US president Joe Biden has said there is “not much that happens in Russia that Putin’s not behind.“)

Thanks to Russia’s heavy censorship and propaganda machines, the verifiable truth of what happened to the Embraer Legacy may never be known, experts say.

Amid the dramatic and unfolding incident, there has been a void of official information and a swirl of unconfirmed theories. However, the event highlights how powerful Russia’s grip on its information space is: The country controls its media, has banned independent outlets, and tightly censors the internet and online services available in the country. The episode also continues to show how useful even small amounts of open source information—such as photos or videos posted to social media and open source data, such as flight information—can be in establishing what may have happened. Open source intelligence, known as OSINT, is already being inspected by researchers.

FlightRadar is one of a tiny number of sources of verifiable information about the fate of the Embraer Legacy 600 and, by extension, those onboard the plane. Since the plane stopped transmitting data, one video has emerged on social media showing a plane in pieces dramatically falling toward Earth.

OSINT investigators have confirmed that this happened around the Tver region, the plane’s last known location, by comparing landmarks in the video, such as trees and metal pylons, with existing photos of the location. Another video of the crash site reportedly shows parts of the wreckage matching previous images of Prigozhin’s Embraer Legacy 600. (However, one false video posted to X, the platform previously known as Twitter, has been viewed around a million times.)

Elise Thomas, an investigator at the Centre for Information Resilience, a nonprofit that conducts open source research to expose human rights abuses and counter disinformation, says that within hours the FlightRadar data and confirmed videos from the site gave people a glimpse of what may have happened. “But at the end of the day, we are probably going to be dependent on Russian sources at some level,” she says. These could include Russian government agencies or Telegram channels, which may not be trustworthy. “In some ways, maybe the most likely outcome here is that we just never know the absolute truth of what happened,” she says.

Getting factual information out of Russia isn’t easy—and it has become harder since the country’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine started in February 2022. “The information space has been tightening over time,” says Natalia Krapiva, tech-legal counsel at digital rights nonprofit Access Now. Over the past decade, Krapiva says, the Kremlin has passed laws and taken other measures to control the internet, censor what people can access, throttle the media, and outlaw independent reporting.

Almost all independent media in Russia has been “banned, blocked” or declared “foreign agents” since February of last year, according to media freedom organization Reporters Without Borders. “Those that survive have belonged to allies of the Kremlin for a few years, or they are forced to strict self-censorship, because of banned subjects and terms,” it says in its 2023 annual ranking. Freedom House, an organization that tracks threats to democracy and freedom, ranks Russia as one of the worst countries for online freedoms.

On top of this, Russia has for years run disinformation campaigns and appeared to lie about public incidents at home and abroad. Prigozhin ran the notorious Internet Research Agency, which created reams of fake news and meddled in the 2016 US elections. Two Russian agents who walked into the UK in 2018 and poisoned Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia later appeared on Russian state television and claimed that they were simply in the country to visit the British city of Salisbury to see its cathedral. And Russian officials changed their story multiple times around the downing of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 in 2014, which killed 298 people—reams of open source evidence were presented by investigative journalism unit Bellingcat.

When it comes to Prigozhin and the crash, Russia’s informal network of so-called military bloggers is also involved. In the void of official information about Russia’s war, these military correspondents have appeared on Telegram, in some cases pushing their updates to more than a million people. These accounts are largely pro-Russia, although they often have different allegiances that further muddy the waters. “Some of these people were working for Prigozhin,” says Thomas. “Some of them we know have links to the FSB or GRU,” referring to Russia’s intelligence services. “Some of them probably have links to the Russian security services that we don’t know about.”

These channels have pushed a range of theories about the crash, claiming to have confirmed that Prigozhin is dead and suggesting that they would “march” on Moscow. There have also been reports on possible causes of the crash. According to Meduza, the widely read independent Russian news source, suggestions are being circulated on Telegram that investigators suspect a bomb could have been attached to the plane and that law enforcement may have a suspect in mind. Neither claim has been officially confirmed, Meduza notes.

“Looking at the information that is either available or not available is not enough,” says Tanya Lokot, an associate professor in digital media and society at Dublin City University who researches internet and media freedom. Lokot says it’s essential to consider the context of any information published from official Russian sources or in Telegram channels. For instance, she says, it is important to scrutinize why certain information—such as a list of names—may have been released at a particular time.

Lokot says it is also important to understand the motives of whoever is in control of this kind of information and how and when they decide to release it, as that helps shape a bigger narrative. “How they are presenting this incident and the fallout from this incident is really important to understand because it helps us also understand how they’re trying to control the information space to make sure that it fits their broader strategic narrative,” she says. “The desired at least strategic narrative is the Russian state wants to show that it remains in control of the situation, whatever that situation is.”

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