Class 20. Inside the Troll Farm
The active measures playbook meets The Office.
One of this summer’s bizarre subplots in the ongoing war by Russia against Ukraine was the mutiny of Putin’s private mercenary warlord, Yvegeney Prigozhin. Following some Jerry Springer-like public exchanges between the two men, Prigozhin — who commanded the Wagner Group, a private military outfit, on Putin’s behalf in Ukraine, Syria, and Africa — led a half-baked march on the Kremlin, only to stop short of Moscow, turn around, and announce that he was retiring in Belarus…all within the span of 48 hours. It was like the writers for this season had nowhere left to go with the plot and had to quickly write a dead-end character out of the picture.
Well, speaking of dead and out of the picture, Prigozhin accidentally fell out of a window out of the sky last week, an outcome that surprised precisely no one. (Russia denies that Putin had anything to do with Prigozhin’s death, also surprising no one.) In looking back at his legacy, it’s worth remembering that, in addition to overseeing rape, torture, and the commission of other war crimes, Prigozhin was also a businessman. Specifically, Prigozhin owned and operated a catering company called Concord Catering — an enterprise that earned him the nickname “Putin’s chef” because of the food services he provided to the Kremlin and Russian armed forces — as well as an entity that became a household name: the Internet Research Agency (IRA), a.k.a. Russia’s troll farm. In February 2018, Prigozhin, his catering company (along with its sister company, Concord Management and Consulting), the IRA, and 12 other Russian nationals were indicted by Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III for their roles in Russia’s disinformation operation during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Prigozhin was also sanctioned by the U.S. and even got his own FBI wanted poster:
Fun, right? For today’s lesson, we’ll take a trip down memory lane, looking at the inner workings of the IRA and the challenges faced by Mueller in bringing the troll farm’s activities to light through the criminal justice system…consider it all a post mortem, as it were, of the IRA, since it apparently no longer exists.
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