Russia in the Midterm US Elections

In case anyone was thinking the Russians had stopped interfering with US internal politics, there is proof they have not.  It is in the form of a previously sealed indictment (read at )against one Elena Alekseevna Khusyaynova, a resident of St. Petersburg where the Internet Research Association, for a time her employer,  is located.  You remember IRA from its interference in the US national election in 2016.  Since 2014, known and unknown individuals participated in Project Lakhta, to influence politics in the US, the EU and the Ukraine.  She was the chief accountant in the Finance Division of this project.  She had a $12 million budget in 2016, but had requested $83 million in different transactions in 2017. The indictment lays these out in great detail.  

The Russians have previously interfered in elections in all of these places, most particularly the Ukraine (see The New Cyberwar, McFarland Publishing).  The indictment lists 10 companies, mostly news agencies in Russia, as participants in the Project.  Concord Management and Consulting LLC. and Concord Catering are the funding companies behind this campaign.  Remember those names from the 2016 election?  You should;  they were had the same function in the campaign going on in the US then.  

Yevgeniy Prigozhin, a close Friend of Putin, operates these companies and has had a hand in most of the US operations.  His conspiracy  sought to operate "fictitious social media personas, pages, and groups designed to attract US audiences and address divisive US political and social issues or advocate for the election or electoral defeat of particular candidates."  

Facebook is going to be the target of more investigations since it was the beneficiary of a lot of this work.  Project Lakhta hired persons to pretend to be US citizens at work on various kinds of social and political projects.  They hired bloggers, made artwork, and did the usual kinds of things that we expect from social media groups.  They got guidance on messaging from internal sources and that is quite enlightening since it shows the Russian perceptions of US minorities.  

I said many times that the Russians would change the names of their companies and funding apparatus as a result of being called out in the 2016 election interference.  They obviously did not.