inside the Kremlin

by Mark Galeotti  9-1-17

Until August 2016, the Presidential Administration was headed by Sergei Ivanov, a heavy-hitting veteran of the KGB and FSB, with a powerful reputation in the security and executive communities.  His successor, Anton Vaino, is a rather less powerful figure, so far at least, but in common with many of the key figures within the Presidential Administration, he is a foreign service MID veteran (and part of the ‘MGIMO mafia’ of alumni of MID’s own university).  Although Vaino has both the MID background and was born in Estonia, the consensus among both Western Kremlin-watchers and Russian insiders and near-insiders seems to be that he is focused on domestic policy and management issues, working with first deputy chief of staff Sergei Kirienko.

Foreign affairs are instead part of the portfolio of the other first deputy chief of staff, Alexei Gromov.  Another MID veteran, it is noteworthy that Gromov is under both EU and US sanctions for his role in the 2014 annexation of Crimea – while his superior at the time, Ivanov, is only under EU sanction.  It is also indicative that Gromov (a patron of Margarita Simonyan, head of RT)^[65] appears to be responsible for media affairs, even though Kirienko is the point man for domestic politics.^[66]  Gromov may therefore be coordinating, and possibly even commanding, the active measures campaign, given that it brings together foreign policy, media, and other instruments.

 To this end, he and the other key players (including Ushakov and Surkov) draw on key elements of the Presidential Administration of relevance to the active measures campaign, notably:

• The Foreign Politics Department (UPVneshP), headed by MID veteran Alexander Manzhosin.  He has been especially connected with attempts to undermine the sanctions regime, notably by engaging Western lobbyists and seeking to encourage foreign businesspeople to campaign against them in their own countries.^[67] This department is also a primary consumer of intelligence materials, and thus also a key tasking body for the services, even if only relatively few staffers have an intelligence background.

• The Department for Interregional Relations and Cultural Contacts with Foreign Countries (UPMKSZS) has a particular role in managing soft power operations, including Rossotrudnichestvo’s work courting the Russian diaspora (even though the agency is technically subordinated directly to MID).  Its head, Vladimir Chernov, is a specialist in international economic affairs, but was also Ivanov’s head of secretariat and has been described as “well able to work in an intelligence-heavy and conspiratorial environment.”^[68]

• The Department on Social and Economic Cooperation with the Commonwealth of Independent States, the Republic of Abkhazia and the Republic of South Ossetia (UPSESG) is by definition involved in political operations within the so-called ‘Near Abroad’ of the post-Soviet states, and it is unlikely to be a coincidence that its head, Oleg Govorun, is known to be a close ally of Surkov’s.^[69]

• The Domestic Politics Department (UPVnuP) may seem an unlikely inclusion, but it handles parliamentary and party-to-party contacts with European politicians and parties, placing it very much at the forefront of attempts to suborn some and support others.  It was, for example, the deputy head of this department, Timur Prokopenko, who arranged for Marine Le Pen’s Front National to receive loans from Russian banks, and then – via Russian politician, wealthy media producer, and French tax resident Konstantin Rykov – pressed her to endorse the Crimean referendum.^[70]

• The Press and Information Directorate (UPSIP), headed by Alexander Smirnov but very much under Peskov’s sway, is the main nexus for control of the media and the issuance of regular talking points and temniki guidance memos.  It also seems likely that contracts with the ‘troll farms’ and their instructions come directly or indirectly from UPSIP.^[71]

• The Experts’ Directorate (EUP), under former deputy minister for economic development Vladimir Simonenko, not only conducts its own analytic work, it acts as a point of contact for a wide range of scholars, think-tanks, and the like that, in turn, can sometimes be more than simply sources of information.  One of the think-tanks from which it regularly commissions reports is the aforementioned RISI, once part of the SVR and now notionally independent, although still closely connected to the spooks. RISI is not just an analytic centre (of especially hawkish character and debatable impact), though.^[72]  It has also played a more active role in lobbying and cultivating clients in the Balkans and Scandinavia.  In Finland, for example, RISI’s official representative is the scholar and
pro-Russian activist Johan Bäckman who has been an outspoken supporter of the Donbas rebels.

• Presidential Councils.  Notionally independent, these advisory bodies are housed within and serviced by the Presidential Administration, and a number play a significant role in active measures.  The Presidential Council for Civil Society and Human Rights, for example, disburses grants which have in the past gone to a number of Russian soft power and lobbying front organisations abroad, as has the Presidential Council on the Russian Language (which supports friendly émigré groups under the cloak of assisting language education and cultural programmes).  The Presidential Council for Coordination with Religious Organisations plays a crucial role in liaising with the Russian Orthodox Church and other state-affiliated faith bodies.  The Presidential Council for Cossack Affairs plays a central role in not only mobilising Cossacks for domestic political purposes, but also encouraging pro-Kremlin Cossack groups abroad, such as the hundred Cossacks who turned up in Republika Srpska as a visible demonstration of Moscow’s support for local nationalists in 2014.^{[73]     http://www.ecfr.eu/publications/summary/controlling_chaos_how_russia_manages_its_political_war_in_europe}

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-Serguei Cheloukhine, M.R. Haberfeld:  ^{-Russsian Organized Corruption Networks, 2011}   https://books.google.com/books?id=ZBa1Hu7-H-cC&pg=PA137&lpg=PA137&dq=fsb+structure&source=bl&ots=x6kpK0uHcQ&sig=EOdaTCelLY_RefQGTwp6oUWxu6I&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjl0b7cz73ZAhUX5mMKHUekB3QQ6AEIlgEwFQ#v=onepage&q=fsb%20structure&f=false

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8-17-17    I had some sort of confirmation that I was being tracked by the [intelligence agency and KGB's heir] FSB for various reasons but I certainly think that they were interested in what I was doing while I was there. What I did to counter that was use all sorts of methods. The biggest one was staying off the internet. Staying offline, using burner phones, sending encrypted emails and stuff like that. The biggest one was keeping a lot of our chats, both among our team and with our sources, completely offline. Everything was done while we were in country, and as limited as possible.  https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/vbbbvb/cyberwar-season-2-trailer
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7-20-16    it's all investigative journalists, dissidents, political opposition etc being targeted, never "standard" crime. The vast majority of law enforcement resources everywhere are dedicated to monitoring threats to those in power, in one of the rare glimpses to how police spend their resources in a "democratic" government. Back before everything was on hard drives and you could hack them in your pajamas, it was in filing cabinets and you had to physically break in. But when the citizens commision to investigate the FBI broke into their office they find: according to its analysis of the documents in this FBI office, 1 percent were devoted to organized crime, mostly gambling; 30 percent were "manuals, routine forms, and similar procedural matter"; 40 percent were devoted to political surveillance and the like, including two cases involving right-wing groups, ten concerning immigrants, and over 200 on left or liberal groups. Another 14 percent of the documents concerned draft resistance and "leaving the military without government permission." The remainder concerned bank robberies, murder, rape, and interstate theft. Draft Resistance and leaving the military I'll include under not "real" crime but threats to those in power. So like 70 percent political, 30 percent real crime. The difference between authoritarian regimes and "democratic" ones is that Hacking Team customers jail, torture and kill, where the "democratic" ones have gentler ways of managing dissent....Well yeah, the natural tendency of everyone in power is to want more power and control, and they need surveillance for that.  https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/78kwke/hacker-phineas-fisher-hacking-team-puppet
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6-20-17    A hacker army has systematically undermined practically every sector of Ukraine:  media, finance, transportation, military, politics, energy.  Wave after wave of intrusions have deleted data, destroyed computers, and in some cases paralyzed organizations’ most basic functions.  “You can’t really find a space in Ukraine where there hasn’t been an attack,” says Kenneth Geers, a NATO ambassador who focuses on cybersecurity.

In a public statement in December, Ukraine’s president, Petro Poroshenko, reported that there had been 6,500 cyberattacks on 36 Ukrainian targets in just the previous two months.  International cybersecurity analysts have stopped just short of conclusively attributing these attacks to the Kremlin, but Poroshenko didn’t hesitate:  Ukraine’s investigations, he said, point to the “direct or indirect involvement of secret services of Russia, which have unleashed a cyberwar against our country.”  (The Russian foreign ministry didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment.)   https://www.wired.com/story/russian-hackers-attack-ukraine/

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1-5-18  https://www.independent.ie/business/countries-on-red-alert-for-2018-cyber-war-36459446.html}