VIF Digest: USA, Russia & European Union (Vol 1 Issue I)

Oct 16-31, 2017

USA

Manhattan Terror Attack

On 31 October, a driver plowed his pickup truck down a crowded bike path along the Hudson River in Manhattan, killing eight people and injuring eleven before being shot by a police officer in what officials are calling the deadliest terrorist attack on New York City since Sept. 11, 2001. The rampage ended when the motorist — whom the police identified as Sayfullo Saipov, who came to the United States from Uzbekistan in 2010, smashed into a school bus, jumped out of his truck and ran up and down the highway waving a pellet gun and paintball gun and shouting “Allahu Akbar,” before he was shot in the abdomen by an officer. As investigators began to look into Saipov’s history, it emerged that he had been on the radar of US federal authorities having come to their attention as a result of an unrelated investigation concerning a series of traffic violations by him.

Interestingly, over the last two years, a terrorism investigation by the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, the New York Police Department and federal prosecutors in Brooklyn have resulted in charges against five men from Uzbekistan and one from Kazakhstan of providing material support to ISIS. Several of the men have pleaded guilty. It is unclear whether Mr. Saipov was connected with that investigation. New York Mayor Bill de Blasio declared the rampage a terrorist attack and federal law enforcement authorities were leading the investigation. Investigators discovered handwritten notes in Arabic near the truck that indicated allegiance to the Islamic State, two law enforcement officials said. But investigators had not uncovered evidence of any direct or enabling ties between Saipov and ISIS and were treating the episode as a case of an “inspired” attacker, two counterterrorism officials said. Bill de Blasio also said at a news conference, “Based on information we have at this moment, this was an act of terror, and a particularly cowardly act of terror aimed at innocent civilians.”

Mueller Investigation

On October 27, Paul Manafort and his former business associate Rick Gates became the first people charged in special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into possible collusion between Donald Trump’s Presidential campaign and the Russian government. In a related development, George Papadopoulos, a former adviser to Trump, pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI. The document laying out George Papadopoulos’s guilty plea is, by its own admission, only a partial account of what the special counsel Robert Mueller and his team know about Papadopoulos’s actions. “These facts do not constitute all of the facts known to the parties concerning the charge offense,” the document reads, in its very first paragraph.

There is also no clarity about how important and well-connected were Papadopoulos’s Russian contacts. The plea agreement states that Papadopoulos was in contact with three people connected to the Russian government. According to the Washington Post the first one is a man identified as “the professor,” apparently a London-based scholar named Joseph Mifsud. (Mifsud has so far not responded to the allegation.) Papadopoulos seems to have believed that his second contact, identified as a “female Russian national,” was a niece of Vladimir Putin’s, though according to the plea agreement that was not true. (The plea agreement does not reveal her identity.) The third, and perhaps most meaningful, contact is carefully described throughout the plea agreement as a “Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs Connection,” although it is not clear whether this person was actually connected to the Ministry or simply led Papadopoulos to believe so. There is no clarity whether the young Trump campaign adviser was making plans with actual Russian officials or whether he was conned by a bunch of “hucksters, tricksters, and pretenders.”

Russia

US- Russia Twitter War

Twitter announced that it would ban advertisements from two Russian media organisations, citing allegations by US intelligence agencies that Russia Today (RT) and Sputnik tried to interfere with the 2016 presidential election in the US. On its website, the Company announced, "Twitter has made the policy decision to off-board advertising from all accounts owned by Russia Today (RT) and Sputnik, effective immediately." The site said the decision was based on its own investigations of RT and Sputnik as well as the "US intelligence community's conclusion that both RT and Sputnik attempted to interfere with the election on behalf of the Russian government".

RT and Sputnik condemned the move, and Moscow threatened retaliatory measures. The ban comes a month after Twitter officials told the US senate that it suspended 201 Russian accounts amid a congressional investigation into alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election. US intelligence officials also suspect that social networks may have contributed in Moscow's alleged propaganda attempt to help elect President Donald Trump. Russia denies the allegation and Trump has also denied any collusion. In response, Sputnik called Twitter's decision "regrettable", while RT said it had "never been involved in any illegal activity online" and "never pursued an agenda of influencing the US election through any platforms, including Twitter". RT also said Twitter had encouraged it to "spend big" on advertising in advance of the election.

As charges continued to fly back and forth, Maria Zakharova, a spokeswoman for Russia's foreign ministry, said in a Facebook post that the ban was "an unprecedented attack" and a "gross violation" of free speech guarantees. Later in the fortnight, in an interesting development, the Chair of Russia’s Foreign Affairs Committee Senator Konstantin Kosachev wrote on his Facebook page that he expects the US will seek to influence the country’s presidential election next year, saying Washington will only settle for victory by a pro-Western candidate. “The United States recognizes elections as fair and democratic only when they are won by pro-western candidates, in the case of any other outcome, election procedures and results are anathema to them.” He added, “Judging by the increasing demagogy about alleged Russian interference [in US polls], they have already started their ‘artillery raid’ ahead of the Russian presidential elections. It is likely that the scale of pressure there will be unprecedented.”

Kosachev posted the comments in response to a statement by US Chief Envoy to the UN, Nikki Haley in which she accused the Russian Government of meddling in US politics and politics across the world. "When a country can come and interfere in another country's elections, that is warfare," Haley said, "the Russian Government has made a project of turning Americans against each other," she stated, according to Reuters. Kosachev continued his response by saying that he felt bewildered that such statements were being made by an official representative of a nation that has the strongest economy and most powerful military in the world. He noted that, according to its own data, the US interfered in the election processes of foreign nations 81 times between 1946 and 2000. He elaborated, “This number does not include their special operations and military coups that took place in countries that elected candidates who the United States was not content with, such as Iran, Congo, Chile and Guatemala…More than that, as demonstrated by the Arab Spring and pro-Western revolutions in post-Soviet states, interfering with the political processes of other nations is the main tool by which the US maintains its international influence…This has followed military experiments that were clearly unsuccessful, such as the Iraq campaign, with Colin Powell’s infamous vial used as an excuse.”

Last June, Russian President Vladimir Putin accused the US of repeated and aggressive meddling in Russian politics through US diplomatic staff and NGOs. Putin used the example of US diplomatic workers, who had actually campaigned for the Russian opposition. “They gathered opposition forces and financed them, and went to opposition rallies,” he noted, adding that he had raised this issue with members of the past administration, including former US President Barack Obama and former Secretary of State John Kerry.