The Russia Conundrum

CHAPTER 15

INTERNATIONAL OPERATIONS

Among the band of criminals who run Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin, some stand out. Yevgeny Prigozhin has something of a personal connection to me. Prigozhin is Putin’s trusted counsellor; in addition to advice, he provides many of the technical, logistical and military resources that Putin needs to impose his will. But the way in which Prigozhin attained such eminence is unusual: a street thief who served time in jail, he later became a caterer and food merchant, running a hot-dog stall in St Petersburg in the early 1990s. With the help of friendly local officials, he was able to open a restaurant, then a convenience store, eventually expanding his activities to become one of the city’s most powerful operators, providing food for public bodies. This brought him into contact with the first deputy chairman of the St Petersburg city government, Vladimir Putin. Their partnership has endured for over a quarter of a century; and even now, with Prigozhin wielding influence in every area of Kremlin activity, he’s still universally known as ‘Putin’s Cook’.

As I have mentioned, one of Putin’s responsibilities during his time in St Petersburg was managing the relationship between the municipal authorities and special services and the city’s organised crime groups. The Russian mafia wielded great power in St Petersburg in the lawless 1990s, to the extent that it was impossible for the authorities to control their activities. The only solution was to do deals with them, a task that the mayor entrusted to his deputy. Putin dealt with the worst elements of the St Petersburg underworld, so he probably didn’t bat an eyelid when he learned that his associate, Yevgeny Prigozhin, also had a criminal record. Prigozhin served nine years in jail – covering most of the 1980s – for offences including robbery, burglary and fraud. Extracts from some of his convictions suggest a significant level of violence, with charges of assault and battery against young women. ‘Prigozhin continued to strangle Ms Koroleva,’ runs one graphic indictment, ‘until the point at which she lost consciousness…’

It seems prudent to ask why a man with such a chequered past became, and still remains, an adviser to the Russian president. Prigozhin himself has used his position to pressure internet search engines to remove references to his criminal convictions, with some degree of success. In more recent times, his actions have been equally unsavoury, but now they are carried out at the behest of the Kremlin and bring him approbation rather than jail sentences. His Concord Management and Consulting Group has become a multi-billion-dollar company, with deals to provide school meals throughout the country, and to feed conscripts in the Russian army and patients in Russia’s hospitals. Periodic outbreaks of dysentery caused by contaminated food have not persuaded Putin to terminate Concord’s contracts, and investigations of fiscal impropriety have been discreetly shelved.

More worrying than run-of-the-mill corruption, however, are Prigozhin’s international activities. A number of reputable news outlets have reported that Prigozhin finances a group of outfits collectively known as the Wagner Private Military Company (Wagner PMC), a secretive organisation of mercenaries that carry out missions dictated by the Kremlin. Prigozhin has denied any links and gone as far as to use the English courts to try and sue those who repeated and adopted the allegation. Wagner first came to the world’s attention in 2014, when Vladimir Putin’s illegal seizure of the Crimean peninsula was preceded by the appearance of groups of unmistakeably military men wearing unmarked uniforms and staying largely in the shadows. Their self-effacing behaviour earned them the nicknames ‘polite people’ and ‘green men’, but their mission was to prepare the way for a brazen land grab that trampled on the norms of international law. The same ‘green men’ were later spotted in eastern Ukraine, supporting pro-Moscow separatist rebels, and in Syria, fighting alongside government troops loyal to Bashar al-Assad.

Yevgeny Prigozhin serves Vladimir Putin at a banquet near Moscow in November 2011

The Kremlin has denied any ties to them, claiming that they were private individuals who happened to be ‘on holiday’ in Crimea. When investigative journalists established that many of them had served in or had connections with the Russian special forces, Moscow said they were all ‘retired’ and must have travelled to the war zones off their own bat. Mercenary groups are illegal in the Russian Federation, but Wagner PMC troops have an impressive habit of turning up wherever the Kremlin seeks to exert its influence. And it isn’t always the interests of the Russian state that Wagner PMC is sent to support: more often than not, it seems that Putin and his cronies use its resources to further their own venal objectives. Prigozhin is, we are told, the tool they use, not the instigator – his strings, according to some people, are pulled by Putin’s ‘personal banker’, Yuri Kovalchuk.

Not all of Wagner’s activities have been successful. In early 2018, a dozen Russian military operatives were killed in US airstrikes against Syrian pro-government forces in the east of the country. The world expected the Kremlin to react with fury at so many Russian deaths; but Moscow was silent, evidently embarrassed at having to admit that ‘volunteer’ Russian forces were taking part in military operations abroad.

Also in 2018, Wagner PMC mercenaries began work in the Central African Republic (CAR), where Moscow was hoping to extend it political and military influence, displacing the former colonial power, France. Wagner’s brief was to train the CAR army, in return for which another of Prigozhin’s companies, Lobaye Invest, was granted lucrative diamond mining rights. I provided funding for a group of Russian filmmakers that was travelling to the CAR to investigate Wagner’s operations. In July 2018, the TV journalists Alexander Rastorguyev, Orkhan Dzhemal and Kirill Radchenko tried to film a camp where Russian mercenaries were based. Shortly afterwards, their vehicles were ambushed and all three of them were killed. An inquiry by local authorities concluded that the murders were the work of ‘robbers’, an explanation that was immediately supported by the Kremlin. But investigations by the Dossier Center, my fact-checking media organisation dedicated to probing the Kremlin’s illegal activity in Russia and beyond, uncovered a darker story: the journalists had been lured to a secluded spot by a fixer connected to Prigozhin’s employees and the alleged robbers had stolen nothing after murdering them. The Dossier Center concluded that ‘the murder was premeditated and carried out by professionals … following carefully planned surveillance.’ Its report indicated that Wagner employees had obstructed the inquiry into the men’s deaths by destroying evidence, and when a CNN reporter travelled to the CAR to investigate further, she too was followed and harassed. There is no evidence to suggest that the murders of the journalists were instructed by Prigozhin.

Western experts estimate that Prigozhin commands a force of around 5,000 troops, former regular soldiers and special forces veterans, who have become Putin’s unofficial and usually invisible army. Funded and deployed by the Kremlin to countries as far away as Libya, Sudan and Mozambique, they enjoy almost total impunity, gaining a reputation for ruthlessness and cruelty. The investigative Russian newspaper, Novaya Gazeta, obtained video footage of Wagner operatives torturing and executing a Syrian deserter. And in the CAR, a United Nations report accused Wagner-deployed mercenaries of human rights abuses, including the random shooting of civilians, extrajudicial executions, gang rape and torture. Britain, like several other Western countries, has added Prigozhin to its sanctions list, citing his ‘responsibility for significant foreign mercenary activity and multiple breaches of UN arms embargos’.

Rather than deny the charges against him, Prigozhin chooses instead to intimidate and threaten those who question his illegal activities. When Prigozhin was challenged by Alexei Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation, he successfully sued in the pliant Russian courts, promising to ‘ruin’ Navalny as he lay in a coma after a state- sponsored Novichok poisoning.

It was Yevgeny Prigozhin who, in March 2021, offered half a million dollars to any Russian who would kidnap me back to Russia. This action fits the same pattern. Angered by my support for the Dossier Center and its investigation into his African machinations, he made a series of inflammatory public statements about me, none of which bore any relation to the truth. Yevgeny Prigozhin is not interested in the truth, of course, but he is interested in deflecting attention away from himself and – in this instance – from an announcement a few weeks earlier that the American authorities had issued a warrant for his arrest. The FBI had accused him and 12 other Kremlin operatives of ‘involvement in a conspiracy to defraud the United States … for the purposes of interfering with the US political system, including the 2016 Presidential Election’. The charges detailed Prigozhin’s role in the Kremlin’s cyber-hacking campaign to undermine Hillary Clinton’s election bid and the FBI was offering a $250,000 reward for information leading to his conviction.

When I was asked about the case by journalists from the Moscow Echo radio station, I said that Prigozhin seemed to be facing quite serious allegations that should be properly resolved by an open and impartial legal process. I expressed the hope that such issues might one day be addressed by an independent judiciary in the territory of Russia. Prigozhin’s response was typical. ‘I am a patriot and a good guy; and Khodorkovsky is a villain! He is a former oligarch who bribed the country’s top leadership in the 1990s and stole huge funds from the people … The American charges against me are for non- existent crimes, but Khodorkovsky killed people in large numbers!’ Asked why he thought it was he, rather than Khodorkovsky, who was being accused by the FBI, Prigozhin gave an enigmatic answer: ‘I am a scapegoat for the US authorities to cover up the massive gap between the deep state and the [American] people … the only way I will ever go to jail in the United States is if some traitor in [Russian] law enforcement decides to betray the motherland. Luckily, I don’t think that is a real possibility in Russia, because in our country there are many, many more patriots than there are liberals willing to take dirty money from the West.’

Anti-Western invective has become the go-to excuse for anything that reflects badly on Putin’s Russia. For many Russians, this rhetoric is enough to convince them that the motherland is under attack from hostile Western forces and that the patriotic response is to rally to the support of the Kremlin.

In early 2018, I was invited to the hearings organised by the US Republican Party, at which Mark Zuckerberg was asked how Facebook was dealing with the threat of fake news. His answer was that people should be provided with honest information and this would allow them to figure out the truth for themselves.

In his subsequent speech to the US Senate in April that year, Zuckerberg admitted that fake news was being used as a tool by agents acting on behalf of Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin to influence people’s thinking in the battle between the Kremlin and the West, and that Facebook and other platforms had been hijacked.

We build technical tools to try to identify when people are creating fake accounts – especially large networks of fake accounts, like the Russians have – in order to remove all of that content … But it’s clear now that we didn’t do enough to prevent these tools from being used for harm, as well. And that goes for fake news, for foreign interference in elections, and hate speech, as well as developers and data privacy.

Putin’s propagandists were promoting conspiracy theories and anti-Western paradigms, driving them into people’s minds by the ruthless use of fake accounts, fake postings and fake activist groups, amplified exponentially through the power of social media. Because Western democracy was itself in crisis, beset by doubt and self-questioning, it proved singularly vulnerable to the Kremlin’s subversion. Putin was able to use the disputes and conflicts that were dogging politics in the West, fanning extremist rhetoric and promoting radical views.

In all of this, Putin’s chief lieutenant was Yevgeny Prigozhin. In the months leading up to the US presidential election of November 2016, Prigozhin had been orchestrating the Kremlin’s efforts to trash Hillary Clinton’s campaign and manipulate American voters into backing Donald Trump, who the Kremlin was not convinced could win. The aim was to discredit the US electoral system and, if possible, foment civil conflict by accusing the Clinton campaign of dirty tricks. It was a role in which Prigozhin seemed to take great delight but, as would later become clear, US intelligence officials had been tracking Prigozhin’s own dirty tricks and knew full well what he was up to. So, when they switched on their TV sets on the morning of 1 June 2016, they most likely exploded with indignation. Standing in front of the White House, in the very spot where the international press corps train their cameras, an individual was holding up a banner bearing the words, ‘Happy 55th Birthday Dear Boss’. The images had already been transmitted worldwide before the DC Police Department was despatched to the scene. According to their deposition, the ‘real US person’ holding up the banner had been ‘informed by the defendants and their co-conspirators’ that the sign was ‘for someone who is our leader and our boss … our founder’. Knowing that Yevgeny Prigozhin’s birthday was 1 June 1961, and learning that the ‘co-conspirators’ who commissioned this person to carry out the stunt were Russian, the FBI and the CIA realised that their number one adversary in the murky world of cyber warfare was thumbing his nose at them.

We know about Prigozhin’s little jibe thanks to the FBI or, more exactly, the sixth director of the FBI, Robert Swan Mueller III. Bob Mueller was tasked with investigating the covert subversion carried out by Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin against the American people and the American system of electoral democracy – and he did his job so well that he uncovered absolutely everything, including the ‘real US person’ who stood outside the White House with a banner congratulating Yevgeny Prigozhin on his birthday, as well as the 16 ‘defendants and their co-conspirators’, all of whom had Russian names. Chief among them was Prigozhin.

The Mueller Report arose from an FBI investigation of alleged links between Donald Trump and the Kremlin. Operation Crossfire Hurricane had been triggered by claims that Russian agents were offering to supply the Trump campaign with information damaging to Hillary Clinton. The FBI established that the ‘damaging information’ consisted of emails hacked from the account of the Democratic Party in the same month as Prigozhin’s 2016 birthday stunt.

By the end of that year, Trump had won the presidency and did everything in his power to halt the investigation, including firing the FBI’s director and deputy director; but Congress voted to pursue the inquiries and Bob Mueller was appointed special counsel in charge of them. In May 2017, the remit of the inquiry was widened to include all forms of Kremlin interference in the presidential election, allegations of coordination between the Trump campaign and the Russian government, and the US president’s alleged obstruction of justice. In pursuit of his brief, Mueller would issue 2,800 subpoenas, execute 500 search warrants and interview more than 500 witnesses. His report, delivered in March 2019, resulted in 34 indictments, including against former members of the Trump campaign, and 448 pages of lurid detail of what Vladimir Putin and his agents had been involved in. According to Mueller, the Kremlin’s efforts to subvert the US electoral process began as long ago as 2014 and included the hacking and leaking of illegally obtained information, conspiracy-theory disinformation, coercive messaging and psychological operations, paid advertising, false-flag posts and information warfare. The aim of all the operations was to support the Trump campaign and undermine that of Hillary Clinton. Putin and the Russian Government, Mueller concluded, aspired to help President-elect Trump’s election chances whenever possible.

I read one particular indictment generated by the Mueller inquiry with especial interest. The defendants in it were named as ‘The Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA), its leadership and affiliates’. Issued in February 2018, its 37 pages read like a spy thriller and made clear that the inoffensive-sounding ‘Research Agency’ was in fact a hotbed of subversion, and it was run by Prigozhin.

Prigozhin’s Internet Research Agency was founded in 2013 in a suburb of St Petersburg. It was paid for by money from Prigozhin’s Concord catering conglomerate, a business entity described by Mueller as having ‘various Russian government contracts’ and which, as we have already seen, acts as a conduit for large-scale Kremlin funding of Putin’s black operations. The IRA set about recruiting IT-literate employees, mainly young marketing and computer graduates, offering salaries far higher than those available elsewhere, and put them to work producing a flood of pro-Putin, anti-Western propaganda. The online comments of the IRA trolls – attacking foreign and domestic critics of the Kremlin, including myself, and accusing Western countries of repression at home and abroad – hit the internet with a tsunami of disinformation and bile. Putin’s political opponents were mocked and slandered; the leaders of Ukraine were described as fascists and Nazis. Using bots and automated delivery algorithms, the IRA became so notorious that by 2014 it was widely referred to as the Troll Factory.

Prigozhin appointed three of his cronies to run the operation. Its chief executive was reported to be a former St Petersburg police officer, Colonel Mikhail Bystrov; its executive director, Mikhail Burchik, was a young tech entrepreneur; and its chief deputy director, Alexandra Krylova, had previously worked at Prigozhin’s Federal News Agency. Between them they ran the IRA as a streamlined digital marketing firm, with departments generating editorial content, graphics and search engine data analysis, and trolling targets. They had an HR unit to oversee recruitment, staff incentivisation, finance and budgeting.

By the spring of 2014, the operation had nearly 1,000 employees and was expanding. A new unit, at first secretive but then widely touted within the organisation, was set up. The blandly named Translator Project was tasked with ‘focusing on the US population and conducting operations on social media platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter’. An internal IRA memo defined its remit as American electoral politics and its aim ‘to spread distrust toward candidates and the political system in general’.

The Translator Project conducted research into American voting patterns, political campaigning and the demographics of party affiliation, coordinating with the Kremlin in defining the tasks that Vladimir Putin would set for them. As Robert Mueller would later report, the operation was always focused on the end goal of the 2016 presidential election, the political event that mattered more to Putin than any other: ‘The conspiracy had as its object impairing, obstructing, and defeating the lawful governmental functions of the United States by dishonest means in order to enable the Defendants to interfere with US political and electoral processes, including the 2016 US presidential election.’

The Translator Project infiltrated groups dedicated to politics and social issues on US media sites, monitoring the popularity and engagement of online conversations, including the frequency of posts and the nature of comments or responses. Its employees adopted fake social media identities, pretending to be Americans, and the IRA’s IT department set up a network of proxy servers to conceal the fact that they were posting from Russia. ‘In order to collect additional intelligence,’ Mueller reported, ‘defendants and their co-conspirators posed as US persons and contacted US political and social activists’, communicating with ‘unwitting members, volunteers, and supporters of the Trump Campaign involved in local community outreach, as well as grassroots groups that supported then-candidate Trump’.

Translator Project operatives would eventually run hundreds of accounts with fictitious American identities, with the stated aim of becoming ‘leaders of public opinion’. Working round the clock to hit all the US time zones, they were instructed to ‘inflame political intensity through supporting radical groups, users dissatisfied with the social and economic situation, and oppositional social movements’. To that end, their pages on Facebook and Instagram fomented unrest about the Obama administration. Under the title, ‘Secured Borders’, one online group strove to fuel voters’ anger at the Democrats’ alleged failure to curb immigration. Another fanned the flames of racial discontent with a Black Lives Matter-style page titled ‘Blacktivist’. Yet others appealed to old north–south resentments with groups named ‘South United’ and ‘Heart of Texas’ or targeted religious groups with pages such as ‘United Muslims of America’ and ‘Army of Jesus’. United Muslims of America encouraged Muslims to boycott the elections because ‘most of the American Muslim voters refuse to vote for Hillary Clinton’. And an IRA fake Instagram account titled ‘Woke Blacks’ declared, ‘A particular hype and hatred for Trump is misleading the people and forcing Blacks to vote Hillary. We cannot resort to the lesser of two devils. Then we’d be surely better off without voting at all.’

The IRA’s Twitter accounts that served as cheerleaders for Trump appeared to be authentically American, with like hashtags like @TEN_GOP, ‘Tennessee GOP’, and were retweeted by senior Trump officials including General Mike Flynn, Kellyanne Conway and Donald Trump Junior. By having each fake account repost, retweet and promote the content of the others, Prigozhin’s trolls were able to amass hundreds of thousands of followers. ‘Over time, these social media accounts became Defendants’ means to reach significant numbers of Americans for purposes of interfering with the US political system,’ Mueller’s indictment says. ‘They had the strategic goal to sow discord.’

Prigozhin’s team decided on key messages and on key targets for their attack bots, pouring vitriol on Hillary Clinton and the Democrats, using all available means to boost the Trump campaign. English language specialists monitored the team’s posts to ‘ensure they appear authentic’ and offered guidance on wording and visual content. A system of bonuses encouraged workers to make extra effort and compete with their peers. The monthly budget of Prigozhin’s IRA was now estimated to be around $1.25 million.

When campaigning commenced for the 2016 election, the IRA took out fake political advertisements, paid for via a shadowy internet agency. As many as 10 million people viewed the ads, which promoted divisive political and social messages, supporting Trump and attacking Clinton. Not content with buying their own publicity, the trolls began opening counterfeit PayPal accounts in the names of unsuspecting US citizens, stealing their Social Security numbers and driving licence details to authenticate the payments. The accounts were used to purchase advertisements with messages like, ‘Trump is our only hope for a better future’, ‘Support the Second Amendment’, ‘Hillary Clinton Doesn’t Deserve the Black Vote’ and ‘Ohio Wants Hillary 4 Prison’. The IRA bosses instructed employees to ‘use any opportunity to criticize Hillary and the rest (except Sanders and Trump – we support them) … it is imperative to intensify criticizing Hillary Clinton’.

Not satisfied with sowing discord over the internet, the Kremlin put agents on the ground. In the summer of 2014, Prigozhin instructed Alexandra Krylova and another IRA employee, the data analyst Anna Bogacheva, to apply for US visas, according to the indictment, in order ‘to collect intelligence for their interference operations’. The women falsely stated that they were travelling to the US for personal reasons and concealed their place of employment. They equipped themselves with cameras, SIM cards and untraceable burner phones, agreeing on pre-planned ‘evacuation scenarios’ in case something went wrong. Between 4 and 26 June, Krylova and Bogacheva travelled through Nevada, California, New Mexico, Colorado, Illinois, Michigan, Louisiana, Texas and New York, for the purpose of what the indictment calls ‘the collection of intelligence’.

With the election approaching, that intelligence was put to practical use. Pretending to be grassroots US activists, the IRA began organising political rallies in several states, building attendance through fake social media accounts and emboldening the administrators of political activist groups. Using the email address allforusa@yahoo.com, they distributed press notices promoting a ‘March for Trump’ in New York in June 2016, contacting rally organisers with an offer to ‘give you money to print posters and get a megaphone’. The following month, they helped mount a rally in Washington, DC to promote false claims that Hillary Clinton planned to introduce Sharia law in the US, hiring people to carry banners with a picture of Clinton and the slogan, ‘I think Sharia Law will be a powerful new direction of freedom.’ They supported a ‘Down with Hillary’ rally later in July, sending out press releases to more than 30 media organisations and paying for Facebook ads. In August, they helped coordinate ‘Florida for Trump’ rallies, using their fake social media personas to communicate with Trump campaign staff. ‘Florida is still a purple state,’ they messaged via Facebook, ‘and we need to paint it red … What about organizing a YUGE [sic] pro-Trump flash mob in every Florida town?’ The ads got 8,300 likes, with users being clicked through to the IRA’s fake Facebook page ‘Being Patriotic.’

Mueller calculates that the IRA posted more than 80,000 items between 2015 and 2017, and that more than 126 million Americans viewed its propaganda. For the Florida rallies, they arranged for a lorry with a prison cage on it to join the parade, paying a local woman to appear as Hillary Clinton in prison uniform. At further events in New York and Pennsylvania, Mueller reports, the IRA paid protesters to join the rallies.

One of the most insidious – and most effective – tactics of Putin’s trolls was to spread rumours of voter fraud. As a trial run, at the time of the Democratic primaries, the IRA posted fake reports that Clinton had somehow ‘stolen’ the Iowa caucuses from Bernie Sanders. Encouraged by signs of controversy and division among Democratic voters, Prigozhin repeated the trick by circulating allegations of illegal mail-in votes for Clinton in Broward County, Florida. The tactic found fertile ground. As far back as 2012, Donald Trump had made unfounded accusations that the election had been rigged by Barack Obama (‘This election is a total sham and a travesty! We are not a democracy!’) and in the summer of 2016 he was warning that the impending election was going to be rigged by Hillary Clinton. It was easy to prey on the fears of voters and Putin’s campaign increased the atmosphere of unease. By the time of the 2020 election, the trope of voter fraud and stolen elections had become so ingrained in the American consciousness that Trump was able to convince many of his supporters that they had been ‘robbed’. Putin and Prigozhin could congratulate each other that the group entrusted with sowing doubt and distrust in democracy had succeeded in the first phase of its mission.

It is evident from the Mueller Report that the IRA operated with remarkable self-confidence. Its directors knew from the US media that the FBI was tracking suspicious activity by Russian bots and trolls, but did nothing to scale back its operations. Not until the autumn of 2017, when Congress ordered Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to reveal the identities of suspect groups that had used their services, did Prigozhin’s operatives begin to panic. On 13 September, a senior IRA specialist, Irina Kaverzina, emailed a friend: ‘We had a slight crisis here at work: the FBI busted our activity (not a joke) … so I got preoccupied with covering our tracks, together with colleagues.’ As for the successful impact of her work, Kaverzina was in no doubt. ‘I created all these pictures and posts,’ she wrote, ‘and the Americans believed that it was written by their people!’ It was a taunt that was echoed by Prigozhin himself in February 2018, when the IRA was indicted by the FBI. ‘The Americans are very impressionable people,’ he commented wryly, ‘and they see what they want to see. I am not upset at all … If they want to see the devil, let them see him.’ His subversive activities would earn him a place on the US sanctions roster, a criminal indictment and, in February 2021, elevation to the FBI’s Most Wanted list.

FBI ‘wanted’ notice for Yevgeny Prigozhin

The Mueller Report caused much indignation among the American public – it isn’t nice to learn that a foreign government is sneaking around, trying to mess with your thoughts and opinions. But I do wonder what exactly Putin was hoping to achieve by hacking the US election. It is possible, but unlikely, that he had some sort of pact with – or some means of influence over – Donald Trump. It is possible he thought Trump would be easier to push around, or that he was overcome with hatred for Hillary Clinton, who had called him out on numerous occasions when she was secretary of state. But very few people in Russia would be particularly impressed by or overly interested in Putin achieving that sort of outcome.

Putin may have had another aim in mind, however, when he instructed Prigozhin to stir up trouble, one that would have a big effect on Russian opinion. People in the West tend to think that Putin runs Russia with effortless ease, that he has the whole country under his shiny, platform-soled heel. But he isn’t talented as a manager or hardworking or even a good organiser. And he knows that things in Russia are not going well. The US election allowed him to create the impression that things are going well, a fantasy of pretence and fake claims to paper over the reality. Just like in the times of Catherine the Great, Putin has created his own Potemkin villages – but instead of erecting fake villages on the ground in Russia, he is creating citadels of fake news and history on a global platform, that is online. He projects a mirage of wellbeing to force the Russian people to believe in it and to stave off the day when they finally realise their emperor has no clothes.

But even Putin’s Truman Show falters at times and the parlous state of Russia becomes too big to ignore. At moments like these, he needs a way of explaining to the Russian people why not everything in the garden is rosy. He needs someone to blame. He can’t blame the political opposition, because he cleaves to the image of a powerful president who has dealt with internal opposition and crushed them into irrelevance. So, instead, Putin turns to America. In Putin’s cosmology, America takes the blame for everything. The US is big and powerful, capable of inflicting all sorts of woes on Russia, a most convenient enemy for Putin to have or, perhaps, for him to invent.

Putin’s preoccupation is always with his domestic audience and with how his image will play with the Russian people. Prigozhin’s IRA allowed him to demonstrate to the Russian people that American democracy is corrupt. Putin may not have been overly concerned with backing Trump; but he did want to convince the Russian people that the vote was being falsified in favour of Hillary. He wanted to provoke outrage among Trump supporters, so they would proclaim to the world that the US system was rotten.

And he succeeded in spades.