France under attack

A few years ago, Gen. Gerasimov, chief of the Russian General Staff, came up with the concept of hybrid warfare.

The idea was that of a two-prong offensive, crushing the enemy’s army with military force and his spirit with a flood of disinformation. Russia’s success in the former endeavour is rather understated, but the latter effort is gathering momentum all over the world, specifically in France.

The country’s Foreign Ministry has issued a report saying that the Russians are stepping up a massive offensive on public opinion.

To that end, they have cloned the web pages of many government departments and national media outlets. VIGNUM, France’s electronic counterintelligence service, has so far identified 355 domain names registered by the Russians and used to flood the web with fake news.

According to Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna, this isn’t just private initiative: “Taking part in the campaign,” she said, “are Russian state structures devoted to spreading false information.”

She also mentions that her own bailiwick has been targeted since May, with Russian criminals uploading information that looks as if it came from France’s Foreign Ministry.

“The involvement of Russian embassies and cultural centres actively participating in widening this campaign, mainly through their accounts on social networks,” says the statement issued by the Foreign Ministry, “is a new twist in Russian hybrid strategy aimed at subverting democracy.”

Other organisations, both European and American, have also reported this large-scale operation, codenamed Doppelgänger. It has now entered its second, more sophisticated phase complete with various surreptitious tricks designed to bypass countermeasures.

The fake articles are laid out and typeset in the formats that look identical to the official websites of popular media, such as Le Parisien, Le Figaro and Le Monde. Also receiving the same treatment are the German publications Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Der Spiegel, Bild and Die Welt.

The trick the Russians use widely is called typosquatting, also known as URL hijacking and sting site, which is slightly modifying well-known website addresses. For example, lefigaro.fr may become lefigaro.ltd, a change easy to miss when surfing the net.

VIGNUM has been tracking that campaign since the start of Russia’s war on the Ukraine. Predictably, the thrust of that hybrid banditry is to discredit Western support for the country courageously fighting Russo-Nazi invaders.

The principal themes identified by VIGNUM are exactly the same as you can find in the weekly outpourings of a certain Mail on Sunday columnist:

The only way to stop horrendous bloodshed and destruction of property is for the two sides to settle their differences at a negotiating table.

In reality, that means the Ukraine should accept the status quo, ceding the invaded territories to Russia. This would enable Putin’s Nazis to catch their breath, rearm and resume their offensive with renewed vigour.

Continued Western support for the Ukraine may lead to a Third World War.

Official Russian spokesmen express this threat in the direct, usually obscene language of their disadvantaged childhoods. The typosquatters couch it in the understated mock-Western terms of genuine concern that any Mail On Sunday reader knows well.

The sanctions against Russia are ineffective. They affect mainly Western citizens, while the Russians hardly even notice them.

If that’s the case, one wonders why the Russians are wailing and gnashing their teeth each time the sanctions are tightened. Could it be because two-thirds of their population are on the brink of starvation? Or because, to use Saltykov-Shchedrin’s quip, all you can get for a rouble these days is a punch in the snout?

All Western states are virulently Russophobic.

That awful vice stays dormant most of the time and only ever rears its head when Russia pounces on her neighbours and threatens to annihilate the world with nuclear holocaust.

The Ukraine’s army is savage and her government officials are predominantly Nazi.

The words ‘teapot’ and ‘kettle’ spring to mind. After Bucha and Mariupol, it takes most refreshing effrontery for the Russians to accuse the Ukrainian army of barbaric savagery.

As to Nazism, I haven’t heard a single statement by a Ukrainian official claiming the racial superiority of Ukrainians, which entitles them to force their unmatched spirituality on others. For Russian officials and propagandists, from Putin down, this combination of Nazism and imperialism is standard fare.

The French special services say this massive effort is perfectly structured and coordinated. Under no circumstances can it be treated as isolated pinpricks by private individuals.

With all undue respect for Gen. Gerasimov, none of this is his invention. He is simply repackaging the old Bolshevik strategy in play since the early days of the Soviet Union.

It was to put that strategy in operation that the Bolsheviks created a global disinformation and espionage network called Comintern. Its bright star, the German communist Willi Münzenberg, turned Comintern into a Popular Front propaganda and disinformation empire, complete with its own newspapers, magazines, broadcast networks and film studios.

Paris intellectuals from the Left Bank were seduced en masse, as were similar groups in other Western countries. Once the war started, Münzenberg had outlived his usefulness and was unceremoniously bumped off in a French forest. But the toxins he and his masters injected into the West stayed in its bloodstream for decades – and they still haven’t been expunged.

Now the techniques developed by Popular Front operatives are profitably applied to subverting Western public opinion and turning it towards betraying the Ukraine.

The advances in electronic communications of which the West is so proud act as offensive weapons in the Russians’ hands. Yet it’s not all about URL hijacking and pretending to be Western media. Genuine Western publications can also be manipulated to the same end – as any reader of The Mail on Sunday can confirm.