How Russia is 'already spreading disinformation' in the 2024 election

26 February 2024

Donald Trump nesting dolls on red textile

From military aid to Ukraine to encouraging the expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), U.S. President Joe Biden has been a major thorn in the side of Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin.

Former President Donald Trump, in contrast, has said he would encourage Putin to invade NATO countries if they don't pay enough into the alliance. Putin is clearly hoping that Trump will win the 2024 GOP presidential nomination and defeat incumbent Biden in November.

According to NBC News reporters Dan De Luce and Kevin Collier, Putin's Kremlin loyalists are "already spreading disinformation" in the election by "using fake online accounts and bots" to "damage" Biden "and his fellow Democrats."

De Luce and Collier, in an article published on February 26, explain, "The dissemination of attacks on Biden is part of a continuing effort by Moscow to undercut American military aid to Ukraine and U.S. support for and solidarity with NATO, experts said. A similar effort is underway in Europe. France, Germany and Poland said, this month, that Russia has launched a barrage of propaganda to try to influence European parliamentary elections in June."

Bret Schafer, a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund's Alliance for Securing Democracy, told NBC News that Putin and the Kremlin have even more "incentive to interfere" in the United States' 2024 election than they did in the 2016 and 2020 elections.

Former CIA official Paul Kolbe, now with the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, told NBC News, "In many ways, it's a perfect storm of opportunity for them. I think, for a lot of reasons, we will see the same approach, but amplified and, I think, with some of the constraints that you might have seen taken off."

Read NBC News' full report at this link.

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