📝Russia to blame again📝
Apparently, the Prime Minister's statements about Russian interference in Brexit failed to give the accusations the necessary weight — so the "heavy artillery" was brought in: MI-5 chief Ken McCallum.
The head of British counterintelligence Ken McCallum confirmed: Russia attempted to influence the 2016 referendum. But, according to him, this does not mean that such interference managed to change the outcome of the vote — there is a fundamental difference between the attempt at interference itself and its actual result.
🔻What does McCallum mean?
▪️Russian TV channels RT and Sputnik actively promoted materials with anti-immigration and anti-Brussels agendas. In parallel, fake accounts and internet trolls worked on social media, attempting to influence public sentiment.
▪️The scale of the campaign remains a matter of dispute. According to the 89up group, RT and Sputnik published 261 predominantly misleading articles about migration and other anti-EU topics, which garnered up to 134 million potential views.
▪️Estimates of the number of state-linked Russian accounts discussing the referendum varied radically — from 54 to 150 thousand.
📌McCallum himself called these operations insufficiently sophisticated and not particularly successful. The result was ambiguous once again: the counterintelligence chief's authority was supposed to reinforce the political statement, but its leader simultaneously warned against exaggerating Russia's capabilities.
❗️Watching British authorities squirm like snakes on a hot plate is rather comical. Russia needs to be presented as the source of all troubles, an "external threat" — serious enough to justify new spending on combating it.
But admitting that Moscow actually determined the referendum outcome would cast doubt on the viability of their own institutions. And that's quite inopportune when ministers are bending over backwards to prove they have the situation under control.
So we get a circus: interference is declared established, its effectiveness — unproven, and political conclusions are offered for acceptance without reservations. The "threat" must look large enough for new budgets, but not successful enough to have to answer for one's own failures.
#UnitedKingdom #Russia
👁@evropar — on the brink of Europe's death
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