From Z to X: How Russian Information Warfare Primed the World for Trump and Musk

Digital Barbecues

The invitation came out of the blue: “His Excellency Ambassador of the Russian Federation requests the pleasure of the company of Mr Peter Jukes at a Digital BBQ.” 

Back in December 2015, I had no idea why Ambassador Alexander Yakovenko was inviting me to talk about “social media vs mainstream media” at his sumptuous residence in Kensington Palace Gardens, except that it would have something to do with the fact I had live-tweeted the entire phone-hacking trial from the Old Bailey, and become an advisor to a new start-up journalistic crowdfunding site called Byline.com. 

I was wary. I had been to Kyiv just after the Maidan revolution the year before, and was publicly opposed to Russia’s annexation of Crimea and invasion of eastern Ukraine. But I was also curious and planned to go, resolving not to take my phone or talk to any attractive Russian women at the event. 

Then, something I now look back on with a mixture of regret and relief, I promptly forgot about it.

Thanks to working with Carole Cadwalladr on Project Citizen’s new Sergei and the Westminster Spy Ring podcast, I now know the significance of these ‘digital barbecues’ and the role they have played in the decade-long information warfare Vladimir Putin has deployed in the UK, the US, and Europe. 

These glamorous events were organised by the first political secretary, Sergei Nalobin, whose activities in trying to funnel money to the Conservative Party are detailed in the podcast by the tireless whistleblower, Sergei Cristo. 

Nalobin was behind the scandal-hit ‘Conservative Friends of Russia’ group – a front for the Kremlin’s ‘active measures’ campaign to influence Tory politicians. When that was shut down, he set up the ‘Westminster Russia Forum’, which mainly focused on Nigel Farage’s UKIP and pro-Brexit right-wingers. 

Nalobin was a familiar figure around Westminster and interacted with senior Brexiters such as the Vote Leave campaign chief executive Matthew Elliott and its figurehead Boris Johnson. 

But Nalobin’s diplomatic visa was rescinded in 2015 and he left under a cloud. 

By the time I was invited to this digital barbecue another character, Alexander Udod, had replaced him as political first secretary. 

Udod was himself expelled from the UK after the Salisbury Novichok attack three years later. To discover more about Udod’s role in Brexit (no spoilers!), you’ll have to listen to the second half of our podcast series. Suffice it to say, the underlying story of Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee’s Russia Report is explained by it, and the reasons why Johnson wanted to suppress the report.

But back to those digital barbecues. 

Thanks to open-source intelligence, and the testimony of attendees like Steve Lacey (an advertising executive who is the second key whistleblower in our podcast), we now know that the Russian Government wasn’t only trying to pour money into UK politics – it was hoovering up expertise and contacts in the world of social media. 

Many influential tech leaders attended these embassy events, including the leading right-wing blogger Paul Staines of Guido Fawkes, whose Messagespace advertising company won a contract to work on Russian Government campaigns. 

As Carole Cadwalladr reveals in Sergei and the Westminster Spy Ring, the Kremlin-funded media company RT (formerly Russia Today) was, at this point, dominating YouTube, having ‘juiced the algorithm’ with disaster videos. It would pay and promote Nigel Farage as a Member of the European Parliament. Along with its sister Kremlin outlet, Sputnik, RT would be a major influencer in the EU Referendum debate, with a reach bigger than ITV News or Sky News. 

Meanwhile, in plush offices in a St Petersburg suburb, the oligarch Evgeny Prigozhin was starting up his notorious troll farm, hiring hundreds of foreign-language Russian students to troll English-language social media and news commentary. 

As multiple FBI and congressional investigations have shown, Prigozhin’s Internet Research Agency sent personnel to the US to set up fake Facebook groups and spent $50 million promoting discord in American society, backing the 2016 presidential campaign of Donald Trump.  

No such official investigation with legal powers has ever been conducted into Russian interference on this side of the Atlantic. 

The 2018 Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee’s final parliamentary report into disinformation and fake news did conclude that the Kremlin probably had attempted to swing the referendum vote. 

But that is the extent of the investigation, apart from the heavily redacted Russia Report. 

Meanwhile, whatever Nalobin learned at those digital barbecues didn’t hinder his career. He went on to run the  Digital Diplomacy Unit at the Department of Information in the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. 

From there, he was appointed as the chargé d’affaires at the Russian Embassy in Estonia in 2019 where, according to New Lines Magazine, “Nalobin interacted with many people in Tallinn and tried to dig his way into high society – just as he did in London”. He was deported from the Estonian capital in March 2022, soon after the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine.  

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The ‘Secret Super Weapon’

From those early days of the digital barbecues, Russian understanding of online influence operations expanded, reaching a crescendo in 2016 when Kremlin operatives were active in both the election of Donald Trump and Britain’s exit from the EU. 

As Nafeez Ahmed revealed three years ago in Byline Times, Brexit was a strategic objective of Russian foreign policy as Putin planned for his full invasion of Ukraine. But the role of Big Tech companies in enabling this kind of information warfare is the most enduring legacy of those days. 

Part of the unwritten story of Russian propaganda is the role non-Russian companies and activists played in spreading its message and fine-tuning its technology. 

Soon after the 2016 US Presidential Election, a deputy in the Russian Parliament, Konstantin Rykov – known as ‘Putin’s internet guru’ – claimed a role in Trump’s shock victory. He announced on Facebook that, as far back as 2012, he and his colleagues had the “insane idea” that they would “digitise all possible types of modern man” and “change their perception of reality” to elect Trump as President.

With a level of detail about the psychometric profiling which would have been hard to come by without intimate knowledge, Rykov explained that “British scientists from Cambridge Analytica” had succeeded by “making 5,000 existing human psychotypes” to create the “ideal image of a possible Trump supporter” and successfully target them with a “secret super weapon”. 

Cambridge Analytica was a political cons