KEY TAKEAWAYS:

• Russia’s online influence operations persist despite intensifying US enforcement efforts.
• Actors associated with Russia’s Project Lakhta influence campaign have launched a new generation of media outlets in the last year.
• Project Lakhta outlets continue to use US social media platforms to amplify their communications.

“There are five times fewer beggars in Caracas than in Kiev,” is just one of many sensational headlines pushed recently by the Russian media outlet Federal News Agency. In a nod to Soviet propaganda of bygone years, the website claims that Venezuelan shops are full of goods, contrary to news broadcast by “fake news channels” of the West.

The article, which blends criticisms of Ukraine with support for Venezuela’s ruling authorities, neatly follows Russia’s foreign policy. The millions of readers turning to the Federal News Agency every month are exposed to a steady stream of such stories, including ones warning that the “crack in the EU will remain,” and that the US is attempting “to carry out a coup d’etat in Venezuela” and might remain Syria’s “main occupier.”