The Federation Council discussed and condemned Western plans to discredit the Russian presidential elections

The Federation Council Commission for the Protection of Sovereignty and Prevention of Interference in the Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation held a meeting on Thursday dedicated to the upcoming presidential elections in Russia. The senators stated that the “collective West” used “all resources” to discredit the vote and is actively attracting relocants and foreign agents, but their “malicious attempts” are unable to influence the result.

The first item on the agenda was the adoption of the commission’s report on its work for 2023. But since at the plenary meeting of the Federation Council at the end of December all the reports were accepted without consideration, the senators this time decided not to return to the past, immediately moving on to “continuous attempts to interfere” in the presidential elections. As a primer, the head of the commission, Andrei Klimov, said that CIA Director William Burns recently publicly confirmed that Russia is creating “serious geopolitical problems” for the United States, threatening its monopoly in the world, so the Americans cannot “miss the opportunity to take advantage of what may be corroding the Russian leadership and the people.”

For this, the senator continued, the CIA uses an agent network and recruits relocants, “fortunately, figures from the so-called opposition who fled abroad provide the necessary fertile ground.”

As an example, Mr. Klimov cited the online school “Broom,” which creates “digital resistance teams.”

According to him, the site’s domain is registered in the United States, and the project is close to supporters of Alexei Navalny, convicted of extremism: ““Broom” teaches how to speculate on anti-war topics, foreign agents were involved in the training.”

Its latest course, said Andrei Klimov, is aimed at people who are already abroad, and “in this plan” a whole group of citizens and NGOs recognized as foreign agents appears. At the same time, the senator revealed the plans of another “emigrant new formation” – “Greenhouses of Social Technologies” (included by the Ministry of Justice in the register of foreign agents), which in mid-February “started another action with the participation of programmers, opposition activists, dubious NGOs and relevant journalists.” “All this is called “Hackathon Spotlight,” although it is more correct, in my opinion, to call such “spotlights” political scams,” Andrei Klimov joked.

According to him, we are talking about “a malicious attempt to increase influence in the media sphere during the election campaign,” and in this light, the commission records “the growth of destructive anti-Russian efforts sponsored by the United States.”

“Provocative calls continue even before the end of the elections not to recognize their results. Right now in the European Parliament, deputies from such unfriendly countries as Bulgaria, Denmark, Spain, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Finland, Sweden, the Czech Republic, Estonia are running around with such an initiative,” the senator conscientiously listed. And he added that the authorities of a number of countries are trying to prevent Russians from voting and refuse to guarantee their safety. Finally, the West is seeking to “fabricate some semblance of unrest” in the Russian Federation related to the elections, but these “malicious attempts are not able to stop us,” Andrei Klimov summed up.

Next, Senator Vladimir Dzhabarov took the floor and said that the monitoring working group notes the use of “all intervention resources” in the presidential campaign from the West, including the involvement of top officials. The CIA, according to Mr. Dzhabarov, is working “with potentially vulnerable” citizens and relocants, and all the activities of undesirable organizations, foreign agents and the media controlled by them “are aimed at trying to denigrate the elections and disrupt the vote.” As an example of the “sweeping accusations” they spread, the senator cited a “simultaneously distributed unsubstantiated fake about alleged violations” when collecting signatures in support of Vladimir Putin’s presidential nomination.

Deputy Minister of Justice Oleg Sviridenko spoke about ensuring security during the presidential elections and in this regard provided statistics on foreign agents.

Thus, their number in 2022–2024 included about 40 politicians and 13 deputies, including from the Komi State Council and the Moscow City Duma. “If you look at the ratio, in 2022 1% of such political figures were “foreign agents”, and in 2023 – 5.3%. The growth, as you see, is appropriate, and the activity is appropriate,” he said.

According to the official, over the same period, the share of bloggers in the register of foreign agents increased from 2% to 4.9%, professional politicians – from 8.5% to 12.2%, political scientists – from 2.7% to 5.8%, which is “related, among other things, to the conduct of the SVO and changes in legislation.” Mr. Sviridenko emphasized that foreign agents seek to have a “negative impact” on the course and results of the election campaign, including suggesting that citizens not vote. In addition, “facts of the participation of foreign agents in the headquarters of candidates have been revealed,” the Deputy Minister of Justice announced, without specifying whose headquarters he was talking about. “According to our data, more than a hundred people included in the register are abroad. They continue to speak negatively on issues of government policy, including presidential elections,” concluded Oleg Sviridenko.

The official representative of the Russian Foreign Ministry, Maria Zakharova, in turn, analyzed the arguments used by Western media corporations, calling for not recognizing the Russian elections.

There, she said, in addition to the traditional “unfair accusations” of lack of competition, non-admission of candidates and massive falsification, “abuse and opacity of remote electronic voting” will be added, as well as elections in the “so-called occupied territories,” the diplomat continued. The task of the “disgraced” OSCE ODIHR, according to her, is not to monitor “the transparency of voting”, but to publish a report with obviously known content, so representatives of this organization will learn the voting results from the message of the Central Election Commission of the Russian Federation. “We do not need an assessment of those who want to inflict a strategic defeat on us,” Mrs. Zakharova clearly explained.

She also drew attention to the obstacles that the authorities of foreign countries are putting in our way by delaying the response to the diplomatic note from the Russian Foreign Ministry with a request to ensure security during the March vote. In this regard, Vladimir Dzhabarov asked Maria Zakharova whether Russia would respond by “recognizing their elections as illegitimate.” The representative of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs began to answer from afar, admitting that “for a long time I could not understand why Biden (US President Joe Biden.— “Kommersant”) communicates with the dead.” But she ended with the desired specifics: “He simply thanks them for their support in the elections. Unlike Westerners, we never anticipate the outcome of elections or try to influence them.”

Andrey Prah