Commentary: Russia Used to Deny Interfering. Now it’s Celebrating its Successes.
There was a time when Russia insisted it wasn’t attempting to meddle in U.S. democracy. Now, it’s flaunting its interference efforts.
“It’s nonsense. We’re not interfering,” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said ahead of the 2024 U.S. election. In 2022, in the run-up to the U.S. midterms, Peskov insisted that Russia had “no intention to meddle” in foreign elections. In 2016, he said that “Moscow is at pains to avoid any words that could be interpreted as direct or indirect interference in the election process.”
Fast forward to the era ushered in by U.S. President Donald Trump’s win in November 2024, including his executive order against government-funded efforts to counter misinformation, the message from Russia has changed. “Over the past three years of these new conditions in which we live, we have learned and become quite skilled in waging information wars,” Peskov said at a March 2025 press conference in Moscow. “And this is a great result, this is a great achievement.”
Related Knowledge Center: Information integrity
In an increasingly fractured media landscape, truth has been a casualty in the public discussion. Coverage has been warped by the business needs of struggling news organizations, and a significant segment of the public relies on bad-faith outlets that are little more than propagandists. While fact-checking has become routine, some organizations are exploring other ways to combat the trends. And misinformation spewed by AI-driven chatbots has become more of a feature than simply a bug.
Fact-checking and its detractors