Long dormant Kremlin-connected Twitter account suddenly roars back to life to help Donald Trump
Now that Donald Trump’s campaign and family have been exposed as having tried to collude with the Russian government to rig the election in Trump’s favor, one might think the Kremlin would back off and lay low for awhile. But instead an infamous Twitter account, which is believed to be connected to the Kremlin and had been dormant for the past six months, suddenly roared back to life today to run interference on Donald Trump’s behalf.
The Twitter account in question is @cyberberkut2 and it roared to life today with a tweet aimed at fanning the flames of the phony election collusion scandal between Hillary Clinton and Ukraine. The Russian-language tweet says “Украинцы спонсировали Хиллари Клинтон за счет кредитов от МВФ” which translates to “Ukrainians sponsored Hillary Clinton through loans from the IMF” according to a Google translation and “Ukrainians are sponsored by Hillary Clinton at the expense of credits from IMF” according to a Twitter translation.
Attached to the tweet is a flowchart showing several false and misleading connections between Hillary and Bill Clinton and the government of Ukraine. But while this tweet is easily recognized as proverbial fake news by anyone familiar with the underlying facts, the real story here may be that the Kremlin appears to be trying to help Donald Trump and his son out of their stickiest situation yet. Of course in so doing, the Kremlin risks looking even more closely associated with Trump.
On the other hand, this may be more about Russia trying to sabotage Ukraine. Vladimir Putin has long felt that Ukraine, which was part of the former Soviet Union, should be part of Russia. He’s illegally invaded and seized Crimea, and seems to have his sights set on mainland Ukraine as well. So this propaganda, while helpful to Donald Trump, may be more about trying to delegitimize the elected government of Ukraine.
