Vasily Piskarev, chairman of the security and anti-corruption committee of the Duma, Russia’s lower house of parliament, said that the unity of society helped to repel mass interference in the presidential election.
Speaking at a press conference on the results of the three-day vote, Piskarev said that interference attempts had not stopped in principle, but the attacks and their intensity had changed, Vedomosti reported.
“The West has resorted to tactics of intimidation and active psychological pressure,” Piskarev said, stressing that numerous and diverse forms of interference in the elections had been recorded.
Igor Borisov, a member of Russia’s Central Election Commission, said that the commission could not yet reveal all the details of the attempts to infiltrate the elections, adding that it would ‘not remain impervious to interference’.
“We have counted more than 40 provocative calls to our citizens, in particular open calls from the US Embassy and the CIA to cooperate with them,” Piskarev said. In essence, the American authorities were encouraging Russians to commit treason,” Piskarev said.
Referring to the note prepared for voters by the Voice of America radio station, Piskarev said: “This is of a manipulative nature and was intended to intimidate our citizens and reduce voter turnout.”
The official also drew attention to attempts by ‘agents of influence’ to illegally collect personal data on Russians.
In addition, Yevgeny Zaitsev, the head of the Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technologies and Mass Media (Roskomnadzor) in the field of electronic communications, provided statistics on the agency’s fight against attacks on the Internet.
According to Zaytsev, some 1,300 sources and publications containing calls for participation in uncoordinated mass events planned for election days have been detected and blocked as a result of monitoring.
Senator Andrei Klimov, for his part, stressed that the US media had created ‘the illusion that the entire West is fighting Russia for Ukrainian democracy’. This unprecedented intervention, Klimov said, “shows that Washington is trying to muster what is left of its forces to pressure Russia as the Kiev regime drags the last of its troops into battle.”
