Putin's Troll Factories

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Re: Putin's Troll Factories

Postby Burnt Hill » Wed Apr 25, 2018 1:11 am

Yep and you just said Jerky was a mess so you lose a lot of credibility on the topic.
We are all fucked up in so many ways.
Lets have at it on issues, but streeb we are all trying to improve the tenor around here.
I should have stayed out of BelSav and Jerky's argument.
Sometimes you gotta let folks work things out...

streeb » Tue Apr 24, 2018 10:05 pm wrote:
(not accusing Jerky of it).


I am. He does it all the time.
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Re: Putin's Troll Factories

Postby Elvis » Wed Apr 25, 2018 1:59 am

American Dream » Tue Apr 24, 2018 6:15 pm wrote:Please let's not get distracted by insults. Take some deep breaths, or do whatever else you do that may help.


You sneakily imply that posters on this thread have "right wing views" then you say let's not insult each other. Please just stop with your little snipes and insuations—it's no better than Mac calling you a spook. In fact, it's worse.
“The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of ready-made answers to economic questions, but to learn how to avoid being deceived by economists.” ― Joan Robinson
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Re: Putin's Troll Factories

Postby mentalgongfu2 » Wed Apr 25, 2018 2:31 am

You know what might be beneficial to all? like a five day moratorium on insulting posters on this board, for whatever reason.
Just five days. Just long enough to maybe let some shit settle.
Even when we have a detente in one thread, like the "Collaborative Discussion" thread, someone brings up the same shit elsewhere. That is what ruins discussion on this board. All this entrenched bullshit. If we could just step away from that for a few days even, that might actually help.
Instead, we just get sniping on different threads, sometimes by different posters, but still the same old shit.

Can we just have like 5 days in a row wherein ALL POSTERS commit to saying something like "I disagree" rather than "you're dumb and/or a tool because you have the wrong opinion +witty insult to show why I'm smarter than you."

It won't change any minds, but maybe it calms shit down for a bit, instead of just moving the same fighting from one thread to another.
Sure, I've got my opinions on issues, and even my personal evaluations of posters who are or are not contributing to discussions vs. simply attacking others, but I'm going to keep that to myself for now in order to try and foster something different.

Of course, everyone always wants to respond to something said about them. But if we go just 5 days without personal insults or insinuations, even when responding to some other insult or insinuation, I submit that we could gather a better idea of the actual issues at best, or at worst, a better idea of who has nothing to offer but insults vs who has something to talk about. Obviously, five days is arbitrary, but going even a whole 24 hours seems hard for some.

I don't know if that's a good solution, but anything that tamps it down is better than the ridiculous sniping that has become commonplace here, where one person posts something and another steps up to not only say they are wrong, but to draw upon all sorts of past postings to allege that they are a horrible person or an agent or whatever. This place is becoming like the comments section of every other discussion board, wherein accusations fly haphazardly all over the place. For those who actually care about RI, maybe just take a break from proving people are wrong, and see what happens. I assume trolls have less patience than honest contributors, though that remains to be seen. Call it a social experiment. Try posting your shit without pointing out which poster expressing an opinion is a horrible, evil person by your metric. It may reveal something.

Maybe not. It's just an idea.
I'm tired of all this shit clogging up the airwaves, and all the talk of signal to noise ratio by people who are making lots of noise. Let's all just shut the fuck up for a minute about being better or smarter or more well informed and hone in on the signal.

And I wouldn't mind more UFO, chubacabra type shit if there's anyone still paying attention to that. Politics is a giant aggravating factor. Props to anyone who posts about high weirdness that doesn't involve alleged political satanic cults. That's the shit I love. I may not have much to add to it, but I will read it all.
"When I'm done ranting about elite power that rules the planet under a totalitarian government that uses the media in order to keep people stupid, my throat gets parched. That's why I drink Orange Drink!"
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Re: Putin's Troll Factories

Postby Jerky » Wed Apr 25, 2018 2:40 am

Okay Mentalgongfu. I'm going to give it the old college try, starting now.

J.
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Re: Putin's Troll Factories

Postby Belligerent Savant » Wed Apr 25, 2018 10:23 am

.

I'll keep this simple. As I indicated to a fellow member via PM a moment ago, I realized: in my pursuit of getting to the 'truth' (ha! how naive) of a matter without bias or pre-set notions, I've expressed myself here in ways I don't like.

Whatever the reasons for it, I'm not fond of some of the words I've shared here of late (loss of civilian lives paid for in part by my taxes may be a factor in my frustrations).

A 'sabbatical' is in order.

On EDIT: I encourage others to likewise dedicate time for self-reflection, challenging as it may be for some.
Last edited by Belligerent Savant on Wed Apr 25, 2018 5:11 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: Putin's Troll Factories

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Apr 25, 2018 10:39 am

we should all get in a boat and go fishing together ...


Asian Carp the one thing I hate more that trump

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Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Putin's Troll Factories

Postby American Dream » Thu May 10, 2018 8:48 pm

The latest news on Russian interference

Democrats on the House intelligence committee just released all 3,519 Russian propaganda ads placed on Facebook.

MELISSA RYAN

Image

Earlier this week, I wrote about what information related to Russian interference in the U.S. elections Americans need before this year’s midterm elections: the Senate intelligence committee report on the issue, the entire cache of Facebook ads that Russia’s Internet Research Agency (IRA) purchased targeting American voters, and a report from special counsel Robert Mueller’s office about Russian influence on the election and the Trump campaign’s possible collusion. Two of those three are now in motion.

On Tuesday, the Senate intelligence committee released the first of what will be multiple reports on Russian interference in the 2016 election. The six-page report covers Russian cyberattacks on U.S. voting systems, explains what Russian hackers did and what their motives were, and lays out recommendations for government agencies to prevent foreigners from interfering in future elections. According to Buzzfeed, “The next report will evaluate the Intelligence Community’s January 2017 assessment that found the Russians waged an influence campaign in the 2016 elections and ‘developed a clear preference for’ President Donald Trump.”

Today, Democrats on the House intelligence committee released the entire cache of Russian Facebook and Instagram ads. It’s quite the document dump -- PDF files of all 3,519 ads including targeting information with each ad. The accompanying analysis makes clear that the same Russians whom Mueller’s office indicted for attempting to aid the Trump campaign are responsible for the ads. Here are a few more facts from the analysis worth noting:

During the hearing, Committee Members noted the breadth of activity by the IRA on Facebook:

3,393 advertisements purchased (3,519 advertisements were released today);

More than 11.4 million American users exposed to those advertisements;

470 IRA-created Facebook pages;

80,000 pieces of organic content created by those pages; and

Exposure of organic content to more than 126 million Americans.


A few things of note about the ads. The data dump doesn’t include 80,000 pieces of organic content (content without an ad buy behind it) that Russian trolls spread on Facebook. (House Democrats promise they’ll eventually release that content as well.) .


https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2018/ ... nce/220186
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Re: Putin's Troll Factories

Postby American Dream » Mon Aug 20, 2018 10:32 am

Russian Trolls Spread Baseless Conspiracy Theories Like Pizzagate And QAnon After The Election

Less than two weeks after the first "Q" post appeared on 4chan, a Russia-backed troll account began amplifying the conspiracy theory on Twitter.

Salvador Hernandez
BuzzFeed News Reporter
Posted on August 15, 2018, at 10:49 p.m. ET


Image
A campaign rally with President Trump in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, on Aug. 2.

Long after President Trump's election victory in 2016, Russian trolls continued to sow discord among Americans by promoting a host of baseless conspiracy theories on social media, according to a BuzzFeed News analysis of nearly 3 million tweets published in an online archive.

The cache of tweets from the Kremlin-backed Internet Research Agency show that the Russians attempted to mimic extremist voices to push a menu of debunked conspiracy theories ranging from Pizzagate and chemtrails to Obama's birth and FEMA camps. At least one of the accounts latched on to the conspiracy du jour of QAnon, pushing for months the nonsensical theory that Trump was appointed president by the military to save the nation from a pedophilia ring before it would eventually make its way to President Trump's rallies and into the mainstream media.

The nearly 3 million tweets offer a glimpse into how Russian trolls helped perpetuate a flow of misinformation online that not only blurred the lines between fake and real, but sought to deepen political divisions in the US with disproved conspiracy theories that have continued to spread from the internet to the real world.

One such account, @CovfefeNationUS, which posed as a Trump supporter, aggressively pushed the QAnon conspiracy theory less than two weeks after the first "Q" post was made on 4chan, bringing it out of the dark corners of the internet and into mainstream social media view.

Using hashtags like #thestorm and #followthewhiterabbit, the account picked up on the conspiracy on Nov. 10, 2017, well before signs with the letter Q began to appear at Trump's rallies. Over the course of a month, the account posted about 800 QAnon-themed messages, including more than 90 on Dec. 9, 2017.

Image
Screenshot / Via archive.org

The following day, the account went dark.

The tweets from known Russian trolls, which were gathered by professors Darren Linvill and Patrick Warren of Clemson University in South Carolina and published last month by FiveThirtyEight, reveal an array of conspiracy theories made up a significant amount of content from the accounts.

"At the deepest level, the goal is to make our political differences and debates seem more extreme and insoluble than they really are," Warren told BuzzFeed News. "If they could make this about QAnon against Black Lives Matter, then they win."

Their study of the social media posts so far has shown that those behind the accounts tried to mimic people on the ideological fringes of both the right and left of American politics. Pushing conspiracy theories toward the mainstream appears to have been part of that effort, even long after the 2016 election.

"Conspiracies, they go hand-in-hand with extremism," Warren said.

The Internet Research Agency, or IRA, ran a coordinated campaign with about 400 employees from St. Petersburg to disrupt American politics. The 2,848 troll accounts, which were identified by the House Intelligence Committee, are believed to be only a sliver of the accounts deployed by the Russian government as part of their effort to disrupt the 2016 election.

The tweets linked to the Russian agency have since been removed, but FiveThirtyEight published copies from Warren and Linvill.

Among the conspiracy theories pushed by the accounts was the baseless claim that Seth Rich, an employee of the Democratic National Committee, was murdered in July 2016 because he had been WikiLeaks' source for the leaked DNC emails. Several US intelligence agencies have determined the Russian government was in fact behind the hack of Democratic emails.

But from July 29, 2016, to Feb. 18, 2018, multiple Russian troll accounts promoted the conspiracy theory that Rich had been murdered because of his role in the email leak, suggesting that DNC officials had been behind the killing.

"The man who brought the #DNCleak to Wikileaks," said @USA_gunslinger, which posed as a Wisconsin woman, in September 2016. "He was murdered two weeks later. Seth Rich!"


https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/sa ... ories-like
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Re: Putin's Troll Factories

Postby American Dream » Sun Sep 09, 2018 9:57 pm

WHY THE "SPUTNIK LEFT" HAS NO ANSWERS

Image

Indeed, while Western imperialism targets and always predictably and hypocritically frames third world Global South governments and their leaders as "dictators" etc, there is also a dangerous fallacy running rampant in the red-brown so-called "Sputnik Left" circles that has so far gone unchallenged; and that is, the penchant for advocacy on behalf of authoritarianism and authoritarian political structures by this crowd. A lot of this comes from Dugin, the New Right pontifications of de Benoist and their acolytes who openly celebrate authoritarian and totalitarian political figures and structures of the past. For example, many of the "Sputnik Left" unashamedly define themselves as Stalinists and lionize Joseph Stalin and his era, never mind the confuting evidence for that era and what it was.

Indeed the liberal democratic order of the West has broken down (arguably it broke down long ago) with the social contract it once claimed to champion all but evaporated. In the so-called liberal West political liberalism in its process of synthesis with dubious capitalist economic theories itself mutated into Neoliberalism and Neoliberalism has in turn spawned one of the most insidiously authoritarian political cultures ever seen (i.e. the corporate state or corporatocracy); this, simultaneously as it makes the traditional state itself literally wither away in a sort of reverse version of the Marxian withering away of the state under (theoretical) communism.

But the question is, how is authoritarianism the answer to authoritarianism especially when authoritarianism has proven itself in the modern world to be ever prone to instability? This is a sore thumb contradiction in the thinking of the so-called "Sputnik Left" and a demonstration of their confused and regressive ideological discordianism which has made the word "democracy" (never mind social democracy) a dirty word in their lexicon.

Indeed, once the war of liberation is fought and won there is a day after. Like many of their predecessors, the "Sputnik Left" does not seem to have any coherent answers to this "what comes after" conundrum and instead in their silence they seem to have willingly ceded this particular ground to their far-right neo-Nazi cohorts who are open about wanting to create ethno-states in an effectively anti-pluralist so-called "ethno-pluralist" (where whities all remain in whitey countries and darkies in theirs) "multi-polar" New World Order.


http://wahidazal.blogspot.com/2018/09/n ... false.html
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Re: Putin's Troll Factories

Postby American Dream » Tue Sep 25, 2018 9:41 pm

THE BIG BUSINESS OF ONLINE ABUSE

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https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-big-b ... line-abuse


For a select few, Internet harassment isn’t just a way to bully others. It’s a way to rake in the bucks.


It can be a terrifying experience: thousands of individuals, ganging up on a single person to ruin his or her life and, in some extreme cases, drive that person to suicide. But what makes this ugly occurrence even more troubling is that this sort of online mob harassment is sometimes done for profit. For a select few, trolling is a good business.

In recent years, online harassment and disinformation campaigns have become industrialized. This year The New York Times published a stunning exposé on Russian troll farms—anonymous office buildings full of professional internet “trolls,” a generic term for the people who flood social media with intentionally provocative messages. A single “farm” supposedly generated revenues of 20 million rubles (roughly $300,000) each month. These trolls-for-hire were reportedly deployed to spread false rumors about an Ebola outbreak in Atlanta, post pro-Kremlin messages on various social media, and to spread disparaging comments about Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko. Individuals and groups, including those sponsored by the state, use the Internet to spread propaganda and shut down dissent. Occasionally, we catch a glimpse of the commercial, illicit businesses sprouting up to support them.


Read more: http://wahidazal.blogspot.com/2018/09/t ... buse.html#
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Re: Putin's Troll Factories

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Oct 17, 2018 4:04 pm

Massive Twitter data release sheds light on Russia’s Trump strategy

NANCY SCOLA10/17/2018 09:04 AM EDT

Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin
Twitter and Facebook have been widely criticized since the 2016 election for not doing more to stem the abuse of their platforms by Russians and other foreign actors hoping to manipulate the American political landscape. | Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images
Twitter on Wednesday released a trove of 10 million tweets it says represents the full scope of foreign influence operations on the platform dating back nearly a decade — including Russia's consistent efforts to disparage Hillary Clinton and an initially erratic approach to Donald Trump that eventually settled on a concerted pro-Trump message during the 2016 campaign.

The huge data cache consists of tweets from some 3,400 accounts tied to the Kremlin troll farm known as the Internet Research Agency and 770 others linked to Iran. It also includes some 2 million GIFs, videos and other pieces of visual content. Twitter said it's making the information available to "enable independent academic research and investigation," according to a company blog post.

The Russian tweets around the 2016 presidential election showed distinct patterns when it came to Clinton and Trump, according to researchers at the nonpartisan Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab, which has been scouring the data since late last week.

While the Clinton animus was clear from the start, it took the IRA awhile to settle on its Trump strategy, as the Republican primary played out.

"Literally from the day Clinton announced her candidacy they were attacking her," Ben Nimmo, an information defense fellow at the lab, told POLITICO. "But on the Republican side, in the early days, they seemed to be backing more than one horse."

He described "peaks and troughs — a lot of pro-Trump content and a lot of anti-Trump content" in 2015 and 2016, adding that Trump's GOP rival Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) got a similar mixed treatment while former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush was the target of negative content. But Nimmo said the messaging around Trump turned decidedly in his favor around the time the reality show star began locking up the Republican nomination.

That period of time is said to be of interest to investigators with special counsel Robert Mueller's team, which is looking into Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election — including a June 2016 Trump Tower meeting between Trump campaign officials and Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya.

By Election Day, the Russian trolls' tweets were nearly uniformly pro-Trump, expressing sentiments like, "I don’t want a criminal in office! I’d vote for Monica before I vote for Killary! #Trump #MakeAmericaGreatAgain #TrumpForPresident," according to the Atlantic Council lab's findings published Wednesday.

After Election Day, though, the researchers found the trolls returned to their mixed-bag approach to Trump — for example, both cheering and jeering what were reported to be his disparaging remarks in January 2018 about Haiti and African nations. "Call it what it is — racist!" read one tweet in part. "Y’all have to admit that Trump is right," read another.

Nimmo said the research into the data is still in its early stages, but he said it's clear that much of the U.S.-focused tweeting was aimed at simply fomenting discord around political and social issues, a dynamic similar to what's already been identified in Facebook ads and highlighted in Mueller's indictment of Russian nationals and entities over 2016 election interference.

"There was a lot of stuff that was just plain divisive, that were just attempts to inflame," Nimmo said. "They had Black Lives Matter accounts and Blue Lives Matter accounts. There was a lot of sticking fingers in painful wounds."

The archive includes Russian-placed tweets arguing both sides of the gun debate the day after the Dec. 2, 2015, attack in San Bernardino, Calif., that left more than a dozen people dead. "Mass shooting occurs even in #GunFreeZones so people is the problem not guns #Prayers4California," read one. "[M]ass shooting wont [sic] stop until there are #GunFreeZones #Prayers4California," read another.

Twitter and Facebook have been widely criticized since the 2016 election for not doing more to stem the abuse of their platforms by Russians and other foreign actors hoping to manipulate the American political landscape. Some lawmakers on Capitol Hill say the companies have failed to do proper postmortems of that interference, including via digging into the enormous stores of online data they alone hold.

The newly released Twitter data may eventually shed light on the style as well as substance of foreign campaigns.

Russian accounts appeared to be particularly good at building personality into their tweets, such as those published by accounts like @TEN_GOP and @Jenn_Abrams, the Atlantic Council researchers found. By comparison, the Iranian operation was "much clumsier and clunkier and less engaging," focused mostly getting users to click on government propaganda, Nimmo said.

The Twitter database is not limited to U.S. influence operations. Many of the Kremlin-linked tweets are in Russian and appeared aimed at shaping politics in Russia and Ukraine, according to Nimmo.

While aspects of social media foreign-influence operations have been disclosed in bits and pieces, he said, "the massive value of this Twitter dump is now it looks like we've got the lot."
https://www.politico.com/story/2018/10/ ... ons-910005
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Putin's Troll Factories

Postby American Dream » Sat Oct 20, 2018 6:29 am

#TrollTracker: Twitter Troll Farm Archives

2. Multiple Goals
The Russian operation had multiple and evolving goals. One main purpose was to interfere in the U.S. presidential election and prevent Hillary Clinton’s victory, but it was also aimed at dividing polarized online communities in the U.S., unifying support for Russia’s international interests, and breaking down trust in U.S. institutions.

Image
Screenshot of a scan of posts by Russian troll accounts on #CrookedHillary. (Source: Twitter)

3. Community Targeting
Both operations targeted highly engaged, highly polarized online communities, especially in the United States. The Russian operation attempted to infiltrate and polarize them, while the Iranian operation tried to message them.

Image
Tweet by Russian troll account @Crystal1Johnson. (Source: Twitter / @Crystal1Johnson, via tweetsave.com)

Any attempts to increase domestic resilience should prioritize working with such communities.

4. Equal-Opportunity Troll Farms
The Russian trolls were non-partisan: they tried to inflame everybody, regardless of race, creed, politics, or sexual orientation. On many occasions, they pushed both sides of divisive issues.

“Mass shooting occurs even in #GunFreeZones so people is the problem not guns #Prayers4California” ( @micparrish, December 3, 2015)

“mass shooting wont stop until there are #GunFreeZones #Prayers4California” (@LazyKStafford, December 3, 2015)


It is vital to recognize this factor to end the partisan perception that Russian influence operations focused on one side of the political spectrum. Focus shifted over time or at specific moments based target audience.

5. Opportunism
The Russian trolls often chose targets of opportunity, especially elections and terrorist attacks, in their attempts to interfere in local politics. This included promoting anti-Islam hashtags after the Brussels terror attacks, a pro-Leave hashtag on the day of Britain’s Brexit referendum, and leaks targeting French President Emmanuel Macron before his election.


https://medium.com/dfrlab/trolltracker- ... 5dd61c486b
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Re: Putin's Troll Factories

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Oct 22, 2018 11:08 am

Meet The Woman Who Is Proudly Russia’s Troll-In-Chief

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Maria Zakharova has revolutionized what it means to be a Russian diplomat — in real life and online. “She’s like Marmite: Some people love her and some people hate her.”

Konstantin Benyumov
Posted on October 22, 2018, at 6:10 a.m. ET


Vyacheslav Prokofyev / TASS
MOSCOW — In the years since Maria Zakharova took over the job of communicating Russia’s intentions to the wider world, her weekly press briefing has become must-watch TV here.

Combative and aggressive, her style mimicked Russia’s increasing belligerence, both at home and abroad.

One such briefing, in late May, exemplified the approach that has made her a star.

A journalist, Erkka Mikkonen of Finnish television, had dared to ask Zakharova, the Foreign Ministry spokesperson, about an anti-LGBT campaign unleashed in Chechnya by its ruthless leader, Ramzan Kadyrov, and unearthed when survivors began speaking to the press.


Zakharova stood at the lectern and responded with her usual calm irritation. Her answer would be watched almost 14,500 times on YouTube, aside from the journalists before her in the room at the time.

She addressed not Mikkonen, but the Chechen leader, who has been accused of widespread human rights abuses, including extrajudicial killing and torture: “Mr. Kadyrov, today’s briefing is being attended by a representative from Finnish television … Would you be able to organize a trip for him to the Chechen Republic during which he may be able to find the answers to the questions that so interest him?”

She then stepped out from behind the podium and approached Mikkonen, asking, “You’re not afraid, are you? I repeat: We are not joking here, we are actively working on sending you directly to Chechnya.” And then, almost imperceptibly, she winked at him.

The exchange was widely seen as a threat. Kadyrov is among the most feared people inside Russia, acting with brutality and impunity. That evening, he responded, telling the journalist: “Come down. Write about what’s really happening here. Journalists don’t seem to be pursuing objectivity very actively these days. Feels like there ought to be a competition, ‘Write the truth and win a free iPhone 7.’”

“It was very awkward and uncomfortable,” Mikkonen told BuzzFeed News’ reporting partner, Meduza, of the exchange with Zakharova. “It was like getting called out by the teacher in school. She was trying to make me feel like an idiot.”

Hers is an unapologetically confrontational approach that would make Donald Trump and Sarah Sanders envious. She was vilifying reporters and calling out supposed fake news before fake news was even a term. She exemplifies a time when Russia, feeling it had been shouted at for years, has been ready to shout back — loudly, fiercely, and with no room to question its line.

And, at the end of the day, even those she crosses call her successful. “Her goal isn’t making people feel good. She’s up there to spin everything in the way that’s advantageous for Russia,” said Mikkonen. “This is a very hard thing to do since very often, the official Russian line is actually very far from reality. Zakharova is pretty good at her job, though. For instance, when it comes to me, in the eyes of the Russian media, she won.”

Image
Soviet Army Col. A.V. Tarantsov at an elaborate press conference in Moscow, 1953.
Bettmann Archive / Getty Images


In Soviet times, press conferences held by the Foreign Ministry were routine and boring. As a rule, they featured serious men in suits — and they were always men — reading dry, official announcements, then answering questions using the same officious language. Those who ran the ministry’s Department of Information and Print saw it as a short stopover in their diplomatic careers as they worked toward becoming consuls or deputy ministers.

That remained largely true after the Soviet Union collapsed. And then came Maria Zakharova.

The 42 year old has completely upended the public face of Russian diplomacy. Gone are the dry statistics, replaced instead by bombastic language and off-color jokes. She is one of the few spokespeople in Russia known by name. Her briefings have also made her an online star, garnering millions of views on YouTube.

“She really likes her job. She clearly gets a kick out of what she does,” said Aleksey Maslov, a professor at Moscow’s prestigious Higher School of Economics, who was Zakharova’s academic adviser in the early 2000s. “She’s turned PR management for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs into high theater.”

Zakharova is seemingly everywhere — at the briefings, but also on TV talk shows and all over social media. On Instagram, it’s all lattes and flowers. Facebook is where she really shines, opining on everything from poetry to the ills of the West to her nearly 395,000 followers.

“She really likes her job, she clearly gets a kick out of what she does”

She doesn’t always stick to diplomatic protocol in her language. She once told a Ukrainian commentator on a talk show, “Let me speak or you will really hear what Russian missiles sound like!” She said the Barack Obama administration had no foreign policy accomplishments. When Obama’s secretary of state John Kerry advised students at a Harvard Kennedy graduation speech that, under the Trump administration, they should “learn Russian,” Zakharova pointed out that he himself had had two terms to have done so. She gave her opinion of Michael McFaul, US ambassador to Russia during the Obama years, especially bluntly, saying, “We remember his professional incompetence.”

A source close to the ministry called Zakharova “Russia’s answer to Jen Psaki.” Psaki, a State Department spokesperson under former president Obama, became target number one for trolling in Russian state media and official statements during her time in the post, as US-Russia relations began to plunge. Clips of her allegedly misspeaking went viral; her face appeared on mocking T-shirts in tourist hotspots.

If Russians were obsessed with Psaki, so, too, were they obsessed with comparing Zakharova to her. In 2015, Russia Insider, a pro-Russian site, ran an article under the headline, “Washington’s SpokesClowns Are No Match for Russia’s Top Press Spokeswoman.” After several paragraphs deriding Psaki, the article turns to Zakharova. “Sharp and witty, she runs circles around her US counterparts, and ordinary Russians get a kick out of her media appearances.”

Not all of Zakharova’s colleagues approve of her behavior. “When it comes down to it, she was threatening the journalist,” a source in the Russian government told Meduza regarding the incident with Mikkonen and Chechnya. “None of her predecessors would have taken such liberties.”

Maslov compared Zakharova to a talented lecturer to whom students flock even if she teaches a boring subject: They come for the performance. “It’s cathartic,” Maslov said. “At least you can come out of the theater, or one of Masha’s press conferences, and ask, ‘What the hell was that?’ Remember the other Foreign Ministry press secretaries? Of course you don’t.”

She has supporters and detractors inside the Russian government — as some sources told Meduza, she has two different groups of enemies within the agency: the “conservative men” and the “rationalists.” One group believes that she is too entertaining, a lightweight; the other that she is overdramatic.

“She’s like Marmite: Some people love her and some people hate her,” said a Russian diplomat currently working in the US. “However, [Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov] is part of the first group, and that’s what counts.”

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Russia's President Vladimir Putin awards Maria Zakharova with an Order of Friendship, during a ceremony at the Kremlin.

Zakharova comes from a line of diplomats. Her father, Vladimir Zakharov, moved the family to Beijing in late 1981 to work at the Soviet Embassy there. Zakharov devoted most of his career in China, first working at the embassy, then rising to the post of deputy secretary general of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). “He knows Beijing and Shanghai better than he knows Moscow,” Maslov said, calling him “an absolute man of the system.”

In an interview with Meduza, Zakharova described the move, which came on her 6th birthday, as a “shock.” “Moving from snow-white and festive pre–New Year’s Moscow into a county that was gray, dusty, and horrifically cold — there’s no snow there, just wind. Everyone was wearing these homespun coats with sheepskin, and caps with red stars,” she said.

Zakharova is very close to her family — following in her father’s footsteps professionally and her mother’s footsteps in terms of temperament. Irina Zakharova is an art historian who works at Moscow’s famed Pushkin Museum, who, Maslov said, has a natural, “absolutely theatrical, emphatic exaltation.” “She’s the kind of museum worker who can look at any little shard and declare it extraordinary. Multiply Masha by three and you get her mother.”

“My parents were expecting a boy; the doctors swore up and down that they’d have one,” Zakharova said. “When they ended up with a girl, instead, I think my father didn't take me seriously. He loved me, he raised me, but his expectations were low. I didn't consciously realize that, but I think it left a mark on me.” This is why, Zakharova believes, she wasn’t surprised to find that women were often looked down on in the Russian professional world.

Zakharova said her parents harbored no illusions about the Soviet regime. In the early 1980s, Soviet journals had refused to publish Irina Zakharova’s articles about Chinese folk toys because of the state of Soviet-Chinese relations. There were incidents when her mother’s art books were confiscated at the border for allegedly containing pornography. Today, Zakharova calls these incidents mere “overreaches” by the Soviet system but acknowledges that during perestroika, she supported Mikhail Gorbachev.

“I believe it's important to see the pluses and minuses,” she said. “The fact that a giant state toppled, leaving behind, as the president has said, the largest divided nation, is a huge tragedy. And still, the things that Gorbachev lobbied for weren’t defeatist.”

The Zakharovs were in Beijing in 1991 when they learned of the fall of the Soviet Union. Life at the Soviet Embassy in Beijing grew difficult. No one was paid for long stretches; everyone was waiting to be evacuated. “We lived from month to month,” Zakharova recalled. “They said they would send an airplane, put everyone on it, and we would fly back. But to where? We’d come to Beijing with Soviet passports, now, we were going back to a completely new and confused country.”

But the family didn’t consider going anywhere else. The subject of emigration, she said, “was off the table. Our family is there, it’s our homeland, and not in an overblown, hysterical way, but as a simple fact. It’s home. We had to return to Moscow no matter what awaited us there. Although I remember that even the people closest to us told us not come back.”

The Zakharovs went back in 1993. Her parents had lost all their savings and had to survive on regular public sector wages, and meanwhile, the time had come for Maria to go to college.

Years earlier, in middle school, she told her mother that she was dreaming of becoming a diplomat or a foreign correspondent. Irina was alarmed. “She said, ‘You have to understand that neither path is open to you,’” Zakharova said. “In our country, they don’t have women diplomats or foreign correspondents.”


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Maria Zakharova
Artyom Geodakyan/TASS
Zakharova entered the prestigious Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO) in 1993, as Russia was plunged into chaos by the collapse of the Soviet system and the sudden onslaught of capitalism.

“At that time, everyone was going into business,” Zakharova said. “I doubt that I would have gotten in before or after that exact moment.”

Maslov, her former adviser, saw it as a natural move. “Diplomacy has a clannish structure, because the most important thing about it is understanding and following the rules of the game, knowing what you’re supposed to do, and what not to do,” he said. “People rarely get into it from outside.”

Zakharova focused on China and graduated with honors in 1998 and, with recommendation letters from the country’s leading China experts, she applied for her first job at the Foreign Ministry, in its Asia Department.

She was not hired.

“It came as a real shock,” Zakharova said. “I had been working toward this for five years, I’d studied Chinese in school, I had an article published in Problems of the Far East. When they said ‘no,’ it was a full-on disaster.”

Zakharova scoured job fairs and was eventually recruited to join the federal tax service. Then, her connections took the lead. The Russian ambassador to China at the time, Igor Rogachev, had worked closely with Zakharova’s father. “He was in Beijing, but he somehow learned that I hadn’t been hired and I think through my parents suggested that maybe I could get into the press service,” Zakharova said. At the time, it was run by Vladimir Rakhmanin, who knew the Zakharovs well, having also worked at the Chinese Embassy. She joined the Foreign Ministry, as a press officer in its China Department, weeks after first being rejected.

Speaking to Meduza, Zakharova bristled at the idea that connections played a part — her answer giving insight into the new Russia, where things only get accomplished because of svyazi, or links. “What connections was I hired because of? What are you talking about?” she asked. “People got jobs at banks through connections, or at international corporations. At the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, with their $30-an-hour salary, they weren’t just hiring people — they were putting classified ads in the newspapers and one was answering.”

The greatest dream for an MGIMO graduate at that time, Zakharova said, was getting hired at international companies like Procter & Gamble or Philip Morris. Only people with ideological convictions went to the Foreign Ministry — or, those with nowhere else to go.

As Zakharova put it: She got the job because “fate once again interfered.”

Her first job at the Foreign Ministry was at the Diplomatic Bulletin, an intra-agency publication that mostly printed decrees, contracts, and archival documents, leaving only a little room for scholarly and journalistic articles on diplomacy. Zakharova took on the task mostly in hopes of eventually leaving for China. At the same time, she was studying her favorite culture in an academic setting — she had enrolled in graduate school at the Peoples’ Friendship University and, under Maslov’s supervision, began writing a thesis on Chinese folk holidays.

The subject was esoteric but, Zakharova believed, important. “My thesis might be mediocre, it might not be scholarly enough, but it's completely honest,” said Zakharova.

Around that time, in 2003, Zakharova crossed paths with Alexander Yakovenko, who would go on to head the Foreign Ministry’s press service (and eventually become the oft-tweeting Russian ambassador to the UK). She remembers running into him one day at MGIMO and sharing a cab to the vast Foreign Ministry headquarters back in the center of town. “We got to talking,” Zakharova said, and Yakovenko admitted that he didn’t understand a lot about information policy. She explained how she saw it and the new head of the Information Department asked her to put down what she had said on paper.

“I probably wasn’t entirely up to the task, but I realized that something big was happening — that this was my one chance to become an important part of this ministry,” Zakharova said. That night, she wrote a framework for the development of the ministry’s communication strategy, and the very next day, began her new job.

Zakharova saw her task as more than modernizing the ministry’s press service — she wanted to build it from the ground up. “The Soviet system of propaganda had stopped working, so there was nothing to destroy or change — we had to build something on completely different foundations,” she said. They looked to Western models, including US ones. Soon, the department stopped doing weekly briefings and focused on timely responses to media inquiries. They revamped the ministry’s website. Yakovenko started seeing journalists daily, reading them reports compiled from answers to their inquiries and participating in live broadcasts.

“Remember: Before that, the government didn’t hear and didn’t listen,” Zakharova said. “There were clans that had divvied up all the television networks. The government couldn’t even tell them, ‘Hey guys, we’re signing an important agreement right now, why don’t you at least pay some attention to that?’”

It was around the same time, in the early 2000s, that Zakharova met Sergey Lavrov, who would become foreign minister in 2004. The following year, Zakharova went on her first foreign assignment, to New York, to run the press service of the Russian mission to the United Nations, where Lavrov had been UN ambassador before being promoted to foreign minister. “The Russian Permanent Mission had always been [Lavrov’s] territory,” a source inside the Russian government told Meduza. “Everyone there is fairly close to him. And if that’s where Maria was, it means that by that time, they must have already been on good terms.”

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From right to left: Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova; former Russian ambassador to the US Sergei Kislyak; former lieutenant governor of Alaska Byron Mallott; and Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov talking after laying a wreath at the Alaska Siberia Lend-Lease Memorial, featuring statues of US and Soviet pilots.
Alexander Shcherbak / TASS via Getty Images
From right to left: Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova; former Russian ambassador to the US Sergei Kislyak; former lieutenant governor of Alaska Byron Mallott; and Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov talking after laying a wreath at the Alaska Siberia Lend-Lease Memorial, featuring statues of US and Soviet pilots.

Zakharova arrived in New York with false expectations of life in the West.

“I left [for New York] in 2005 with, of course, rose-colored glasses, that’s for sure,” Zakharova said. “I think I just left with a hypercritical view on our reality,” she said, “but most importantly — with heightened expectations about the ideals that waited for me there.”

It took one closed session of the UN Security Council to change her mind. “The same people who talk about human rights in public easily toss around human lives behind closed doors,” she said. “I was not ready for all that, for the cynicism and roughness. There are no higher values at play, only the same kinds of interests people will fight over until the bitter end.”

Zakharova spent the next three years in New York, traveling from the Permanent Mission complex, 20 miles outside the city, to make it to work at UN headquarters by 9 a.m. and then work until nearly midnight. Zakharova said she still loves the city — and posts giddily whenever she has visited since — but no longer has “any illusions about the [US espousing] higher ideals and humanist values.” Among other things, the spokesperson says she was bothered by the fact that American journalists never wrote anything good about Russia — they were, she said, only interested in crime, terrorism, and corruption.

Those who knew Zakharova at the time don’t recall her voicing these opinions — which have hardened into the anti-Western vitriol she regularly espouses from the podium and in the media. Zakharova was at the UN four years after George W. Bush looked into Vladimir Putin’s eyes and said he had gotten a sense of his soul. During her tenure, Putin may have been consolidating power and centralizing authority, but US–Russia relations were still relatively good. There were signs of deterioration — including Russia’s war with Georgia, but most people weren’t speaking of a new Cold War.

“When Sergey Lavrov worked at the UN, he seemed like a completely different person,” said Matthew Rojansky, director of the Kennan Institute at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. “He was a mainstream Russian diplomat. It’s important to understand that at that time, both he and Zakharova were working under a completely different administration.”

Zakharova’s career really took off under the presidency of Dmitry Medvedev. Medvedev, who stepped into the role of president between Putin’s second and third terms, very much modeled himself after his US counterpart at the time — Obama. Medvedev wanted to portray himself as modern, liberal, and tech-savvy; Obama professed to want improved relations between the United States and Russia.

It was in this context that Zakharova met another influential woman in Russian politics, Natalya Timakova, who was Medvedev’s press secretary, until she left the role last month. Zakharova’s professionalism and her understanding of the media impressed Timakova. She liked how Zakharova didn’t hide behind formal announcements and wasn’t afraid to express her own opinions. “As it was fashionable to say back then, she was very ‘proactive,’” Timakova told Meduza. Timakova said she convinced Lavrov to promote Zakharova “out of a desire to support another smart woman.”

A source close to the government said that without this support, it is unlikely that Zakharova would have ascended as she did. That is in no small part because the Foreign Ministry is known as the most sexist government body in Russia. The number of women consuls can be counted on one hand; Zakharova is the only woman to head a department at the Foreign Ministry. Of all Russia’s current ambassadors around the world, only one is a woman (Lyudmila Vorobyeva, responsible for representing Russian interests in Indonesia, East Timor, Papua New Guinea, and Kiribati), although another is an ambassador-at-large (Eleonora Mitrofanova, who covers world heritage issues at UNESCO).

Zakharova doesn’t see herself, however, as a trailblazer. Her views on women’s equality fall in line with the Russian mainstream — highlighting what are seen as the good differences between men and women, the righteousness of traditional gender roles, and the hysteria of the feminist movement in the West.

“The French Foreign Ministry has to be 50/50 men and women, whatever it takes! Take them off the street, grab them from the stores — it doesn’t matter,” she said. “We have never had quotas or any other kind of obligations. But the people who have gotten into the highest positions have done it based on their abilities, and not thanks to quotas.”

When Zakharova thinks of the fight for women’s rights in the US, she thinks of high heels. She recalled her first visit to the country, as part of an official Foreign Ministry delegation, in 2004, when she decided to spend three free hours at the National Gallery in Washington, DC. “Obviously, I went in heels,” she said. “It’s the National Gallery!”

She recalled having to walk several miles in her heels to the museum, and then inside. But she felt her plight was rewarded when she was approached by an older security guard at the museum, who said: “Madam, I would take everything out of this gallery and leave your high heels in the center. I am so sick of watching people in sneakers, especially women in these terrible, formless shoes.” Zakharova called the moment transformative. “I understood it was a symbolic phrase, but how this world is turned upside down — how many suffer!” In the guard’s confession, she heard a longing for times when women could be feminine and men still had the right to pay them compliments.

Zakharova believes that gender relations in the US and the fight against sexism are categorically wrong. She sees the situation in Russia as healthier — women have rights, she said, and would continue to occupy ever higher positions at work, while “a gallantry, that is part of our tradition” remains in force. “I think that if a woman is carrying a heavy bag and a man is walking next to her, he should offer to carry it,” Zakharova said. “If a woman wants to go through a door, the door should be opened for her.”

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Zakharova (left) poses with participants in the Olympic Park's main media center in Sochi.

As her posting in New York drew to a close, Zakharova had a few options. “But I knew that what I wanted to do was take everything I had learned back to my own country and apply it there,” she said. But back in Moscow, at the Foreign Ministry headquarters, there was no similar sense of a mission. It was 2008, and the ministry seemed unprepared for the modern age — no one understood why, for example, social media was important.

Zakharova was different.

“We had a lot of conversations about social media sites and incredibly, Maria had no idea how they worked,” Mikhail Zygar, a journalist who worked at Kommersant at the time, told Meduza. Zygar says he taught Zakharova how to use Facebook when she came back to Moscow.

In 2011, Zakharova became the deputy director of the press department, responsible for organizing briefings, visits abroad, and running the Foreign Ministry’s social media accounts. It was a huge move for Zakharova — and one that put her front and center for the first time. Zakharova personally transformed herself accordingly. She went on a training kick, preparing herself to look as well as act the part of the face of Russian foreign policy.

“Masha approached it very methodically,” a source told Meduza. “She started going to the gym, she hired a personal trainer who established her diet and fitness regimen, she changed the way she dressed.”

“It’s not that she had to do any of those things,” another source said. “But she knew that she would be representing the country and that she would be on TV. I really respect her for that.”

Zakharova also totally reimagined what Russia looked like online. Suddenly, the Foreign Ministry launched a Twitter account, which promoted Russia’s image and vigorously defended its point of view. In the West, the account — like Russian Embassy accounts around the world — gained a reputation for being aggressive and loose with the facts. On April Fools’ Day in 2013, the main Foreign Ministry account changed its name to “MFA Trolls,” a spoof on their growing reputation. A year later, the department won a “Runet,” or Russian internet, award in the “Culture, Media, and Mass Communications” category. It was presented to Zakharova at an official ceremony.

The aggressive posturing online coincided with an equally bellicose Russian foreign policy. In 2013, then-Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych backed out of a deal with the European Union under pressure from the Kremlin. A revolution in Ukraine followed, which Putin blamed on the US, before he swiftly annexed Crimea from Ukraine following a referendum, which was widely criticized as illegitimate and which Russia maintains was in accordance with international law. The Kremlin was also involved in the armed conflict in Eastern Ukraine, where fighting continues to this day. The next summer, in July 2014, Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was downed over separatist-controlled territory. International investigations have established it was shot down by rebels with weapons provided by Russia. Russian activity in Ukraine, at least as determined by Washington, brought on sanctions from the US and EU, and Russia’s political isolation from the West, buoyed by its deployment of forces to Syria to support Bashar al-Assad.

Zakharova met each turn with online jokes and social media-ready soundbites, but under every jab was a deeply serious message — she and the ministry would laugh at, not accept or internalize, criticism of Russian foreign policy.

That has only grown over time. Since Russia was accused of meddling in the 2016 US election, and the word “troll” has become almost synonymous with Russia, the Foreign Ministry has only played to type.

Zakharova is clearly proud of the Foreign Ministry’s sense of humor. Their online April Fools’ jokes have become a tradition. In the middle of her interview with Meduza, Zakharova whipped out her phone to read one of her favorite jokes, a recording of which was released on the Foreign Ministry Twitter account on April 1 last year. “Hello. You’ve reached the Russian Embassy. If you wish to have a Russian diplomat speak to your political enemies, press 1; if you would like to use the services of Russian hackers, press 2; if you have any questions about election interference, press 3 and wait for the beginning of a political campaign. To ensure the quality of our services, all phone calls will be recorded.”

“That’s totally Masha. She’s being provocative, of course,” Elena Chernenko, an editor at Kommersant who knows Zakharova well, said. “All of these jokes — that’s what she’s really like. That’s how she jokes around in private.”

Being provocative has also served her well professionally. For those at Zakharova’s level in Russian politics, Rojansky said, “you have every incentive to try to elevate or preserve your status. One of the most obvious ways of doing that is trying to pick fights.” And Zakharova proved herself skilled at picking fights with the most powerful, biggest bully of all: the United States of America.

Her undiplomatic, sarcastic approach has won her many detractors in the West — “I have no idea why she remains so obsessed with me,” McFaul wrote of her personal attacks in an email to BuzzFeed News, adding, “But she does seem obsessed” — but Zakharova admits that a lot of her work is aimed at the domestic Russian public. She believes that the most critical element of her job is the opportunity to speak with people directly and that the language that comes out of the MFA needs to be geared toward its intended audience. “Today, it’s not just the media you need to talk to.”

Her willingness to engage — even combatively — has won her some fans in the Russian media. Accustomed to impenetrable ministries and officials who act like the press is a toxic force to be avoided, Zakharova is at least someone they can speak with. She will unleash a torrent of criticism and vitriol — but then she will reply.

Alexander Gabuev of the Carnegie Moscow Center, who worked closely with Zakharova when he was a journalist for Kommersant, said the first thing she does when a journalist asks for a comment is find out their deadline. This practice, which is standard in the West, is still unimaginable in the majority of Russian government agencies. “She isn’t some career diplomat with no conception of how media works,” Gabuev said.

Journalists also give Zakharova her dues for working with all kinds of media outlets, including independent ones — which are therefore considered part of the “opposition” to Putin. While this may be standard practice in the US, it is rarer in Russia, and appreciated by even those normally critical of the Kremlin and government. “She never asked for questions to be approved ahead of time and always let me speak without knowing what I was going to ask,” said Anton Zhelnov, who has worked the Foreign Ministry press pool for the independent TV channel Rain.

“She’s like Marmite: Some people love her and some people hate her"

“I very often disagree with the things Masha says publicly and in her personal conversations with journalists, but I like arguing with her because she tries to convince you, but also listens to your arguments. She doesn’t just say, ‘That’s it, you’re wrong, forget it,’” said Chernenko, who has developed something of a friendship with Zakharova. “She is willing to have real conversations that show that she’s truly interested in talking to you. There are not many officials who do that.”

Zakharova recalls how, on one occasion, she was having a heated argument with journalists aboard a Foreign Ministry flight shortly after Russia annexed Crimea. The journalists believed that Russia had acted in violation of international law; she didn’t. “It was a long flight, and we got to the point where we were all shouting: They were yelling at me, and I was yelling back at them,” Zakharova said. “It wasn’t just about Crimea; we were talking about things like #MeToo. After these kinds of incidents, I always approach people, or call them, or write to them, and do what I can to let them know that I got too emotional or personal and crossed a line. And people apologize back.”

Maxim Martemyanov traveled with the Foreign Ministry pool in 2014 and 2015 while writing a profile of Sergey Lavrov for Russian GQ. According to him, Zakharova “jealously guarded the minister,” making sure that no “human” detail about his personality appeared in the press. “It seemed like she was not only running the MFA press service but also acting as Lavrov’s personal PR manager,” he said.

“Masha is very personable — on the plane and at events,” said Martemyanov said. “But if you cross the line, she goes into angry headmistress mode.”

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Zakharova, ahead of a press conference by Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Russia's foreign policy in 2017.

For some who know her, it’s hard to tell how much Zakharova is a true believer in the policies she pushes and how much of it is merely fulfilling her public role.

Andrei Kozyrev, a former foreign minister who has been living in the US for many years and is now a Putin critic, says he knows two Zakharovas — the one he met in the US in the mid-2000s, well before the invasion of Crimea, and the person she has become since then. “For me, this is a very painful subject because after Crimea, my comrades, talented diplomats who had been involved in promoting my more or less pro-Western policies, started saying completely monstrous things,” he said.

Russia’s annexation of Crimea and meddling in eastern Ukraine were a turning point — both for Russia and how it was viewed in the world. And it was a turning point for Zakharova. When they met, Kozyrev said, “Maria made a very good impression on me: She was very polite, professional, and helpful. It’s painful to see people afflicted with a political plague.”

“It’s hard to say what Masha really thinks about Crimea,” said the journalist Martemyanov, referring to her by her nickname. “But of course, in public, she can only say things that are in line with the policies of the president. [The diplomats] don’t make the decisions; they only justify them to the world community. That’s the discipline of diplomacy. It’s very possible that they don’t believe in anything at all.”

It was hard to tell when Meduza sat down with Zakharova (after a prerequisite text from her that read, “Are you planning on writing nasty things?”) at a Starbucks near the Foreign Ministry building. She spoke for four hours over two days.

Zakharova didn’t prescreen the questions, but there were subjects that she wouldn’t talk about. She doesn’t comment on domestic Russian policies because she considers it “bad manners to publicly talk about things that you’re not an expert on.”

She spoke about her parents and child (she has an 8-year-old daughter), but never about her husband, a man named Andrei Makarov, whom she married in 2005 in New York and about whom almost nothing is known.

She spoke a little about her poetry — in recent months, she has written a poem about a Russian pilot shot down in Syria and cowrote a song with Russian pop star Katya Lel.

“I was reacting to current events and that was the form my reaction took,” Zakharova said. “I don’t write poetry. I want everyone to know that. [Anna] Akhmatova, [Bella] Akhmadulina, they wrote poetry. I am just making rhymes. It’s a typical Russian amusement. Just like how ladies used to sew — they weren’t seamstresses, but they embroidered.”

Sources close to the government consider all of this show business — additional efforts toward theatricality on the part of Zakharova, whose task is to increase how often she is quoted in the press. “In the past, spokespeople didn’t have to mug for the cameras and draw attention to themselves,” said one former government official. “But politics have changed dramatically, and today, spokespeople act like they’re the important ones.”

“Our diplomacy is rather dry and Maria has breathed a lot of new life into it,” the former official said. “On the other hand, diplomacy is supposed to be dry and boring, and so it’s a big question how much scathing retorts and flashiness do for it.”

According to Maslov, her former adviser, Zakharova’s success is the result of her finding herself in the right place at the right time — just when the Russian government needed an interesting character to represent its foreign policy. “Maria Zakharova has, inarguably, made her mark,” he said. “She embodies the new stage of the development of Russian diplomacy. When this stage is over, they might get rid of the interesting characters altogether.”

“She is far from stupid and knows very well that she is dancing on a minefield,” he said. “So far, the Lord has protected her from explosions. But the worst thing would be if this talented person turned into a boring Foreign Ministry worm. She might rise up to a very high position, but if she loses her charm, she will be a lot less interesting. The artist only matters while she is making art.”

Alberto Nardelli contributed reporting to this story.
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Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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