Moscow moles in Ukrainian intelligence derail FBI attempts to quash Russian disinformation on Ukraine

For the past year and a half, the pro-Ukrainian community has been outraged: why can any mention of the war and Russia's crimes on social media result in a ban, while Russians can write and post content of any level of aggression? Now the truth seems to have come out. 

Russian special services could influence the largest corporations that own social media through the American FBI thanks to Russian agents in Ukraine's State Security Service (SBU).

A sensational report by the House Judiciary Committee has just been released, titled "The FBI’s Collaboration with a Compromised Ukrainian Intelligence Agency to Censor American Speech".

It's a long document, but in short, the essence of it boils down to a few sentences and one name – Ivan Bakanov. Bakanov is the former head of Ukraine’s State Security Service (SBU), who was fired by President Zelenskyy in July last year, saying over 650 cases were being investigated of security officials suspected of committing treason and aiding Russia.

The report says that since the end of February 2022, the FBI, at the request and sometimes demand of the Ukrainian SBU, which was infiltrated by Russian agents, has been asking the world's largest media platforms to censor Ukrainians, anti-Putin Russians, and Americans who expressed their opinions on social media.

The report accuses the FBI of not properly vetting social media accounts that the SBU, flagged as spreading Russian disinformation. Some of the accounts that the FBI passed on to Meta for review, according to the report, were actually criticizing Russia and its war on Ukraine, CNN reports. 

Before and after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the FBI and other US agencies tried to blunt the impact of Russian propaganda about the war. Part of that work typically includes the FBI passing along tips to social media platforms about coordinated disinformation campaigns.

In this case, however, the committee is alleging that the FBI uncritically passed on information from the SBU without vetting the information.

The committee claims that the FBI and SBU, “flagged for social media companies the authentic accounts of Americans, including a verified US State Department account and those belonging to American journalists” as well as requested that those accounts be taken down.

Here is one example. The FBI operates “63 legal attaché offices — commonly known as legats—and more than two dozen sub-offices in key cities around the globe.” According to the FBI, the legats “serve as the FBI Director’s personal representative in the country where they have regional responsibilities.” 

FBI Special Agent Aleksandr Kobzanets served as the Assistant Legal Attaché in Kyiv, Ukraine from 2020 to 2022, and “worked very closely with his Ukrainian Cyber counterparts on all cyber matters.” In the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Agent Kobzanets acted as the main conduit relaying requests for social media censorship from the SBU to American social media platforms.

On March 1, 2022, FBI Special Agent Kobzanets sent an e-mail to a Meta employee with

the subject “additional disinformation accounts.” Agent Kobzanets wrote, “I have a few more Instagram and [Facebook] accounts that according to the SBU spread Russian disinformation. For your review and action as deemed appropriate.”According to his e-mail signature, Agent Kobzanets was then serving as the “Assistant Legal Attaché” for Ukraine and Belarus.

Agent Kobzanets attached two spreadsheets to his e-mail to Meta. One spreadsheet

contained a catalog with the timestamp, text, and URL for 15,865 individual items of content on

Instagram, including posts, stories, and reels. The other spreadsheet contained a detailed

registry of 5,165 Facebook accounts, ostensibly suspected of “spread[ing] Russian

disinformation.”

It was only after Kulinych's high-profile arrest in July 2022 (Oleh Kulinych, a former SBU regional head in Crimea, annexed by Russia in 2014, is suspected of treason - ed.) and the dismissal of SBU head Bakanov two days later, that the Americans came to their senses and recognized that they had been suppressing freedom of speech in their own country with their own hands.

The FBI is currently investigating how this happened and whether this flawed situation was the result of incompetence or "personal interest" on the part of the individuals involved.