Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan
In late April 2024, Nikolai Patrushev, the longtime head of Russia’s Security Council, chaired a meeting in St. Petersburg of top security officials from countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. The meeting was about information sovereignty and security—the Kremlin’s way of describing cybertechnologies that are designed to protect against Western surveillance, influence, and interference. But Patrushev also had a more specific message. Flanked by Sergei Naryshkin, the head of the Kremlin’s SVR Foreign Intelligence Service, Patrushev informed the audience that Russia’s top cybersecurity companies could help their governments gain control of their national information space.
At the time, the event was little noted in the United States or Europe. Just days earlier, the U.S. Congress had approved a long-delayed $60 billion aid package to Ukraine, and Europe was preparing its 14th round of sanctions against Russia. Yet governments in many other parts of the world were paying attention. Although the full list was not released, participants in the meeting included national security advisers, the heads of national security councils, and the heads of security and intelligence agencies from a wide variety of countries including Brazil, Sudan, Thailand, and Uganda; close Russian allies such as China and Iran; as well as the Arab League.
For many of these security officials, Patrushev’s pitch was welcome: Russia has long excelled at cybertechnologies, and they understood that its resources could be valuable to securing their national digital infrastructures. Some of them had witnessed the “Twitter revolutions” of the last two decades and tended to share Russian President Vladimir Putin’s view that such events—enabled by American-owned social media—reflected a U.S. tactic of fomenting mass protests that were often destabilizing. Moreover, many of their governments have maintained business relations with Moscow despite the war in Ukraine and are not particularly concerned about Russian influence in their countries.
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