President Krasnov
A different sort of immunization.
There’s been a wave of attention on the claim by Alnur Mussayev that Donald Trump was recruited by the KGB in 1987 and given the codename Krasnov.
This France 24 investigation finds it to be implausible, in part due to Mussayev not being in a role to know key events from 1987.
If you are at all in doubt on their conclusion, watch the entire video.
This reads to me not so much as self-promotion by Mussayev, my first thought was wondering what they were trying to get ahead of by doing this. This technique of creating an over the top scrum on a specific issue when something real is about to break is straight up Russian “operations psychological”.
How did I come to that conclusion?
My general reading in this area includes a number of things focused on analytical tradecraft, most notably Information Operations Recognition: From Nonlinear Analysis to Decision-Making.
I’ve read Craig Unger’s American Kompromat and found it to be way too speculative for my taste. Maybe he got the goods but credible single sources weren’t enough for the editors. Yuri Shvets was one of his sources.
I first noticed Shvets in the fall of 2024, I found what he had to say very interesting then, thanks to Ukrainian ties, I got a native speaker’s read on his personality. Like Mussayev, a self promoter and KGB, so reality is malleable for him.
I did NOT put a lot of time into this, since the whole world has. Spending substabtial time on this is the IO equivalent of shooting at a hurricane with a shotgun.