MUNICH: Top Russian and American officials exchanged barbs Saturday in Germany over the US indictment of 13 Russians accused of an elaborate plot to disrupt the 2016 presidential election.
H.R. McMaster, US President Donald Trump’s national security adviser, said at the Munich Security Conference that the federal indictments showed the US was becoming “more and more adept at tracing the origins of this espionage and subversion.”
“As you can see with the FBI indictment, the evidence is now really incontrovertible and available in the public domain,” McMaster told a Russian delegate to the conference.
Just minutes before, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov had dismissed the indictments as “just blabber,” according to remarks through an interpreter.
“I have no response,” Lavrov said when asked for comment on the allegations. “You can publish anything, and we see those indictments multiplying, the statements multiplying.”
The two men addressed the conference of top world leaders, defense officials and diplomats, giving more general back-to-back opening remarks. But both were immediately hit with blunt questions about the US indictment and the broader issue of cyberattacks.
In Russia, news of the indictments was met with more scorn.
“There are no official claims, there are no proofs for this. That’s why they are just children’s statements,” Andrei Kutskikh, the presidential envoy for international information security, told Russian state news agency RIA Novosti.
McMaster also scoffed at the suggestion that the US would work with Russia on cybersecurity issues.
“I’m surprised there are any Russian cyber experts available based on how active most of them have been undermining our democracies in the West,” he said to laughter. “So I would just say that we would love to have a cyber dialogue when Russia is sincere.”
The federal indictment brought Friday by special counsel Robert Mueller represents the most detailed allegations to date of illegal Russian meddling during the campaign that sent Trump to the White House.
Lavrov argued that US officials, including Vice President Mike Pence, have said no country influenced the US election results.
“Until we see the facts, everything else is just blabber — I’m sorry for this expression,” Lavrov said.
The indictment charges 13 Russians with running a huge but hidden social media trolling campaign aimed in part at helping Republican Trump defeat Democrat Hillary Clinton.
It marks the first criminal charges against Russians believed to have secretly worked to influence the US election’s outcome.
According to the indictment, the Russian organization was funded by Yevgeny Prigozhin, a wealthy St. Petersburg businessman with ties to the Russian government and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Lavrov denounced “this irrational myth about this global Russian threat, traces of which are found everywhere — from Brexit to the Catalan referendum.”
In Russia, one of the 13 people indicted said that the US justice system is unfair.
Mikhail Burchik was quoted Saturday by the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda as saying that “I am very surprised that, in the opinion of the Washington court, several Russian people interfered in the elections in the United States. I do not know how the Americans came to this decision.”
Burchik was identified in the indictment as executive director of an organization that allegedly sowed propaganda on social media to try to interfere with the 2016 election.
He was quoted as saying that “they have one-sided justice, and it turns out that you can hang the blame on anyone.”
Russians, Americans exchange barbs over Moscow’s interference in US elections
Russians, Americans exchange barbs over Moscow’s interference in US elections
Italian general challenges Meloni from the right
- A career soldier with experience in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, Vannacci shot to fame in 2023 with the publication of a controversial book, “The World Upside Down”
- Meloni’s party remains the most popular, polling at more than 29 percent support — more than it won in 2022 elections
ROME: A retired general who criticizes the EU, wants to send home illegal migrants and says Ukraine should accept a peace deal with Russia is challenging Italy’s hard-right government on its own turf.
Roberto Vannacci, 57, last month defected from the far-right League party, a partner in Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s coalition government, and set up a new party he said is “proud of being right-wing.”
Opinion polls put the new “National Future” at around three percent support, most of it taken from the League, led by Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini, but also Meloni’s far-right Brothers of Italy.
Meloni’s party remains the most popular, polling at more than 29 percent support — more than it won in 2022 elections.
But the general offers “the first movement emerging on the right that isn’t aligned with the three main parties,” Lorenzo Castellani, professor of politics at Rome’s Luiss University, said.
A career soldier with experience in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, Vannacci shot to fame in 2023 with the publication of a controversial book, “The World Upside Down.”
In it, he complained about a “dictatorship of minorities,” while saying Italian star volleyball player Paola Egonu, who is black, had features that “do not represent Italian-ness.”
He was suspended from his army job, with Defense Minister Guido Crosetto — a member of Meloni’s party — saying that his “personal ramblings ... discredit the army, the Defense Ministry and the constitution.”
But in the end, he was allowed to retire, and the controversy made him a celebrity on the far right.
Salvini, whose anti-immigration League has been losing ground to Meloni’s in recent years, invited him into his party and Vannacci was elected to the European Parliament in 2024.
But last month the ex-general struck out on his own, taking with him two League MPs and another who was independent but formerly in Meloni’s party.
He is targeting voters disenchanted with Salvini and also Meloni, who has radical far-right roots but in office has taken a more pragmatic approach.
National Future is “a party of the true right, pure, sincere, proud, unashamed of being right-wing,” and “not hesitant, not fearful,” Vannacci told the foreign press association Thursday.
Once a firebrand euroskeptic, Meloni has worked closely with the EU in office, while her flagship promise to cut illegal immigration has been tempered by a major boost in visas for legal migrants.
Vannacci has “a more extremist approach to issues like immigration, like security, where he explicitly talks about remigration,” Castellani said.
The ex-general highlights Italy’s Roman-Christian roots and has called for migrants to be returned to their countries of origin if they arrived illegally or committed a crime.
While Meloni has distanced herself from Italy’s Fascist past, Vannacci was accused of revisionism last year after a social media post defending the democratic credentials of dictator Benito Mussolini.
National sovereignty, meanwhile, is a priority, with Vannacci lambasting the EU as both overreaching member states’ rights and globally ineffective — not least in the current wars in the Middle East and Ukraine.
