Putin Waging A Propaganda War On West By Using A Kremlin-backed News Agency Based

Russian president Vladimir Putin is waging a propaganda war on the UK and the West using a news agency funded by the Kremlin.

Sputnik News, whose UK version operates from an Edinburgh office block, produces news from a pro-Moscow perspective.

The Russian government has been blamed by western intelligence sources for orchestrating a hack on the Democratic Party's computer system in the United States. A poll on the website said more than 80 percent of readers do not believe Russia is responsible for the hack.

Coverage on Sputnik is highly critical of Western military involvement in Syria and has criticised policies from sanctions against Moscow over the invasion of Crimea, to the partial ban on Russian athletes competing in next month's Olympics.

Paul Saunders, executive director of the Centre for National Interest told The Times, Putin is using the news agency to forward his agenda on the international stage.

He said: 'Following Russia's annexation of Crimea and support for separatists in eastern Ukraine, the EU and Russia have begun what appears to be a long-term confrontation.
'As the weaker party, Moscow is seeking whatever levers it can find to undermine its opponents.'

Sputnik News is based in this office block in Edinburgh after moving to the city in September 2015

Following the Scottish referendum, the site questioned whether the vote was rigged an managed to convince 100,000 people to sign an online petition to call for a rerun.

Sputnik News was the idea of Putin's adviser Dmitry Kiselyov.

Kiselyov heads the Rossiya Segodnya state media complex, whose outlets include two of the media that are most prominent outside Russia: the RT satellite TV channel and the Sputnik multi-lingual news website.

These outlets, aimed at foreign audiences, are hugely important to the Kremlin's aim of propagating its views and countering what it claims to be Western news media's determination to portray Russia unfavorably.

How much influence top officials exert on the editorial policy is unclear, but the outlets are widely assumed to reflect the thinking at the top.

A search of Sputnik's headlines over the past month turn up no stories overtly favorable to Clinton. The best she gets are some neutral, just-the-facts stories. But there are many more that are either openly tendentious or heavy with aspersions.

'Hillary Clinton's campaign has decided to double down on their bid to cast Trump as a secret agent of the Kremlin propped up by Russian President Vladimir Putin despite the obvious absurdity of the narrative,' ran the contemptuous lead of a recent story.

Another story cast aspersions on US media as credulous enablers of Clinton, saying they have 'gobbled up spoon-fed lines' from her campaign alleging that Russia was behind the release of emails hacked from the Democratic National Committee.

Much of Russia's media is against Clinton and the west with Komsomolskaya Pravda, one of Russia's largest-circulation newspapers, calling the former first lady 'the personification of evil' and praising Trump who 'appears to be fresh air from an open window in a room that no one has aired out for decades'.

US officials have confirmed that the Democratic National Committee's computer system was hacked, with Russia identified as the main suspect.

The breach affected a DNC data analytics program used by the campaign and a number of other organisations, according to the Clinton campaign.

The FBI is investigating a hack at the DNC that resulted in the posting last week of embarrassing internal communications on WikiLeaks, and a similar intrusion of the House Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. President Barack Obama has said Russia was almost certainly responsible for the DNC hack, an assertion with which cybersecurity experts have agreed.

The FBI said Friday it was aware of 'media reporting on cyber intrusions involving multiple political entities, and is working to determine the accuracy, nature and scope of these matters'.

Computer hacking, emails and indications of Russian involvement have evolved into a political issue in the presidential campaign between Clinton and Republican candidate Donald Trump.

This week, Trump encouraged Russia to seek and release more than 30,000 other missing emails deleted by Clinton, the former secretary of state. Democrats accused him of trying to get a foreign adversary to conduct espionage that could affect this November's elections, but Trump later said he was merely being sarcastic.

Clinton deleted the emails from her private server, saying they were private, before handing other messages over to the State Department. The Justice Department declined to prosecute Clinton over her email practices, though FBI Director James Comey called her 'extremely careless' in handling classified information.

CrowdStrike and another security firm, ThreatConnect Inc. of Arlington, Virginia, said they found evidence pointing to Russian government involvement in the DNC hack when they analyzed the hackers' methods and efforts to distribute the stolen emails and other files. The hacker groups, identified by CrowdStrike as Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear, used different but sophisticated techniques to break into the DNC and try to avoid detection. Most of the DNC emails appeared to have been stolen May 25.

(Daily Mail)