7th February, 2014 / 11.00am - 4.00pm
28th September, 2017
The history of Russian interference in western democracy dates back to the cold war, but Donald Trump’s election victory has brought it under sharper scrutiny in recent times. Last October, the US officially accused Russia of interfering with its presidential election, an accusation that Vladimir Putin described as “useless and harmful chatter”. The ongoing FBI investigation into the Trump administration and the furore following the controversial sacking of FBI director James Comey have only further highlighted suspicions.
In an exclusive interview with the Guardian, MI5 chief Andrew Parker warned that Russia was at work in Europe and the UK using “a whole range of powers to push its foreign policy in increasingly aggressive ways – involving propaganda, espionage, subversion and cyber-attacks”. Was Russia involved in the collapse of the voter registration website in the run-up to the UK’s EU referendum? And what were the country’s links to the hacking of Emmanuel Macron’s campaign data prior to the French presidential elections this May?
Now, with German elections on the horizon, Angela Merkel has already expressed concerns about possible Russian influence. Is Russia hacking the world?
Join the Guardian’s Mark Rice-Oxley for a discussion on the Russian attack on western democracy with Andrei Soldatov, Russian security services expert and co-author of The Red Web; Yevgenia Albats, Russian investigative journalist, editor-in-chief of the political weekly The New Times and author of The State Within A State; and Guardian senior international correspondent Luke Harding, author of A Very Expensive Poison and Mafia State. One further panellist to be confirmed shortly.
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