FSB chief Alexander Bortnikov warned during a recent meeting of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) Council of Heads of Security Agencies and Special Services that “The West seeks to disrupt integration processes and undermine stability in CIS countries from within, making nations forget their shared history and trying to pit them against each other in order to take the situation here under control.” This is being advanced in part through new Western “digital laboratories” in the CIS states.
In his words, “According to the information we have, the Western intelligence community is behind programs aimed at establishing a network of digital labs across the Commonwealth, tasked with collecting and analyzing, using AI technologies, standard behavioral profiles of the population, identifying areas of social tension, and modeling public responses to various external factors, including government actions…One of the goals being to implement adaptable scenarios of color revolutions.”
This was foreseen in 2017: ”Russia is accused of ‘exploit[ing] marketing techniques to target individuals based upon their activities, interests, opinions, and values’ in order to ‘disseminate misinformation and propaganda’, but there’s nothing stopping the US from doing this either, nor in crafting the Holy Grail of Hybrid War by ‘integrat[ing] information derived from personal and commercial sources with intelligence collection and data analytic capabilities based on AI and machine learning’”.
The purpose would be “to fully maximize its outreach efficiency via algorithm-created infowar packages custom-tailored for each targeted demographic.” Moreover, “Just as Russia and China are accused of ‘us[ing] propaganda and other means to try to discredit democracy’, so too could the US do the same against their governing systems by ‘exploiting information, democratic media freedoms, and international institutions’”.
This could “undermine their legitimacy while championing its own values, principles, and de-facto state ideology.” As applied towards the CIS as Bortnikov just warned, this “Holy Grail of Hybrid War” will most likely be weaponized to promote Pan-Turkism among the CIS members of the Turkic-led “Organization of Turkic States” (OTS), which apart from Azerbaijan, also includes Russia’s CSTO allies Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. The immediate goal could be to “make them forget their shared history” with Russia.
The secondary goal might then be to get Kazakhstan “to defect” from the CSTO, emboldened as it may be by NATO’s new military logistics corridor to the region whose anti-Russian strategic consequences were warned about here, prior to the ultimate goal of rekindling “Balkanization” processes inside of Russia. That dark scenario was elaborated on here and concerns the weaponization of Kazakhstan’s self-declaration as the Golden Horde’s successor for sparking secular Muslim insurgencies in relevant regions.
It’s possible that Kazakhstan’s Data Center Valley project in one of its Russian-bordering regions, which will be the largest in Central Asia upon completion, could be weaponized by the West for advancing these three interconnected goals following the model pioneered by Armenia’s American AI data center. As was recently warned here, delayed implementation of Russia’s Monroe Doctrine towards the south “risks empowering NATO to blackmail Russia on pain of a major war along its entire southern periphery.”
