In a talk given at the Semafor news agency’s World Economy Summit, Brad Smith, president of Microsoft, has warned that Russian agentsboth from the country’s intelligence services and from the Wagner mercenary group, are trying to infiltrate online gaming communities. The manager has alluded to a security analysis carried out by Microsoft itself.
Brad Smith has said that from Microsoft they have “been advising governments on this. It’s the Wagner Group, it’s Russian intelligence, and they’re partly using this [las comunidades en torno a los juegos] to put information into circulation. That’s what happened here. That included the Discord channel around Minecraft, it included other of these [comunidades]”.
The invasion of Ukraine by Russia has definitely ended up returning the world to a time that many believed belonged to the Cold War, when the enmity between the United States and the Soviet Union reached such extremes that not a few predicted a Third World War. carried out by both powers. Three decades after the end of the Cold War, a United States that has expanded its influence in Eastern Europe and a Russia diminished by the dissolution of the Soviet Union have ended up exploding the tragedy in Ukraine.
The current Russian government, led by Vladimir Putin, has had a staunch ally in the Wagner Group, which is a private mercenary company. Brad Smith has gone further in his statements by saying that he is the Wagner Group is “regarded as a de facto unit of the Ministry of Defense or Russia’s military intelligence agency, the GRU”. The acronym GRU is still used to refer to the Main Directorate of the High General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, despite the fact that it has been officially deprecated since 2010.
Smith has stressed the importance of curbing intrusions of Russian agents in gaming communities because they can spread propaganda and false information related to the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, although on the other hand he recognized that it is not the most pressing thing in terms of war. “It’s not like playing Call of Duty is going to cause deaths in the real world, these are video games”, Smith said, possibly in an attempt to prevent the resurfacing of certain black legends that have always accompanied video games.
microsoft president @BradSmi says the Wagner Group and Russian intelligence have been working to penetrate gaming communities to use them “as a place to get information into circulation.” pic.twitter.com/F7CCmaqOvu
— Semafor (@semafor) April 12, 2023
It cannot be denied that combating propaganda and false information is important, but here it would also be important to stress the blatant Atlanticist propaganda spread by many Western media, which sells us a vision of the world taken from a Marvel comic. That does not in the least detract from the gravity of the atrocity committed by Russia in its invasion of Ukraine.
Brad Smith’s words at the Semafor event were delivered shortly after Jack Douglas Teixeira leaked secret Pentagon documents.. In these documents, which were disseminated through media such as Discord, Twitter, 4Char and Telegram, there is information about the possible deployment of NATO special forces in Ukraine, the operations of the Wagner Group in Africa, Israel, South Korea and the Emirates. United Arabs.
