Republican Attorneys-General from Missouri and Louisiana are continuing their push to aid Russian Intelligence agencies in maximizing the toll that Covid19 has on the United States. A piece published by FOX, the official propaganda outlet of the Republican Party and Russian GRU describes arguments before the Supreme Court to stymie the Biden Administration’s efforts to slow the spread of Covid19.

In his Twitter thread “Ten Don’ts for dealing with Russia“, analyst Keir Geils advises: “Don’t expect Russia to respect values and standards that were developed elsewhere”. Russian intelligence agencies are notorious for having a “living off the land mentality,” and taking advantage of situations on the ground to try to advance Russian military objectives.

In the case of Covid19, the Russian government was faced with an opportunity to use the same kind of agitative propaganda and the same social media targeting network that they used to interfere in the 2016 and 2020 Presidential elections to maximize the long term impact that Covid would have on the United States. Impacts have included the death of over 800,000 Americans from Covid19, enormous turn-over and burnout in the American health-care system, and billions of dollars billed to the Federal Government’s Medicare and Medicaid programs.

In his speech, “The value of science is in the foresight,” General of the Russian Army Valery Gerasimov stressed the importance of “leveraging the protest potential of the population to operate throughout the depth of the enemy’s terrain.” Utilizing belligerent Americans who are prone to belief in authoritarian ideologies and conspiracy theories is entirely consistent with Russia’s focus on assymetric modes of warfare that are able to inflict heavy losses on opposing states in spite of Russia’s current inferiority in conventional military hardware.

Multiple media reports have already confirmed Russian media efforts to target coronavirus vaccines and the Biden administration. Russia’s disinformation campaign was so aggressive that it even ended up back-firing, and leading to a dramatic increase in the number of Covid19 cases in Russia. If the United States of America is to have any hope of overcoming the Covid19 pandemic, then leaders in this country need to pull their heads out of the sand, call out the Russian government for what they are doing, and point out that Republican Party officials in the US are acting as witting or unwitting agents of a foreign military plot, and are therefore guilty of “offering aid and comfort to enemies of the United States”, also known as treason.