SPOT THE OP: ‘Separatist’ Zombie Armies — A New Bette Dangerous Series
In the first of my new ‘Spot the Op’ series, I focus on ‘separatist’ movements as part of Russian-funded active measures to weaken and overthrow democracies, giving cover for imperialist invasions
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Spot the Op
“Trump is to Alberta as Putin is to Donbas.”—Dr. Michael MacKay
Today, I’m launching a news series, Spot the Op, to help disrupt the flow of the clickbait fascism we’re deluged with daily. Just a quick dose of categorical truth to smother the lies. Responding to the Daily Outrage is a poor use of time. Playing whack-a-mole with fascists is a sure way to lose, but exposing their operations can be useful in getting off defense and playing offense.
Today’s briefing is inspired by the Alberta ‘separatist’ op being pushed by zombie armies. With American leaders functioning as an arm of the Kremlin, we see them pushing Alberta, Canada, to secede.
So we’ll focus on the concept of the ‘separatist op’ — the push to secede from a union in order to divide and weaken democratic nations, accelerated by fictitious zombie armies and real little green men.
This is a very common op of the Russian fascist playbook.
Russian-Backed Separatists Is Propaganda Language
I learned from political philosopher Dr. Michael MacKay that the common phrase you’ll find tossed about in the media, ‘Russian-backed separatists’ is propaganda language and to stop using those words, and so I did.
The term was used to refer to militia groups in Ukraine, when in fact they were Russia proxy groups. Once you understand how ‘separatist’ movements work, they are easy to spot and expose.
CalExit was a Russian op.
Brexit was fueled by Russian active measures.
I dug up this Byline investigation I co-wrote from 2022 titled Agitation and Propaganda: Russian Indicted for Using US Political Groups as Foreign Agents, which reveals that CalExit was run out of Moscow, and that the bad boys of Brexit, Nigel Farage and Arron Banks, worked with the GOP on the CalExit op.
In that investigation, I wrote:
A Russian national backed by the Russian state has been indicted by the US Justice Department for funding and using members of American political groups as foreign agents of Russian Intelligence in nearly a decade of malign influence operations.
Moscow resident Aleksandr Viktorovich Ionov has been indicted by the United States in collaboration with at least three Russian agents for engaging in foreign malign influence campaigns targeting the country.
Founder of the Anti-Globalisation Movement of Russia (AGMR) – a body financed by the Russian Government – Ionov is accused of funding Russian propaganda designed to exploit divisions in the US, at a time of heightened economic, racial and social tension.
Ionov is alleged to have connections with three groups which have worked to spread pro-Russian propaganda in the US, as well as conspiracist and divisive rhetoric. The political groups appear to be Yes California, Black Hammer, and the Uhuru Movement.
He, along with three Russian FSB agents, are all accused of directing the three organisations to push pro-Putin, pro-Russian narratives, in order to splinter Americans by promoting extreme anti-democratic ideologies.
The US Justice Department does not name the individual groups. However, the 25-page indictment provides specific clues to the identity of each organisation – referred to as Political Group No. 1, 2 and 3.
Some of their members have been arrested in recent days. Federal agents said Ionov has been working on his propaganda campaigns since December of 2014, right up until the date of the indictment in July 2022.
The indictment alleges that Ionov used these American political groups as foreign agents of Russia, working on behalf of the FSB. It lists pages of examples of electronic correspondences between Ionov and various groups, instructing them to plant news stories sympathetic to Russia, Russian President Vladimir Putin, and more recently, the invasion of Ukraine. It also indicates that Ionov backed multiple American political candidates.
CalExit
Byline Times‘ investigation into the court documents suggests that Political Group 3 is Yes California – an organisation set up in 2015 by Louis Marinelli, a New Yorker living in Russia. It advocates for California breaking away from the rest of the United States.
The campaigns to divide California in two countries and to secede from the Union – known as ‘Calexit’ – was repeatedly covered by Russian state media in 2016 and 2017.
Yes California’s Marinelli opened an “embassy” in Moscow in 2016, with the Anti-Globalisation Movement of Russia providing the office space rent-free. A right-wing activist who had campaigned against LGBTQ rights, said he left his home in Yekaterinburg, about 1,000 miles outside Moscow, to fight for California’s secession.
Although the campaign never achieved majority support – it peaked at 32% support – Yes California established 53 chapters across the Golden State. In 2017, however, it was reported that Russia was funding the effort to weaken America and cause chaos. It then halted its campaign in April. The BBC reported trolls were boosting the movement’s popularity on the night of the 2016 US Presidential Election.
Such chaos had already been rehearsed via Russian interference in Brexit. Little surprise then, that in 2017, the architects of Brexit – Leave.EU’s Arron Banks and Nigel Farage – were recruited for the Calexit campaign by Republican Scott Baugh, a former member of the state assembly, and lobbyist Gerry Gunster.
Exploiting Racial Strife
The attempt to break up the US via Calexit is just one of many ways in which the Russian state is supporting divisive movements to create civil unrest and hatred across the troubled country.
Evacuate the Moderate Center
It’s worth noting that the frontman, Ionov, was a Charlie Kirk-like figure early in his career, heading a Russian youth organization that functioned as a recruiting cult.
That report was really important, one of many that I had hoped would wake up a nation to the proximity of its danger — we had more than two years after I dropped that investigation to understand how Russia runs thousands of ops, interferes in thousands of elections, and only needs to win a handful of them to upend democracies.
As I note in the report, co-authored by Matt Bernardini, a core objective of so-called separatist movements sponsored by Russia is to evacuate the moderate center, by seeding social and political strife, polarizing people further to the left or right, leaving a nation defenseless.
‘Separatist’ Zombie Armies
I asked Michael MacKay to offer the Bette Dangerous community a deeper look at how the ‘separatist’ ops are run, and how zombie armies fuel the fakes.
Here’s what he said:
When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014, someone from Luhansk said to me “Don’t forget us. Don’t let us be another Abkhazia.”
Abkhazia is a region of Georgia that was invaded by Russia in 2008 – in part to back “pro-Russian separatists” who had carried out an ethnic cleansing of Georgians in a 1992-1993 war. Abkhazia has been a forgotten place for over 30 years – its people lost to the world and stateless.
The Russians invading Ukraine in 2014 created fake political entities to pose as “pro-Russian separatists”: the Luhansk People’s Republic (LPR) and the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR). These were modelled on the so-called Finnish Democratic Republic (invented by Stalin when the USSR invaded Finland in 1939) and the “Ukrainian People’s Republic of Soviets” (proclaimed in the city of Kharkiv by Russian invaders of Ukraine in 1917). These nominally separatist organizations appear to be in favour of independence from the central government – in Kyiv or in Helsinki or in Tbilisi – but in fact they are oriented entirely towards annexation and becoming colonies of the Moscow empire.
The LPR and DPR worked exactly as intended for the Russian invaders, fooling ignorant Westerners. The Armed Forces of the Russian Federation shot down Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 on July 17, 2014 and killed 298 people. But the world’s news media reported that “pro-Russian separatists” had shot down the passenger aircraft. They only half-heartedly corrected themselves eight years later when a court in the Netherlands convicted three men for the mass murder.
In 2026, Alberta separatists in Canada are making the headlines. In themselves, they are a small, marginal and politically insignificant group. But the Putin regime and the Russia-backed Trump regime in the United States are giving foreign support to the Alberta separatists and interfering in Canada’s domestic politics in a big way. They are bringing to bear the considerable power of the online Russian troll farms and MAGA influencers to create an artificial “Maple MAGA” movement in Canada that looks a lot like the Luhansk and Donetsk “People’s Republics” in Ukraine. The legion of Anonymous Cowards on social media (the trolls and the bots) are coordinated as an online zombie army to amplify the message of disunity that’s coming from the “Maple MAGA” influencers – all to make it appear that separation from Canada and annexation to the United States is somehow inevitable. Russian asset Trump has referred repeatedly to Canada as the “51st state” and always devalues Canada’s independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity. This foreign influence operation is undisguised.
‘Separatists’ as Cover for Invasion
Trump is to Alberta as Putin is to Donbas. All the talk about separatists is just a cover for invasion. The imperialist idea that Ukraine is not a real country but merely Russia’s “backyard” is mirrored in the American imperialist theme that Canada is not a real country but is only a dependency of the United States. But unlike in the time of the War of 1812, these days the Monroe Doctrine is backed up by the information warfare power of Russkiy Mir, the “Russian World” – a deadly combination.
—Dr. Michael MacKay for Bette Dangerous
Always indebted to Dr. MacKay for his expertise.
I hope you find this series helpful, and if so, please share this report with your networks. By spotting the ops — the same plays being used over and over again — I am hoping people have an easier time armoring up psychologically against them, particularly where democracies are in peril.
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