In late September, President Vladimir Putin approved the Concept and Strategy (general directions) of the Kremlin’s actions for the period of presidential and parliamentary elections in Ukraine, that's according to the Information Resistance (IR) OSINT community.
Russian government agencies and NGOs are tasked with focusing their main efforts not only on the presidential election in 2019, but also on preparing for parliamentary elections, IR coordinator MP Dmytro Tymchuk wrote on Facebook Oct 16.
"At the same time, the task is set to provide large-scale organizational, financial and informational support to both open and veiled pro-Russian forces," the report says. "The strategy also determines that the issue of uniting these forces into a single party or bloc structure is secondary and irrelevant."
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At the same time, Putin's aide Vladislav Surkov and his team of political consultants managed to convince the Russian president that the centralized management of headquarters of pro-Russian candidates by a unified team of political technologists (according to the IR, it's about Viktor Medvedchuk’s team) bears organizational risks connected with long-standing personal conflicts among Ukrainian oligarchs and intergroup confrontations among Ukrainian politicians of the pro-Russian camp.
In addition, according to the Kremlin's concept, the Russian financial and media support of "loyal" politicians in Ukraine will be based on the willingness of said politicians to publicly recognize the Russian annexation of Crimea and implement the project of Ukraine's federalization.
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At the same time, Surkov removed from the agenda the question regarding mandatory support of the Moscow Patriarchate's position on the issue of autocephaly for the Church of Ukraine.
"Therefore, Moscow will no longer insist that the Ukrainian politicians on whom the bet is being made necessarily declare their opposition to the granting of autocephaly to the Church of Ukraine," Tymchuk says, explaining that this is justified by the fact that for the campaign period, the Kremlin is set to recruit as agents of influence a number of politicians from Kyiv and the central regions of Ukraine, where the voters more strongly support the idea of creating the independent Church of Ukraine.
