A Russian man orchestrated a yearslong effort to puppeteer political groups in Florida, Georgia and California to sow discord in the US, spread pro-Russia propaganda and meddle in American elections, justice department officials alleged on Friday.

Aleksandr Viktorovich Ionov of Moscow was charged with conspiring to have US citizens act as illegal agents of the Russian government, according to a justice department statement. If convicted, he faces up to five years in prison.

The indictment against Ionov was linked to a raid by federal agents of the Uhuru Movement’s headquarters in St Petersburg, Florida, on Friday, the Tampa Bay Times reported, citing US officials.

The Uhuru Movement belongs to the African People’s Socialist party and purports to unite “African people as one … for liberation, social justice, self-reliance and economic development”.

At a news conference on Friday, a Uhuru leader declared openly that his group was “in support of Russia” and dismissed the raid as an attack meant to isolate Africans in the US who are fighting for liberation.

“We can have relationships with whoever we want to make this revolution possible,” said the leader, Eritha “Akile” Cainion.

The movement’s St Petersburg headquarters recently made headlines for unrelated reasons after a man using a flamethrower set fire to a flag flying outside the building, leading to his arrest.

According to the justice department, Ionov was acting on behalf of the FSB Russian intelligence agency when he financially supported the groups at the center of the case, none of which are explicitly named in the indictment. He allegedly ordered them to publish pro-Russian lies and coordinated actions by them intended to further Russian interests.

The department also claimed Ionov influenced a US political group in Florida under his control to interfere in local elections, supporting the St Petersburg, Florida, political campaigns of two people in 2017 and 2019. It listed the group and individuals as “unindicted co-conspirators” but did not name them.

From at least December 2014 to March 2022, the department said, Ionov and at least three other Russian officials engaged in a malign foreign influence campaign targeting the US.

Separately, the US treasury department on Friday imposed sanctions on Ionov, his fellow Russian national Natalya Valeryevna Burlinova, and four Russian entities it accused of backing the Kremlin’s mission of interfering in elections abroad, including in the US and Ukraine.

According to the justice department, the four entities in question are: the Anti-Globalization Movement of Russia (AGMR), which Ionov founded and presides over; Ionov Transkontinental; Stop-Imperialism; and the Center for Support and Development of Public Initiative Creative Diplomacy (Picreadi).

The Russian embassy in Washington did not immediately reply to an email seeking comment on the indictment or the US sanctions, which among other things block the property in American jurisdiction of those named.

Reuters contributed this report

Published: 02:15 BST, 24 July 2022 | Updated: 16:01 BST, 27 July 2022

WASHINGTON — Although the House Jan. 6 committee has presented evidence of the carnage law enforcement faced at the Capitol that day, little time has been devoted to law enforcement’s failure to predict and prevent the attack — at least not publicly.

But behind the scenes, sources tell NBC News, those failures have not been from forgotten. As the committee prepares for an additional round of public hearings in September, they’re expected to put more focus on the intelligence and law enforcement failures at the FBI and Department of Homeland Security that left police woefully underprepared for the mob that stormed the Capitol. Those failures will also be a key component of the committee’s final report on Jan. 6.

One of the online sleuths who has worked with both the Jan. 6 committee and the FBI has a little story that helps illustrate a lot of the bureau’s challenges in the sprawling federal investigation into the Capitol attack and why the bureau didn’t do more to make sure law enforcement was prepared ahead of the Capitol attack, given all the alarm bells going off all across the web.

When they needed to send a large file to the Jan. 6 committee, they popped the files over on Dropbox.

When they needed to give something to the FBI, a special agent drove over to their home to transfer the files manually.

Due to late-breaking revelations, the committee’s public presentations in June and July skewed more towards Trump’s actions before and during the Capitol attack. But there’s a lot that got left on the cutting room floor, including new information gathered by the “blue team,” which is focused on law enforcement failures leading up to the attack, as NBC News reported back in January.

A committee aide told NBC News last week that this team of investigators are singularly focused on the preparedness of and response by law enforcement, intelligence agencies, and the military.

“The team has conducted more than 100 interviews and depositions touching on these matters of security and intelligence across several federal and local agencies, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Department of Homeland Security, Fusion Centers, Office of Intelligence & Analysis, among others,” the aide said. “The team is looking into what intelligence these agencies had at their disposal; how that intelligence was analyzed, stitched together, and distributed; and whether law enforcement operationalized that intelligence.”

The “blue team,” a separate source told NBC News, is headed by Soumya Dayananda, who spent more than a decade as a federal prosecutor — and worked the case against Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman — before joining the committee.

Liz Cheney said in an interview on Fox News Sunday last week that the Blue team’s work will be featured in committee’s final report and would “likely” be featured in upcoming hearings.

“What we aren’t going to do… is blame the Capitol Police, blame those in law enforcement, for Donald Trump’s armed mob that he sent to the Capitol,” Cheney said. “Clearly there were intelligence failures, clearly the security should have operated better than it did. But this was a mob Donald Trump sent to the Capitol, and I think that’s important to keep our eye on.”

The FBI has been generally defensive about its preparations ahead of Jan. 6, and noted in the past that they took some actions to discourage extremists from traveling to D.C. ahead of the attack. But a new FBI statement to NBC News indicated the bureau had “increased our focus on swift information sharing” and “improved automated systems established to assist investigators and analysts” since Jan. 6.

There’s a limited timeframe to help call attention to the need to fix the intelligence failures. If Republicans take back the House in the midterms, as many analysts expect, oversight could very quickly flip from examining FBI shortcomings to investigating alleged law enforcement overreach against those who stormed the Capitol on Trump’s behalf. Instead of trying to understand how to make sure the FBI can make sure they are prepared for domestic extremist violence in the future, some congressional Republicans have downplayed the insurrection, protested the pre-trial detention of some Jan. 6 rioters whom they recast as “political prisoners,” and flirted with the “fedsurrection” conspiracy that posits the FBI instigated the attack to set up Trump supporters.

The potential for lethal violence because of Trump’s false claims about the 2020 election wasn’t a big secret. Law enforcement officials raised concerns about the lethal danger of Trump’s rhetoric both in the lead-up to and immediately after the November 2020 election. NBC News ran a story on the night of Jan. 5, 2021 about the violent threats spreading across Twitter, TikTok, Parler, and TheDonald message board.

One of the individuals who raised concerns before the attack was Bill Fulton, a former FBI informant and expert in right-wing extremism, who sounded the alarm in November 2020 that Trump was “walking” his supporters “to the edge” with his rhetoric about the election.

“You have the president of the United States taking these people to the edge, and the second that something happens he’s going to turn around and go, ‘Well, I didn’t tell them to do that,'” Fulton said, ominously, at the time.

In a recent interview, Fulton said the bureau faces a host of challenges in trying to prevent domestic extremist attacks, including legacy systems and processes that aren’t as frictionless as the communications and organizational technologies used in modern workplaces.

“You have to remember, this is the federal government, dude. Bureaucracy is in the FBI’s f**king name,” Fulton told NBC News this month.

He also noted it was critically important that, even as the bureau takes overdue steps to improve open-source intelligence, that First Amendment rights are well-protected.

“What we don’t want is the FBI becoming Hoover’s FBI again. We don’t want the FBI out there investigating people for no reason, right?” Fulton said. “And we don’t want those investigations to last forever.”

In a statement to NBC News, the FBI stated that the bureau “continues to evolve to combat persistent threats posed by domestic violent extremists” across the country.

“Since the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 the FBI has increased our focus on swift information sharing with all our state, local, tribal, and territorial law enforcement partners throughout the United States,” the statement read. “We also have improved automated systems established to assist investigators and analysts in all of our 56 field offices throughout the investigative process. The FBI is determined to aggressively fight the threat posed by all domestic violent extremists, regardless of their motivations.”

The congressional investigation won’t be the final word on why law enforcement officials didn’t do more. In the weeks after the Capitol attack, the Justice Department’s inspector general announced a review examining “the role and activity of DOJ and its components in preparing for and responding to the events at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.”

The review, the DOJ inspector general said in a Jan. 15, 2021, announcement, “will include examining information relevant to the January 6 events that was available to DOJ and its components in advance of January 6; the extent to which such information was shared by DOJ and its components with the U.S. Capitol Police and other federal, state, and local agencies; and the role of DOJ personnel in responding to the events at the U.S. Capitol on January 6.”

The review would also address “any weaknesses in DOJ protocols, policies, or procedures that adversely affected the ability of DOJ or its components to prepare effectively for and respond to the events at the U.S. Capitol on January 6.” A spokesperson for the DOJ inspector general said that the review “remains ongoing.”

People wait in line at a monkeypox vaccination site in the Brooklyn borough of New York, the United States, on July 30, 2022. New York Governor Kathy Hochul declared a state disaster emergency late Friday night due to the growing monkeypox cases in the state. Photo: Xinhua

 New York City on Saturday declared a public health emergency due to the monkeypox outbreak.New York City Mayor Eric Adams and city Health Commissioner Ashwin Vasan made the announcement in a joint statement as a total of 1,383 monkeypox cases have been reported in New York State.”New York City is currently the epicenter of the outbreak, and we estimate that approximately 150,000 New Yorkers may currently be at risk for monkeypox exposure,” the statement read.The declaration will allow the health department to issue emergency orders under the city health code and amend code provisions to help slow the spread.The announcement came one day after New York Governor Kathy Hochul declared a state disaster emergency over the outbreak. On Thursday, the state health department called monkeypox an “imminent threat to public health.”Data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed that 5,189 cases had been confirmed nationwide as of Friday.The World Health Organization declared monkeypox a public health emergency of international concern on July 23.

People wait in line at a monkeypox vaccination site in the Brooklyn borough of New York, the United States, on July 30, 2022. New York Governor Kathy Hochul declared a state disaster emergency late Friday night due to the growing monkeypox cases in the state. Photo: Xinhua

A staff member holds a box of masks at a monkeypox vaccination site in the Brooklyn borough of New York, the United States, on July 30, 2022. New York Governor Kathy Hochul declared a state disaster emergency late Friday night due to the growing monkeypox cases in the state. Photo: Xinhua

A man sanitizes his hands at a monkeypox vaccination site in the Brooklyn borough of New York, the United States, on July 30, 2022. New York Governor Kathy Hochul declared a state disaster emergency late Friday night due to the growing monkeypox cases in the state. Photo: Xinhua

A man sanitizes his hands at a monkeypox vaccination site in the Brooklyn borough of New York, the United States, on July 30, 2022. New York Governor Kathy Hochul declared a state disaster emergency late Friday night due to the growing monkeypox cases in the state. Photo: Xinhua

A firefighter works in a residential area damaged by a Russian missile strike in Kramatorsk in Ukraine’s Donetsk region.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has announced that the government has decided on the mandatory evacuation of people in the eastern Donetsk region, which site of intense fighting with Russian invading forces.

In a late-night televised address on July 30, Zelenskiy also said that the hundreds of thousands of people still in combat zones in the larger Donbas region needed to leave.

“The more people leave Donetsk region now, the fewer people the Russian Army will have time to kill,” he said, adding that residents would be given compensation.

RFE/RL’s Live Briefing gives you all of the latest developments on Russia’s ongoing invasion, how Kyiv is fighting back, Western military aid, worldwide reaction, and the plight of civilians and refugees. For all of RFE/RL’s coverage of the war, click here.

Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk was quoted by Ukrainian media as saying the evacuation needed to take place before winter begins since the region’s natural gas supplies had been destroyed.

Zelenskiy said hundreds of thousands of people were still living in areas of Donbas where fighting was fierce.

“Many refuse to leave, but it still needs to be done,” he said. “If you have the opportunity, please talk to those who still remain in the combat zones in the Donbas. Please convince them that it is necessary to leave.”

Earlier, the Ukrainian military said on July 30 that it had killed more than 100 Russian soldiers and destroyed two ammunition dumps in fresh fighting in the Kherson region, where Kyiv is concentrating its biggest counteroffensive since the start of the war.

The military’s southern command said that rail traffic to Kherson over the Dnieper River had been cut, potentially further isolating Russian forces west of the river from supplies in Russian-annexed Crimea and the east.

Ukraine has used Western-supplied long-range missile systems to badly damage three bridges across the river in recent weeks, making it more difficult for Russia to supply its forces.

“As a result of fire establishing control over the main transport links in occupied territory, it has been established that traffic over the rail bridge crossing the Dnieper is not possible,” Ukraine’s southern command said in a statement.

It said some 170 Russian soldiers had been killed and seven tanks destroyed in fighting on July 29 in the southern region.

The claims cannot be independently verified.

The Berislav district was particularly hard hit, according to Dmytro Butriy, the pro-Ukrainian governor of the Kherson region. Berislav is across the river, northwest of the Kakhovka hydroelectric power plant.

“In some villages, not a single home has been left intact, all infrastructure has been destroyed, people are living in cellars,” Butriy wrote on Telegram.

Officials warned residents to stay away from Russian ammunition dumps.

“The Ukrainian Army is pouring it on against the Russians and this is only the beginning,” Yuriy Sobolevskiy, the first deputy head of the Kherson regional council wrote on the Telegram app.

The Kherson region, which borders Crimea, fell to the Russians soon after the February 24 invasion.

Russian forces continued rocket attacks on towns and cities across Ukraine’s sprawling front line overnight, killing at least one person and hitting civilian targets, Ukrainian officials said on July 30.

The mayor of the southern port city of Mykolayiv said that at least one person was killed and six others were wounded in shelling that hit a residential area. The strikes left “windows and doors broken, and balconies destroyed,” Oleksandr Sienkevych wrote on Telegram.

A school building was hit in Kharkiv, the country’s second-largest city, Mayor Ihor Terekhov said. Russian rockets also hit a bus station in the city of Slovyansk, according to Mayor Vadym Lyakh. There were no immediate reports of casualties.

Britain’s Defense Ministry said on July 30 that Russia had likely established two pontoon bridges and a ferry system to compensate for bridges damaged in recent Ukrainian strikes.

In its regular bulletin the ministry said “it is likely” that Ukraine has also “successfully repelled small- scale Russian assaults from the long-established front line near Donetsk city in the Donbas.”

The previous day, the ministry tweeted that the Kremlin was “growing desperate” as Russia “has lost tens of thousands of soldiers” in the unjust war it “won’t win.”

On July 30, Britain’s MI6 foreign intelligence agency, Richard Moore, retweeted the Defense Ministry’s comment, saying Russia is “running out of steam.”

With reporting by Reuters and unian.net