Following the resignation of U.S. Ambassador to Russia Jon Huntsman, Russian government officials and pro-Kremlin media outlets spread false allegations that the American diplomat was leaving in disgrace after failing to overthrow the Russian government. The disinformation was spread against the backdrop of five consecutive weeks of citizen protests in Moscow in support of government transparency and reform met by a bloody crackdown by government security services. There is no evidence that the resignation and the pro-democracy protests were related.

While Huntsman cited personal reasons for his resignation, the pro-Kremlin media pushed two false narratives. The first claimed that Huntsman resigned because he had tried and failed to turn the Moscow protests into the “Russian Maidan,” a reference to the 2014 Ukrainian Revolution. The second attributed his resignation to the Russian Prosecutor General’s recent designation of the Washington, D.C.-based Atlantic Council, of which Huntsman is a former chairman and the DFRLab is a part, as an “undesirable organization” banned from doing business in Russia.

The most likely catalyst for these latest accusations was the U.S. Embassy in Russia’s August 2 release of a Demonstration Alert advising U.S. citizens to avoid the planned protest route because of the “possible size of the protest” and “large police presence.” This practice is standard by many embassies around the world around potentially large events. The following day, Russian riot police used force to disperse the unauthorized protests, a key demand of which was the registration of opposition candidates for Moscow city council elections by electoral authorities.

General Claims of U.S. Interference

On August 4, Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova accused the U.S. Embassy in Russia of supporting the rallies in Moscow. She implied that the level of detail included in the alert published by the U.S. Embassy (exact route, start and end times) was an endorsement of the protest and an instruction to join them.

The DFRLab verified a map attached to the Embassy statement and found that it matched one used in an event page on Russian social media platform VKontakte (VK), which was created by Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s team as a means of mobilizing people to join the protests planned for August 3. Nevertheless, unlike in the event description, the U.S. Embassy’s Alert explicitly advised people to avoid the protest route.