Russia's systemic failures, significant as they are, will never be enough to displace their status as one of, if not, the best foreign intelligence operators. At least, not as long they're the Russian Federation.

That's not because they're magic, smarter, or genetically predisposed to being great spies. It's a function, or symptom, of their empire and how they cobbeled it together with so many diverse and divergent ethnic groups, cultures, and religions.

America is a melting pot that forms a singular monoculture, more or less, but Russia is literally different nations stitched together from Europe to the opposite end of the Asian continent. It's been kept that way because of immense effort of their internal security services.

Their entire empire is held together in large part due to them mass producing people with the same skill sets required for covert foreign intelligence work, so it's not really unsurprising why they excell at it, and will continue to for the foreseeable future.

Far from the best, it's only a small part of their social media propaganda effort.

People have very limited bandwidth. You can only dedicate so much energy to care about things at a given moment. Bedbugs aren't a huge threat society wide, but individually they're devastating. So if you spend a bunch of personal energy and effort on making sure you don't bring bed bugs into your home, what things are you not paying attention to that normally would be a big deal?

Viral outrage campaigns don't need to be devastating on their own. Their purpose is to keep people distracted, tired, and apathetic.

The fact that you think this is an embarrassingly unsuccessful endeavor implies to me that they are doing a good job obscuring their actual objectives.

Quite interesting that you are posting this on the same day some new Marsalek information came out. Don't underestimate russian intelligence

But they are pretty freaking good at it..