Russia Still Waiting For Palestinian Elections It Can Hack

Abbas’s term officially ended more than seven years ago, and the parliamentarians should have been out of office six years ago.

Palestinian Legislative Council building, Ramallah. Credit: Lockesdonkey, via Wikimedia Commons

Moscow, June 22 – President Vladimir Putin of Russia has put on hold a series of operations aimed at manipulating elections for the Palestinian presidency, in response to intelligence assessments that no such elections are likely to take place in the foreseeable future.

Putin ordered the operations suspended today until further notice after receiving reports from the FSB federal security service that plans to strengthen Russia-friendly candidates and weaken those with little or no allegiance to Moscow would not, with any likelihood, see any relevance in the next two decades. The last time Palestinian presidential elections were held, in 2005, Mahmoud Abbas was elected to a four-year term. Similarly, parliamentary elections last took place in 2006. The elapsed terms of the elected leadership appear not to have prompted efforts toward holding new elections, calling into question the usefulness of the election-manipulating plans developed in the Kremlin.

Sources within the Kremlin told PreOccupied Territory that when he witnessed the success of the hacking operations that preceded the American presidential elections last year, Putin ordered preparatory work on similar efforts in other countries. However, the preliminary measures for manipulating Palestinian elections at either level of government – executive or legislative – could make little progress in light of the lack of tangible Palestinian moves to hold actual elections anywhere on the horizon.

“We were all set to duplicate our achievements in facilitating the desired outcome, from Russia’s perspective, of elections involving a key entity in an area vital to our strategic interests,” explained an official who spoke on condition of anonymity. “Then, in gathering data for purposes of planning what we called Strategic Intervention, none of our researchers could find a date for the next Palestinian elections. Abbas’s term officially ended more than seven years ago, and the parliamentarians should have been out of office six years ago. We filed our preliminary report for the president, and left it at that.”

Unconfirmed reports in the intelligence community have Russia planning to manipulate Arabs into pressuring Abbas to call new elections so that Moscow can then implement its hacking scheme, but analysts called such a scenario far-fetched. “The only way that might happen is if Mahmoud Abbas kicks the bucket without naming a clear successor,” insisted Wendy Wasserman-Schultz, a close student of Putin. “He has little interest in calling either legislative or presidential elections with Hamas more popular than his Fatah faction – actual elections would be political and literal suicide for his and his faction. It’s actually more useful to have a dictator-for-life in place, as far as Russia’s regional strategy is concerned. It’s just a better situation when that life isn’t so damn old.”

Please support our work through Patreon.