Russian state television celebrates the "beautiful" & apos; hacking & apos; to TVE to broadcast an interview with Puigdemont

• Newspaper archive: Puigdemont on Russian television: "We will win, democracy will prevail"
• Courts.The National Court investigates two Russian spies detained in Catalonia carrying a grenade
• Politics.Putin on Catalonia: "We do not want to break down any European state"

For a moment it seemed that the Russian government had bought Spanish public television. The channel logo +24 shared a screen with that of RT , the international Kremlin chain. And instead of the planned schedule, the former president of the Generalitat Carles Puigdemont appeared interviewed by a friend from Moscow : the former Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa. It happened on Thursday, when they hacked TVE to broadcast an interview with Correa to Puigdemont for Russia Today .

Who has it been? No hacker has claimed the trick but indirect beneficiaries have celebrated it. The head of the RT channel, Margarita Simonyan , congratulated last night on the fact that some hackers hacked the +24 channel to spread this interview of the former Ecuadorian leader to the former escaped president. "We don't know who did it. But it was beautiful," he said a few hours ago on his Telegram channel.

The program of the former Ecuadorian president is called Conversations with Correa , it is broadcast live and through it characters such as Pablo Iglesias, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, Noam Chomsky , Baltasar Garzón, Lula da Silva, Ada Colau, Evo Morales, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or Beppe Grillo, among others.

The interview focused on Catalan independence, the right to self-determination, the debate on autonomy, popular will and the integrity of the State: "There is no solution to the Catalan problem that does not go through independence," was one of the messages of the former president. "In Spain there is an almost macho idea in the sense of imposing, not negotiating, that negotiating is cowardly, weak. They either impose or go to the end," criticizes the Catalan nationalist leader.

Correa asks why there are solutions to his "personal situation, separated from his family, with his fellow prisoners." The independence leader responds by comparing himself with the fighters against slavery:

-There are no personal solutions. We are here, and my colleagues are in jail, for a political struggle.

-And is it worth it?

-Clear. If not, we would not be here either. Our predecessors would have given up. Women would not vote. Nor would slavery have been abolished.

"We just had an interview with Puigdemont, who is the main leader for the independence of Catalonia. Our transmission lasted all night," Simonyan celebrated yesterday.

In Russia the messages of Russian separatists are not celebrated, but rather expensive. In 2013, the Russian Parliament adopted the bill for the introduction of criminal responsibility for public calls for the division of Russia, which includes fines or even imprisonment for up to three years or five years. In 2015, Daria Poliudova , a leftist militant, was imprisoned after promoting greater autonomy for the Krasnodar region and calling for a revolution in Russia.

The newspaper El Comercio , which reported the hacking on Thursday afternoon, explained that TVE attributed what happened to a computer attack, which in effect lasted throughout the afternoon. There is some precedent in other countries of Russian television interference. In November 2017, instead of a live speech by an American congresswoman on the American television network C-SPAN , viewers were shown an RT program. Several Western media blamed Russian hackers , without it becoming fully clear.

It is not the first time that Puigdemont is interviewed by RT. It was already presented by someone even more similar: former Scottish independence prime minister Alex Salmond , whom RT also gave a program after leaving politics. The Ofcom (Office of Communications, the media regulator in the United Kingdom ) concluded in June last year an investigation into the Alex Salmond Show program in which it ruled that the former Scottish leader manipulated the interview with the former president of the Generalitat, It included as questions from the public some that came from the program team: one from the director of the space, another from the make-up artist, another from a collaborator from Salmond and another from the producer of the television space.

This television interference comes at a time when the National Court has opened an investigation into the presence in Catalonia of two agents of one of the elite groups of the Kremlin espionage, the so-called Unit 29155 of the GRU, a dangerous group of operations of Russian military intelligence that was accused of killing former Russian spy Sergey Skripal in the United Kingdom, something that Moscow denies.

RT usually gives programs to figures who have had problems in the West . The WikiLeaks filter Julian Assange had an interview space. And today the Russian chain, funded by the Russian government, has announced that it will give a program to Maria Butina , a Russian who was imprisoned in the United States for working as a foreign agent and was later deported to Moscow. She will host an online program that mocks the opposition. Butina, 31, pleaded guilty in a US court last December on charges of conspiracy to act as a Russian agent by infiltrating a weapons defense group and influencing Republican activists. Moscow maintains that it was forced to confess.

In 2017, the Spanish Government said that Russian-based groups had used social networks to actively promote the independence referendum in Catalonia in an attempt to destabilize Spain. Publicly, Putin has supported the unity of Spain. This summer, before a question about the referendum for independence in Catalonia, the president of Russia said that Moscow "does not want to break down any European state." "Spain must decide how to be, even with its problematic regions of Catalonia and also in the north," he stressed in a meeting with the heads of global news agencies, including Efe, during the St. Petersburg Economic Forum .

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

• Russia
• TVE
• Carles Puigdemont
• Catalonia independence
• Catalonia
• Spain
• Rafael Correa
• Telegram