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Russia and the Brazil Election: Allegations, Evidence and Denials

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Key takeaways

  • Documented: Brazil’s spy agency Abin told French and German officials in September that it had “confirmed the existence of interference from the United States as well as Russia,” according to a report of the meeting seen by Reuters. The officials gave no details of the alleged Russian activity, and Abin did not respond to Reuters’ request for comment.
  • Documented: Researchers and a US State Department report have linked the Brazilian group Nova Resistência to Russian-linked disinformation networks, including Storm-1516, in campaigns aimed at Germany and the Baltic states. We found no published evidence that these campaigns targeted Brazil’s election.
  • Stated by officials: Brazil’s electoral court (TSE) president said on Oct. 4 that intelligence investigations show no risk of foreign interference in the first round, and an OAS observer mission found no facts indicating foreign interference in its preliminary report, according to Brazilian press. The OAS report separately said some actors had raised concerns about foreign statements and actions.
  • Unverified: any specific Russian operation aimed at Brazil’s vote. Russia has not been publicly accused by Brazilian authorities of a specific act; the Russian foreign ministry said after a Sept. 23 meeting with Brazil’s foreign minister that elections should be free of external interference, and Moscow has denied election interference elsewhere.

Brazil’s presidential election goes to a runoff on Oct. 25 between President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT) and Senator Flávio Bolsonaro (PL). In the first round on Oct. 4, Flávio Bolsonaro received 56,104,268 votes, or 47.03% of valid votes, and Lula received 53,876,617, or 45.16%, according to the TSE. Debate about foreign interference in the vote has focused largely on the United States, but Brazilian officials have also been reported as saying that Russia was involved. This report sets out what is documented, what has been alleged and by whom, what officials have said to the contrary, and what no public source has established. It separates the categories deliberately.

Timeline of public reporting

  • October 2023: The US State Department’s Global Engagement Center publishes a special report titled “Exporting Pro-Kremlin Disinformation: The Case of Nova Resistência in Brazil.” (We could not load the page; we describe it from search excerpts and the report’s title.)
  • January 2026: The Nova Resistência website publishes a claim that Germany’s chancellor plans a 1.4 billion euro stadium in Belém. German broadcaster ARD’s Tagesschau reported on Feb. 9 that the claim was “completely invented,” a point German government representatives confirmed to NDR, and linked Nova Resistência to Storm-1516.
  • Sept. 9-11: A European delegation, including France’s Viginum disinformation agency and media regulator Arcom, visits Brasília to discuss the EU’s Digital Services Act and “preparing coordinated responses ahead of the 2026 elections,” according to a document seen by Reuters.
  • Sept. 17: The Atlantic Council’s DFRLab publishes an analysis of a Storm-1516 operation aimed at the Baltic states in which an account belonging to Nova Resistência’s president amplified a false claim.
  • Sept. 23: Foreign ministers Sergey Lavrov and Mauro Vieira meet in New York; the Russian foreign ministry’s readout stresses non-interference. The same day, the PT asks a Supreme Court justice to open an inquiry into alleged foreign interference.
  • Sept. 30: Reuters reports on the Abin briefing.
  • Oct. 4: First round. The TSE’s president says intelligence reports show no risk of foreign interference.
  • Oct. 6: The OAS electoral observation mission releases its preliminary report.
  • Oct. 25: Runoff scheduled.

Documented: what Abin reportedly said

Reuters reported on Sept. 30 that officials from Abin, Brazil’s intelligence agency, briefed a French and German delegation in Brasília in September, and that “Abin officials ‘confirmed the existence of interference from the United States as well as Russia,'” according to a report of the meetings compiled by an attendee. The officials described the alleged US interference as ranging “from lawfare to interference that is openly acknowledged” but “gave no details of the alleged Russian interference.” Abin and the Russian embassy in Brazil did not respond to Reuters’ requests for comment, and Reuters noted that Moscow “has previously denied interfering in other countries’ elections.” The US State Department did not respond but has denied seeking to interfere in Brazil’s elections. A senior Brazilian cyber official who attended said cyberattacks in Brazil had nearly doubled compared with 2025 and that there had been a sharp rise in hacks and phishing attempts against the president’s office, which the official described as “election-related.” That official did not attribute those attacks to any country in the Reuters report. Because the account is secondhand, based on one attendee’s report and not on a published Brazilian document, we classify the Russia statement as attributed but unverified.

Documented: Nova Resistência and Storm-1516

The clearest documented Russia-linked activity with a Brazilian connection concerns Nova Resistência, a Brazilian nationalist organization led by Raphael Machado. According to the Tagesschau report summarized by Deutsche Welle, Machado and the group are named as part of a disinformation network serving the Russian government, linked to a campaign called Storm-1516, and Machado had earlier been identified as part of a Russian network by the US State Department and by France’s Viginum. The DFRLab’s Sept. 17 analysis says France’s Viginum “has previously identified” Nova Resistência as an amplifier of Storm-1516 campaigns, that an account belonging to Machado first posted a false claim in August about Portuguese F-16s being damaged by debris from a Ukrainian drone (using a cloned Defense Post website), and that Storm-1516 has been publicly attributed to Russia’s GRU military intelligence agency, with technical links to the earlier Lakhta project led by Yevgeny Prigozhin. The DFRLab described Nova Resistência member Lucas Leiroz as an author for pro-Kremlin outlets including InfoBRICS, which it says has reportedly been linked to the GRU. Those targets were the Baltic states, Germany and Moldova. In none of the documents we reviewed was this network shown to have run content about Brazil’s presidential candidates, so the link to Brazil’s election is a connection of people, not of documented campaign content.

Stated by officials: the TSE and the OAS

On election day, TSE president Kassio Nunes Marques said intelligence investigations “do not point to any kind of risk” of foreign interference, according to G1, and Valor International quoted him as saying “we did not receive any alerts from the various sectors of the TSE about foreign interference.” He also cited preliminary reports by Mercosur’s Parlasur and the OAS as indicating no facts of foreign interference. The OAS electoral observation mission’s report, published Oct. 6, goes further in a different direction: Valor reported that it noted disinformation narratives aimed at generating distrust in the electronic voting system, that some political and civil-society actors expressed concern about statements and actions by foreign agents that “could have affected the campaign in some way,” and that elections were not immune to growing “international political activism” by heads of state, which in the Brazilian case reached “the extreme of insults against one of the candidacies.” The report did not name people or countries. The mission called electronic voting “an example of electoral excellence.”

Allegations about other foreign actors

Most formal complaints in Brazil have concerned the United States, not Russia. Valor reported that the Attorney General’s office asked the Federal Police and prosecutors on Oct. 1 to investigate an alleged US contribution of $1 million to finance organizations against the Supreme Court, based on a Guardian report, and that the Federal Police opened a preliminary inquiry. G1 reported that the PT asked Supreme Court Justice Flávio Dino on Sept. 23 to open an inquiry into foreign interference, including alleged foreign financing or support for Flávio Bolsonaro’s candidacy. These allegations are the PT’s and the government’s; the US has denied seeking to interfere, and we have not independently assessed them. We mention them only because they shape how any Russian activity would be understood: officials say they are watching multiple external actors.

Russia’s position

After the Lavrov-Vieira meeting, Russia’s foreign ministry said the two ministers stressed the importance of “free expression of the will” of citizens and the principle of non-interference, according to Diário 360’s account of the Russian readout. The outlet noted the statement did not name the United States or accuse any government of interference. We found no Russian government statement responding specifically to the Abin report; the embassy did not respond to Reuters.

What is not established

No Brazilian court, the Federal Police, the TSE or Abin has publicly stated that Russia carried out a specific operation targeting Brazil’s 2026 election, in the sources we reviewed. The TSE president said intelligence showed no risk of foreign interference in the first round, which is hard to reconcile with the Reuters account of Abin’s briefing; that apparent discrepancy has not been explained publicly, and it may reflect different definitions or different time periods. We did not find a technology-platform or threat-intelligence report attributing election-related activity in Brazil to Russia this year. If evidence exists in classified form, it has not been disclosed. For earlier context on Russian disinformation methods across Europe, see our report on Russian hybrid operations; the first-round results are in our Brazil runoff report.

Why it matters

Our analysis: the story illustrates how difficult attribution is in a polarized campaign: Abin’s reported claim is serious but unspecific, the TSE’s statement points the other way, and the documented Russian network activity involving a Brazilian group is real but concerns other countries. Readers should watch for any published Federal Police finding, platform takedown report or TSE statement before the Oct. 25 runoff, and for whether the OAS issues a final report. Until then, the accurate summary is that interference allegations involving Russia have been made by sources close to Brazil’s intelligence service and have not been publicly substantiated.

Sources

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