It‘s not like any one of those politicians knew his Chief of staff. Additionally, he was probably being translated from his native Russian, or speaking mediocre English. It would not have been difficult for any random person to „imitate“ him. The main Qualification would seem to be the ability to not burst out laughing. A deep fake of an actual public figure would be a different matter entirely.
That doesn't make it any less intimidating. This meeting (if undetected) could've easily been used to pour gasoline on the fire of that situation. Not everyone who's opinion matters greatly and will have serious impact on decision makers is well-known enough to be "safe" from this.
I'd say the criminal energy & logistical effort of finding an impersonator who looks sufficiently similar and is down for shady stuff makes buying a decent GPU workstation look downright trivial...
Indeed, it's probably very hard to find out what he looks like, despite his and Navalny's Anti-Corruption Foundation giving talks to European state and human-rights organizations for years now. And indubitably he speaks like a bear, he's a Russian after all: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bw84XVPlaCk
Excellent use of sarcasm, I have to say, but it isn’t an unfair generalisation that Russians don’t speak English very well.
English isn’t and hasn’t been commonly taught in Russian schools like in Europe
> isn’t an unfair generalisation that Russians don’t speak English very well
Of that I happen to be painfully aware, along with the country's simultaneous post-SU obsession with English or generally Latin-alphabet branding. The closer I come to proper pronunciation, the more difficult it is sometimes to communicate my desires in a shop (if I happen to wander into a non-self-serve one). I guess I should just be thankful that it's not French, with the more regular spelling but half of the letters being silent.
Not every random person. The success in a social engineering attack is to know the jargon and framework of thought of your victim. Training a good deepfake is also expensive. Finally, if the campaign is running from march and is run against multiple countries, it requires knowledge and persistance to cover all of these different people and preparedness for the conversations.
