HMS Defender

[Easy Street]

Originally Posted by etudiant

I prefer to follow the maxim 'Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity'.
It is implausible to me that Russia, scraping for pennies as oil prices erode, has the money to support trolls on PPRN.

On the contrary. Trolling is cheap, and funded as much by Putin's oligarch backers (who are certainly not short of cash) as by the state. See here for example. And PPRuNe is a high-payoff target: it's known that Western journos read it for leads and occasionally even lift stories from it, so why not try mixing in some "alternative" perspectives? Even better if they can trick a credulous journo into thinking that western military personnel hold pro-Russian views; that would be quite the scoop. But the standard of trolling is not quite good enough for that. It's taken the campaigns for Brexit and recent UK and US general elections to do it, but it seems that after almost 20 years of talking about it, the West is finally up to speed on info ops.