[11] The dismissal of Serdyukov as Minister of Defense in November 2012, after he was exposed as having used the army to build a private road, boosted morale and signaled a return to high military spending; Spetnaz units are believed to have been given priority in making improvements.

[12] [13] The beginning of Sergun's tenure as the GRU chief coincided with the start of mass protests in December 2011, which were being promoted in online social media and which Vladimir Putin accused the U.S. secretary of state Hillary Clinton of inciting.

[16][17][18][19] So called "Psychographics" and data mined targeting of advertisements as used by Cambridge Analytica was not practiced by the IRA, and its output in English has been characterized as the stilted product of a "troll farm" although that term has been criticized as failing to convey sophisticated manipulation by a foreign state.

[26] The local partisan-proxies and Russian artillery were utilized in a combination of low intensity and siege warfare "to transfer military power into political progress, while obfuscating the associated cost" as in the Second Battle of Donetsk Airport.

[11] In early March 2016, a similar theory was suggested by the Lebanese daily Al Akhbar that alleged Sergun was killed when on a visit to Beirut in a "complicated secret mission" carried out by unnamed Arab and Middle Eastern intelligence agencies.

[42] During a 24 January 2017 questioning by FBI agents at the White House, then-U.S. National Security Advisor Michael Flynn said "he called Ambassador Kislyak following Sergun's death in Lebanon".

[43] After Flynn's FBI interview summary was released on 17 December 2018,[44] the Russian Defense Ministry issued a denial that Sergun had died in Lebanon, calling the story "conspiracy nonsense".