US hits Russia and Iran with sanctions over election interference

The US Treasury and State Departments greeted 2025 by imposing new sanctions on Russian and Iranian entities over their attempts to interfere in the 2024 election.

Specifically, the Treasury is freshly sanctioning a subsidiary of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps known as the Cognitive Design Production Center. The department has also targeted the Center for Geopolitical Expertise (CGE) in Moscow and its director Valery Korovin, allegedly affiliated with Russian military intelligence (GRU).

These actors aimed to stoke socio-political tensions and influence the American electorate during the 2024 US election, said the Treasury.

“The governments of Iran and Russia have targeted our election processes and institutions and sought to divide the American people through targeted disinformation campaigns,” said Bradley Smith, the Treasury’s acting under-secretary for terrorism and financial intelligence.

According to the State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller, the new sanctions build on previous ones “that have disrupted Iran’s attempts to undermine confidence in our democratic institutions and Russia’s global malign influence campaigns and illicit cyber activities.”

Iranians allegedly used social engineering to gain access to individuals with direct access to the presidential campaigns of both the Republican and Democratic parties.

The CGE, which was founded by another sanctioned Russian individual Aleksandr Dugin, directed and subsidized the creation and publication of deepfakes and disinformation about candidates in the US 2024 election.

According to the Treasury, CGE personnel work directly with a GRU unit that oversees sabotage, political interference operations, and cyber warfare targeting the West.

The designation means all property and interests of the affected targets that are in the US or under American control are blocked and must be reported.

Even before last year’s election, authorities said that foreign adversaries were attempting to undermine the legitimacy of the process – but stressed after the vote that the manoeuvres weren’t successful.

Research also shows that most election disinformation campaigns are largely ineffective and people wouldn’t even find out about them without the West’s own anxious coverage.

And Jen Easterly, the director of Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, told AP last year that the actions of malicious actors simply cannot have an impact large enough to materially change the outcome of the election.