New Delhi, Aug. 3 -- individuals carrying apparent monitoring credentials whose actual purpose, he said, was to produce internationally distributed accounts that would frame the election as fraudulent. The claim arrived weeks before the vote itself, a timing that signals its primary function: to pre-emptively discredit criticism that the government expects to receive after the results are announced.

Piskarev told state media that Russian security services had briefed his committee on the threat but declined to name the foreign states involved or describe what evidence the FSB had gathered. The FSB's role in identifying the alleged threat reflects its expanded domestic counterintelligence posture in the election period, part of a broader ...