Putin's secret army about which little is known

Lyudmila Savchuk says that money attracted her to the ranks of the Kremlin's online army. As part of the job, she bombarded websites with comments praising Russian President Vladimir Putin, and mocking his opponents, reports the Patria News Agency.

'Putin is great', 'Ukrainians are fascists', 'Europe is decadent' - this is a list of messages that the 34-year-old stated she wrote on internet forums. She found the job through an online advertisement.

-Our job was to write in a pro-government manner, to interpret all events in a way that glorified government policy and Putin's personality, she said, writes AFP.

While performing her duty as an 'internet troll', she also ran several blogs on the popular Russian platform LiveJournal, where she had multiple identities, including a housewife and a student, among others.

While the blogs themselves were filled with apolitical content about life in Russia, she was paid to use these identities and comment on news on other sites and in online discussions. An average day meant leaving a hundred comments.

Every morning, she says, she would receive the task for the day - a list of topics to comment on and ideas to promote.

-Ukraine approved a reform plan to secure IMF assistance - this is the title of one of the recent tasks Lyudmila saved on her phone.

The instructions stated that she should react to potentially positive Ukrainian news with negative comments such as 'For the Ukrainian government, military needs are more important than the needs of the people'.

She worked as a cyber warrior for two months, in a grey building in Saint Petersburg, and quit in March.

A brief job interview was conducted with her by a man who introduced himself as Oleg, and his first question was what she thought of Russian policy in Ukraine.

Savchuk says that she, like many others, was seduced by the salary. She is raising two children, and a salary of 700 to 870 dollars is considered good money in a Russian city.

Identical, often aggressive internet comments discrediting Russian opponents, especially the US, and glorifying the Russian government, have appeared even before the confrontation with Ukraine.