As Russia prepares for an imminent Ukrainian counteroffensive, and America’s 2024 presidential race takes shape, it is becoming increasingly apparent that Russian President Vladimir Putin believes one possible path to victory in his so far unsuccessful war runs through the US election.
The latest evidence that Putin may just expect Western support for Ukraine to end – if only Russian forces hold on until there’s a new president in the White House – came tucked away in a blistering announcement from Russia’s Foreign Ministry on Friday, declaring entry into the country would be “closed for 500 Americans”.
The blacklist, Moscow explained, targets individuals “involved in the spread of Russophobic attitudes and fakes”, as well as principals in companies supplying weapons to Ukraine.… Seguir leyendo »
This time four years ago, officials in Moscow were preparing -- along with the rest of the world -- for what appeared to be inevitable: a Hillary Clinton presidency. It was a grim prospect for Russian President Vladimir Putin at a time Russia was overwhelmed by a string of scandals.
That summer, the world had learned about the massive state-sponsored doping program in Russian sport. In September, a Dutch-led international investigation found that Malaysia Airlines flight MH17, shot down while flying over Ukraine, had been downed by a Russian missile, killing all 298 on board. Around the same time, Russia launched a brutal bombing campaign on the Syrian city of Aleppo, killing hundreds of civilians and devastating the city.… Seguir leyendo »
Fresh allegations of Russian meddling in the upcoming US Presidential election shine a harsh spotlight on the dangerous deadlock between the nuclear-tipped powers. In a reprise of 2016, Moscow is apparently pushing hard for Donald Trump to win the White House. But is a Trump second term really in the Kremlin's best interest? Or would a Joe Biden win actually be the more pragmatic outcome for Russia?
On the surface, a stable Biden presidency, including a strong, no-nonsense Vice President Kamala Harris, would seem unpalatable to Moscow. Biden is well-acquainted with Russian President Vladimir Putin from before and during his tenure as vice president in the Obama administration.… Seguir leyendo »
The Russian disinformation operations that affected the 2016 United States presidential election are by no means over. Indeed, as two new reports produced for the Senate Intelligence Committee make clear, Russian interference through social media — contrary to the suggestion of many prominent tech executives — is a chronic, widespread and identifiable condition that we must now aggressively manage.
The Senate committee asked two research teams, one of which I led, to investigate the full scope of the recent multiyear Russian operation to influence American opinion executed by a company called the Internet Research Agency. The Senate provided us with data attributed to the agency’s operations given to the Senate by Facebook, Twitter and Alphabet (Google’s parent company), companies whose platforms were manipulated for that purpose.… Seguir leyendo »
En Italia fueron sacos de dinero entregados en un hotel de Roma para los candidatos favorecidos. En Nicaragua se trató de historias escandalosas filtradas a diarios extranjeros para hacer cambiar el rumbo de una elección. En Serbia, millones de panfletos, carteles y calcomanías fueron impresos para intentar derrotar a un presidente que buscaba la reelección.
¿Estamos hablando de las herramientas con las que el gobierno de Vladimir Putin ha interferido en otros países? No, esos ejemplos son solo una pequeña muestra de la historia de las intervenciones estadounidenses en elecciones extranjeras.
El 13 de febrero, los directores estadounidenses de inteligencia advirtieron al Comité de Inteligencia del Senado de Estados Unidos que Rusia parece estar preparándose para repetir las mismas artimañas que desató en 2016 ahora que se aproximan las elecciones de mitad de periodo de 2018: ciberatacar, filtrar, manipular las redes sociales y quizá otras.… Seguir leyendo »
It’s a Hollywood cliché that’s been adopted by villains from the trickster god Loki in Marvel’s “The Avengers” to James Bond’s “Skyfall” nemesis Raoul Silva: They are captured, only for the heroes to realize — too late! — that being caught was part of the villain’s evil plan all along. With Friday’s release of an indictment detailing Project Lakhta — the information operations component of Russia’s efforts to interfere with the 2016 presidential election — it’s worth asking whether President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has been reading from a similar script.
The charging document released by the Justice Department names 13 Russian nationals associated with the innocuous-sounding “Internet Research Agency,” a team of well-funded professional trolls who carried out a disinformation campaign that spread from social media to real-world rallies.… Seguir leyendo »
To be a first-generation Russian-American in the age of Donald Trump is a somewhat nutty experience. As “Russians,” the identity into which we were born, we are now associated less with Dostoevsky and Pasternak, and more with election interference, troll farms, and other subversions of democracy. Yet as “Americans,” our hard-earned new identity, we are the citizens of the very democracy that the “Russians” are believed to have sabotaged. The set-up seems almost purposefully literary. In the age of Trump, we are America’s Trojan horse, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Raskolnikov and Svidrigailov in one person. If the Russians didn’t exist, it would have been a good idea to invent us.… Seguir leyendo »
Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, insists that indictments against Paul Manafort and Richard Gates have “nothing to do with the president’s campaign or campaign activity.” Administration officials dismiss the alleged criminal activity by Mr. Manafort, formerly President Trump’s campaign chairman, as being merely about money-laundering and Ukraine — but not Russia, the focus of the investigation by Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel.
But Mr. Manafort’s work in Ukraine, which began in 2006, has always in a real sense been about Russia — and may also have been about the campaign.
Mr. Manafort didn’t go to Ukraine to advance the interests of democracy, Western Europe or the United States.… Seguir leyendo »
In the Senate last week, Richard Burr, a Republican from North Carolina, asked the fired F.B.I. director James Comey if he had “any doubt that Russia attempted to interfere in the 2016 elections.” Mr. Comey responded with a single word: “None.”
Indeed, he went on to tell the American public that the Russians “did it with purpose, they did it with sophistication, they did it with overwhelming technical efforts.” And he warned: “They will be back,” adding, “they are coming after America.”
Vodka shots in the Kremlin, right? Not exactly.
Doubtless Vladimir Putin continues to derive satisfaction from having assaulted American democracy and embarrassed Hillary Clinton.… Seguir leyendo »
Counterintelligence is long, hard work. Investigators need time to string along suspects — seeking the who, what, when, where and why of the case. The Federal Bureau of Investigation tries to build 3-D chronologies of who did what to whom. Agents usually follow the money, the best evidence. That’s how the feds got Al Capone: for tax evasion.
The F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, is running the most explosive counterintelligence case since Soviet spies stole the secrets of the atom bomb more than 70 years ago. Some of those atomic spies didn’t speak Russian: They were Americans. We now know that President Vladimir V.… Seguir leyendo »
On Monday, the House Intelligence Committee holds its first hearing on Russia’s hacking of the election. (No date has yet been set for the Senate Intelligence Committee’s parallel investigation.) The list of initial witnesses does not inspire confidence in the House committee’s effectiveness.
It should be relatively easy to get at the truth of whether there was collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia over the hacking. I have some relevant experience. When I was a member of Parliament in Britain, I took part in a select committee investigating allegations of phone hacking by the News Corporation. Today, as a New York-based journalist (who, in fact, now works at News Corp.),… Seguir leyendo »
Our democracy was attacked in 2016’s presidential election. Now it’s up to our country’s leaders to name who was responsible, find out how we were so vulnerable, and stand together – as Democrats and Republicans – to show we will do all we can to ensure we are secure going forward.
This attack came without a shot fired or a bomb dropped; instead, America’s longstanding tradition of having free and fair elections was hacked by a foreign actor, with all evidence indicating Russia’s responsibility. The attack was electronic, almost invisible.
But to just chalk this up to information-era antics, or to shrug it off because the attack helped the candidate of your choice, is to deem this behavior acceptable – and to cede control of our future elections to the most aggressive meddlers.… Seguir leyendo »
After months of anticipation, speculation, and hand-wringing by politicians and journalists, American intelligence agencies have finally released a declassified version of a report on the part they believe Russia played in the US presidential election. On Friday, when the report appeared, the major newspapers came out with virtually identical headlines highlighting the agencies’ finding that Russian president Vladimir Putin ordered an “influence campaign” to help Donald Trump win the presidency—a finding the agencies say they hold “with high confidence.”
A close reading of the report shows that it barely supports such a conclusion. Indeed, it barely supports any conclusion. There is not much to read: the declassified version is twenty-five pages, of which two are blank, four are decorative, one contains an explanation of terms, one a table of contents, and seven are a previously published unclassified report by the CIA’s Open Source division.… Seguir leyendo »
On Friday, we learned that we are witnessing new versions of what U.S. statesman George Kennan, in a then-classified 1948 memo, called political warfare: coercion short of war, involving a mix of overt propaganda and covert psychological warfare efforts.
That’s what we can take away from the U.S. intelligence service’s release of an unclassified report, “Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent U.S. Elections.” In it, the CIA, the FBI and the National Security Agency (NSA), collectively referring to themselves as the “intelligence community,” concluded that Kremlin operatives used cyber methods to achieve a clear objective: “to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary [Hillary] Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency.”… Seguir leyendo »
Antes de la elecciones en noviembre, algunos de mis alumnos de Relaciones Internacionales, haciendo de abogados del diablo, me preguntaron: "¿No es mejor que Estados Unidos mejore su relación con Rusia?". Y es cierto, pero las relaciones se basan en la confianza mutua y a pesar de lo que piensa el presidente electo de EE.UU., Donald Trump, Rusia no hace lo que le corresponde.
De hecho, en una entrevista en septiembre en RT, me preguntaron por la supuesta rusofobia del Partido Demócrata. A la pregunta añadieron dos noticias completamente falsas sobre la filtración de los correos electrónicos de Hillary Clinton. Intenté contestar de forma honesta pero diplomática, ya que estaba hablando con un canal de televisión que pertenece al Gobierno ruso.… Seguir leyendo »
Donald J. Trump’s shocking triumph in the American presidential election will have some unusual foreign-policy repercussions. During the campaign, Democrats frequently tried to damage Mr. Trump’s standing by claiming that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia was working for and supporting the Republican nominee. Now many may believe that America’s huge political upset could even be described as a victory for the Kremlin.
In fact, the idea peddled by American news media that Mr. Putin supports Mr. Trump is far removed from reality. Proponents of this idea have blithely ignored the assessments in mainstream Russian news media and by Russian analysts, which have never been particularly enthusiastic about Mr.… Seguir leyendo »
It all started as a bit of Moscow hoodlum-politics, the settling of scores. No one at the court of Vladimir Putin imagined that Donald Trump would emerge as the Republican contender for the US presidency. Rather, the Kremlin assumed that the shadowy monied American elites would chew up Trump and spit him out, just as Putin himself had gobbled up for breakfast Boris Berezovsky, another politically ambitious businessman.
So Russian interference in the election was from the outset about muddying the democratic process and doing some eye-for-an-eye with Hillary Clinton. The writer Peter Pomerantsev compares Putin to Robert de Niro in Taxi Driver, shouting “You talkin’ to me?”… Seguir leyendo »
The second act of the Trump-Putin farce seems to be playing out faster than the first act, but following the same general trajectory: apparent revelations followed by exaggerated interpretation followed by a subdued debunking, all of it somehow giving weight to what, in the end, has never been much more than a matter of speculation. The theory is that Russian President Vladimir Putin is actively trying to bring Donald Trump to office and in fact has direct ties to the onsandidate. The evidence is scant, but the assumption is strong. The reality-based world view is further weakened and American political culture is the loser.… Seguir leyendo »
During the Cold War, the Soviet KGB coined the term “desinformatsiya,” or disinformation, which the CIA defined as "false, incomplete or misleading information" fed to various targets. Both the Soviet Union and the United States engaged in the same game, though the Russians played it far more vigorously.
In the digital age, the players might not have to go to the trouble of altering information, or mixing true information with false. Simply hacking into sensitive emails or other data, even when the information is true, can have the same impact as disinformation.
Witness WikiLeaks’ release of a steady flow of emails the group asserts are from John Podesta, chairman of Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign and former counselor to President Barack Obama.… Seguir leyendo »
The president of Russia, Vladimir V. Putin, once described the collapse of the Soviet Union as a “geopolitical catastrophe.” But the political thinker who today has the most influence on Mr. Putin’s Russia is not Vladimir Lenin, the founder of the Communist system, but rather Ivan Ilyin, a prophet of Russian fascism.
The brilliant political philosopher has been dead for more than 60 years, but his ideas have found new life in post-Soviet Russia. After 1991, his books were republished with long print runs. President Putin began to cite him in his annual speech to the Federal Assembly, the Russian equivalent of the State of the Union address.… Seguir leyendo »
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