The plan for winning the United States was well executed. Now, with Trump in power, Putin would facilitate the rise of other conservative political parties in Europe and would try to take control of multiple governments starting with France. Once his plan was achieved, France, Austria, Hungary, and others would withdraw from the European Union and NATO. These new conservative parties would reestablish Europe as a bastion of Western white Christianity led by Vladimir Putin, the Charlemagne of Red Square. Marine Le Pen was his greatest hope but even with her failure in the French election in 2017, others were rising across Europe. Just as in the US, these white Christian populists were a mélange of fascists, neo-Nazis, and racists who rode a wave of hatred for immigrants from Africa and the Middle East. Fortress Europa required strong white leaders. Moscow would engineer their rise.
Trump’s success was the North Star for European and American political leadership to embrace the extreme Conservative Right. These white conservatives would take over the Western nations and reengineer the old democratic institutions and ally themselves as light autocrats. Moscow would facilitate that power with ideological guidance, money, and whatever else was necessary. Together America, Europe, and other strongmen around the world would form a political alliance. This alliance of like-minded conservative nations and their oligarchies would end the old political order that had existed since 1945. In Putin’s estimation, the West, starting with the United States, would be degraded by sowing chaos, acrimony, and internal division though disruption of the electoral processes. The best way to do this would be to hijack and weaponize social media and then release it in a blizzard of attacks at the heart of the American presidential campaign. Natural enemies of liberal democracy would be elevated. This American self-destruction would allow a firmly led Russia to figuratively step over the grave of the dysfunctional United States. Russia would show staunch, unwavering leadership. Promising to other nations, such as Turkey, Egypt, Libya, and the Philippines opportunities for future riches if they partnered with the nation that would pick up the markets when America goes to pieces.
Russia’s desire to control the destiny of the Western world has existed since before the birth of the Soviet Union. Its attempts to integrate and manipulate empires have always been dynamic and prone to confrontation. The Tsars had periods of expansion where they pushed the limits internationally and repressed domestically. Russia’s imperial desires expanded in the 19th century and came into direct conflict with British power in what would be called the Great Game. The Great Game was the military’s diplomatic and intelligence proxy wars for control of trade routes through Central Asia, with Afghanistan at the center to South Asia. One main British goal was to stop Russia from gaining ports in the Persian Gulf to protect British trade routes from India and Arabia. Both Russia and England used military power, diplomatic missions, bribery to buy kings and warlords, and Islamic fanaticism in order to expand zones of political and economic influence. By the beginning of the 20th century the Game had tapered off through agreements that gave Russia the dominance in Central Asia. After the birth of the Soviet Union in 1917, those regions would become Soviet Oblasts, or administrative states. The Communist leadership of the Soviet Union held dictatorial sway over Russia and sought to expand its influence worldwide by projecting its ideology. By the late 1930s, the three political ideologies that dominated the world were communism in Russia, fascism in Germany and Italy and their ally, imperialist Japan, and American democracy. Constitutional monarchies and liberal republics existed but most fell under or in alliance with one of the three big ideologies. Adolf Hitler’s and Mussolini’s Fascists would launch a global attack to seize the world’s economic leadership away from America, put an end to the British Empire, and to destroy Soviet Communism.
The modern Putin foreign policy is steeped in his own history and that of the Soviet Union. Yet Putin may see himself as more of a Russian ruler of the classical period. He is not a Josef Stalin, the Communist mass-murdering dictator. He views himself more akin to Peter the Great.
Peter I was a child who came to power through palace intrigue and army revolts, but he would eventually make Russia a great diplomatic and naval power. He would also instill in Russia a near insatiable centuries-long desire to have access to warm water ports. Peter as a young man wanted to understand the dynamics of other nations. He would travel clandestinely across the United Kingdom and Western Europe and live undercover as a common worker in shipyards, factories, and other points of growing technology to see firsthand how Western industry worked. He foresaw a time where Russia would be the incubator of new technology and eclipse scientific advancements of Europe. His later military campaigns against Turkey and Persia, and a 21-year-long naval campaign in the Baltics, showed his desire to expand Russia’s role among the great powers. After assisting in the rescue of drowning sailors in the Gulf of Finland, Peter would later get ill and die over the course of a year. Peter I was a man of action. A man Putin revered and who built his hometown, St. Petersburg, into a modern “Window to the West.” A man Putin could admire and use as a role model. Putin wants the Russian public and his opponents to believe he is equal to the legend. Scholars on Russia’s internal workings, Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy, believe that “Putin is less interested in presenting a particular version of reality than in seeing how others react to the information.”1 Now he portrays himself as the leader of a greater, more respected Russia. He understands the psyche of his people and appeals to them by exhibiting the best (and worst) characteristics of the greatest Russian leaders, both Communist and classical.
After the French revolution, some Russian elites thought westernization was the right course. Tsar Alexander III attempted modest liberalization of Russia in the way of the European courts. He came to power after the assassination of Alexander II by anarchist terrorists. Alexander III’s heavy hand on peasants would lead to the formation of terrorist groups such as Sergei Nechayev’s People Will (Narodnaya Volya)—Russian anarchists who sought to spark revolt against the Tsars through selective bomb assassinations both in Russia and across Europe. The 19th-century Tsars’ disastrous military operations (e.g., the Crimean and the Russo-Japanese Wars), and unpopular autocratic rule led to a wave of terrorism and revolution. Russia fell to a people’s uprising led by the Communists and the Soviet Union replaced centuries of Tsarist rule. Vladimir Putin may have been educated by the Communists, but he presides over a relatively rich nation where a large measure of personal freedoms has been restored. Yet he moved to ensure that Russia was operating closer to the autocratic political strengths of Alexander’s time. While 19th-century France was adopting “Equality. Fraternity. Liberty.” Tsar Nicholas I established the official ideology of “Orthodoxy. Autocracy. Nationality.” Today, Putin’s national core values would be best described as “Autocracy. Oligarchy. Global Money.”
Russia in the beginning of the 21st century was rich with natural resources and weapons sales flowing into the global market. It was a nation respected for its wealthy ruling class after it had cast off the constraints of Soviet Communism. Early on, many saw Putin’s pragmatic cooperation with the West as helpful in building the fledgling economy. Russia was open to money, fast cars, and culture, but remained cautious of foreign encroachment. Putin’s early view was that he would cooperate with the West and limit confrontation. There were places Russia found where they could work closely with the United States. The asymmetric terror capability shown by al-Qaeda in the 9/11 attacks was sure to provide a template for Chechen terrorists. It was in Russia’s interest to learn what they could. However, when President George W. Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq in 2003, it brought with it old Kremlin fears of an America set on regime change. Under his successor, Dmitri Medvedev, Russia appeared to moderate but it would be Putin’s return to Red Square in 2012 that was the tipping point where that pragmatic cooperation began to erode.2 It had become a nation led by an ex-KGB officer. Putin had personally experienced the difficulties of wrestling with foreign powers that wanted to dissect Russia, encroach on its borders, and infect it with democracy.
Another core concern for Russia was its insecure borders and large non-Russian populations. Russia had been victim to invasion for centuries. Wars, insurrections, and religious insurgencies had plagued the nation. Russia’s massive oceans, freshwater seas’ coastlines, and its natural treasures were often violated by foreign encroachment as well. Russia’s history was rife with rulers fighting foreign invasions, whether it was the Tsars cleansing the Khanate of Astrakhan; Catherine II fighting off the Ottoman invasion in the Russo-Turkish War, or staving off Swedish fleets; Napoleon knocking at Moscow’s gates; or the Soviets battling Hitler’s attempt to take all of western Russia. Conflagrations crossing their borders repeatedly consumed their people and resources; they also often led to Russia’s limited access to the unfrozen seas being severed. The challenge of secure borders was doubled under Soviet Communism. The Kremlin used their secret police and border guards ruthlessly to keep the dangerous outside influences of American and European democracy away from their own people. The motto of the secret police was simple “Nobody gets in. And definitely Nobody gets out.” Sealing Russia from the outside world continued after the fall of Germany in 1945. The Soviets seized control of all nine nations they occupied and half of Germany. Under this system, people were said to live behind “The Iron Curtain.” To the Soviets the corrosive influence of individualism and free will offered by democracy was their greatest threat. Western ideology became a threat equal to physical invasion. American and European liberal ideas and culture would skirt their border via Radio Free Europe and Liberty, the BBC, and even Armed Forces Radio and TV. They would combat America’s effect through the aggressive use of propaganda, political intrigue, and lies.
Vladimir Putin would make the new Russian Imperial vision possible. With almost two decades in power, he is the longest-running ruler since Stalin. His popularity in Russia remains high with an 82% approval rating. He remains the supreme leader. As many Russians mourned the solidity of Communist authoritarianism, Putin stepped in to provide a Communist-like firm hand but with Western cash and goods. The most popular leader in Russia’s last century, Putin has honed a firm belief that his destiny is aligned with Russia’s. He also believes that only through his guidance can Russia’s third-rate economy rise to be the top superpower. When a journalist questioned him about dominating his country’s leadership, he responded with “I do not need to prove anything to anyone.”3 The words of a first-rate autocrat.
Putin is also the leader of a pure oligarchical kleptocracy. He was ranked as Forbes most powerful person in the world four times and his official biography was a masterful work of hagiography designed to paint a picture that every Russian could love. Raised by a single mother, he was a loyal son and good boy whose greatest desire was to serve the nation in the KGB. The apocryphal tale is that a 13-year-old Vladimir Vladimirovich saw a public presentation by KGB officers. He told them he wanted to join. They laughed at his fervor and they advised him to go get a law degree first. He did just that and earned a law degree from Leningrad State University. He was selected for training at the Andropov Red Banner Institute of Intelligence, named after the Soviet Premier Yuri Andropov, a former KGB officer who rose to the top of the Supreme Soviet. There he learned the art of espionage. As an intelligence officer, he would need to know surveillance, psychology, recruiting, and how to manage foreign spies in the West. The basics of intelligence tradecraft included hand-to-hand combat, and Putin excelled at Judo. After training, he would be assigned to the KGB offices in Dresden, East Germany. He would work there for seven years, doing the mundane day-to-day work of monitoring both West and East German governments. He would later be tasked with recruiting Germans with access to the West to steal or illegally purchase and smuggle computer technology for the KGB’s use. Advanced computer technology, even the rudimentary systems of the 1980s, would revolutionize reporting and databasing for the KGB. It would also give Putin very early insight to how technology could be used against the Soviet Union’s opponents.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, Putin returned to Leningrad, once again called St. Petersburg, where he helped his friend Mayor Anatoly Sobchak gain control of the mafia and sell off billions of dollars in city assets. Hill and Gaddy believe he was seen by the Yeltsin administration as a man who showed loyalty and used it to climb:
“Mr. Putin paid close attention to individuals who might further his career. He studied them, strengthened his personal and professional ties to them, did favors for them, and manipulated them. He allowed—even actively encouraged—people to underestimate him even as he maneuvered himself into influential positions and quietly accumulated real power.”4
Putin would bring his expertise in liquidating Soviet assets as Boris Yeltsin’s Deputy Chief of the Presidential Property Management Department. There he learned a valuable lesson about corruption. As a Soviet intelligence officer, he identified the need to concentrate that illicit wealth into a stovepipe of money that only a few should share. Anyone who didn’t play by his rules would be cut out… or killed. It was simple, refined, and extremely KGB-like in execution. His reward was to be named Director of the Federal Security Service (FSB, the KGB’s successor) by Yeltsin. After excelling in rebuilding the spy networks he would be appointed Yeltsin’s Prime Minister, which put him in line to rule Russia. Putin rocketed to the top of the polls when he entered the presidential race. He no longer presented himself as the shy, unassuming spy turned bureaucrat, but as the hard-hitting anti-terrorism strongman. Putin promised brutal retribution against the Chechens, whom he blamed for a series of mysterious apartment building explosions that killed several hundred people in Moscow. The attacks may have been the convenient handiwork of his FSB officers. With the exception of the four years that Dmitri Medvedev held his seat, Putin has become the longest-serving leader in post-Tsarist Russia. Even the Communist Premier Leonid Brezhnev’s 18 years fell to Putin’s long reign.
Putin has carefully crafted his image as an ordinary Russian man who built his own path to the presidency through sheer focus, hard work, and an undying commitment to the Soviet Union and then the New Mother Russia. The Russian Orthodox Church was key to his success. Early on as Director of the FSB, he bought their favor by renovating the Russian Orthodox Cathedral of St. Sophia of God’s Wisdom on the infamous Lubyanka Square, located next door to FSB headquarters. A far cry from the Soviet era when churches were turned into government facilities and priests were murdered in Lubyanka prison or forced to become informants. After almost a century of murder and repression, Putin knew the powerful draw of God in the post-Soviet world. He portrays himself as a man of God quite publicly, often praying in front of television cameras. He put the church on a pedestal, but it’s a portrayal crafted for his own political purposes. Like all autocratic leaders and skilled propagandists, he also likes to produce a constant stream of masculine, macho imagery that portrays him as a virile leader who hunts whales, wrestles with bears, rides motorcycles with biker gangs, scuba dives to rescue antiquities, and plays with tigers… usually shirtless.
On August 12, 2000, a Russian OSCAR-class guided-missile nuclear-powered submarine, hull number K-191, christened the Kursk, left the Russian Navy submarine base in Murmansk. The double-hulled submarine, built in the 1980s, was out of port and under the freezing Barents Sea on a training exercise with the North Banner Fleet. The boat carried a full complement of torpedoes and its main arsenal of the twenty-four SS-N-19 SHIPWRECK anti-ship guided missiles. At 11:27 a.m., a torpedo suffered a malfunction and exploded in the torpedo room at the bow of the sub. The explosion set fire to the compartment and killed the weapons department crew. Fire on a submarine is far more dangerous than even a nuclear power plant malfunction—smoke can kill the entire crew in minutes; radiation takes days. The submarine’s torpedo room filled with tens of thousands of gallons of seawater, which led to flooding throughout the boat, dragging it toward the bottom of the sea nose-first. The captain tried to inject air into the ballast system in order to blow water out of the tanks, which would make the submarine shoot to the surface—an “emergency blow”—in an attempt to get to the surface at all costs. Unfortunately the boat suffered a catastrophic failure of control systems and crashed down to the seabed. Then the remainder of the torpedoes and cruise missiles exploded. The blast measured 3.5 on the Richter scale and was detected by earthquake sensors worldwide. All the men aboard were thought to be lost.5
The Russian navy submarine command in Murmansk had some clue that a critical incident was occurring on the Kursk. A message from the captain that a torpedo had malfunctioned and was seeking permission to launch it was garbled but received. Then all routine communications stopped. The Kremlin was notified and news of the tragedy was given to the families in the Navy village of Vidyayevo. As the news broke publicly, speculation started about what had caused the blast. Many in Russia were saying that it was caused by a collision with an American or British submarine. Yet all Western submarines were accounted for and without damage. The Kremlin ordered the Navy to attempt rescues but they were unable to attach to the boat. NATO had far more sophisticated equipment that could be brought in, but Moscow had not called for assistance. The Kremlin did not publicly speculate as to the cause of the disaster but the collision with an American submarine was trending in the news.
The Soviet Union had only fallen a decade earlier and their trust of administrations was near zero. Any and every conspiracy theory was to be believed. Speculation on the disaster’s cause was being picked up by the relatively free news media in Russia. Several outlets would publish stories about survivors tapping from inside, and that the Russian fleet had evidence of an American submarine in Scotland with hull damage but were hiding it. Though it was denied by the Kremlin, messages found on the corpses show that the first claim was true. After salvage, the story would soon come to surface that 23 of the 118-man crew managed to evacuate to the nuclear reactor and engineering section at the rear of the submarine as the boat sat on the seabed. It would be four hours before they slowly died of lack of oxygen. One officer wrote numerous notes and recorded their impending doom in a logbook. Others wrote their goodbyes to their families on scrap paper and their bodies.
The TV news in Russia began to say that Putin’s Kremlin was incompetent and engaged in deliberate disinformation. That hit Putin the hardest. Russians had lived under the Soviet Union and knew a Kremlin dezinformatsiya when they heard it. But now that they had free speech and free press they could air those grievances. Deputy Prime Minister Ilya Klebanov was forced to come out before the nation and publicly deny that the Kremlin had carried out a planned disinformation campaign.
The Kursk incident was what made the Russian Federation believe that free press and free speech in a fledgling democracy was unacceptable. Putin knew that he could not just grab the news media and take it away. This wasn’t the Soviet Union any more, but, to Putin, the unwelcomed level of news and media transparency that criticized him was unacceptable. They would have to be reined in. The easiest way would be to essentially step backward to a Soviet solution—make the news media state-run outlets. His former advisor Gleb Pavlovsky recalled on Frontline:
“I think that he began to think that everything can be manipulated. Any kind of press, any TV program is all about manipulation. It’s all paid for by someone.… And when following that TV channels—liberal TV channels—started criticizing him, he decided that… this was a war against him, and he was going to take the challenge.”6
In the new Russia, the media was privately owned but with the right impetus of billionaires or FOVs (Friends of Vladimir), he could pool resources and buy out the Russian media one TV network and newspaper at a time. Over the next few years, he did just that.
By 2010, American and NATO expansion in Eastern Europe and Ukraine was starting to chafe Putin. In his first term, he had brought Chechnya to heel and installed a reliable warlord as governor. Stability was returning with increased oil and gas exports to Europe, which buoyed the economy but it was not steady. Despite oil and gas making up 50% of the country’s revenue, the average Russian family remained economically depressed. But Putin was very wary of turning to the West for help. Though under Yeltsin, Russia had participated in the Partnership for Peace, a NATO initiative that brought Russia into a tacit alliance with the US, Putin felt the United States was playing heavy-handed politics now that the Soviet Union was gone. It was intervening wherever it wished, such as in Bosnia-Herzegovina in the 1990s. As I mentioned, the decision by George W. Bush to invade a former client state, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, eroded the US/Russia relationship. Putin believed that America should not act unilaterally and challenged the Bush administration’s goals. Many Russian political elites felt the Bush administration had not consulted with Russia on the matter as his father George H. W. Bush had during the first Iraq war.7
Some of Russia’s few remaining allies were being seduced by calls to join the West while others like Ukraine were being used as buffers between the two opposing spheres of influence. Democracy was spreading faster than Putin would like and these nations’ alliances with Washington were sapping the leverage Russia had over them as former Soviet states. A series of cultural revolutions called “Color Revolutions” took former Soviet states quickly out of Moscow’s sphere and into NATO’s. That worried Putin. The first was the Rose Revolution in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia in 2003. A predominantly Orthodox nation, they sought extremely close ties to the United States, which they received. It was quickly followed by the 2004 Orange Revolution in Ukraine. This wave of desire for Western-style freedom and democracy soon spread to the Russian-occupied Baltic countries. In quick succession, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia declared independence from the Russian sphere of influence. As a buffer to future interference from the Kremlin, they all joined both the European Union and NATO in 2004.8 The 2005, Kyrgyzstan’s Tulip Revolution happened, though it didn’t drive as big of a wedge in US-Russia relations as the previous two; Putin’s military influence forced the US to evacuate its base at Manas airport in 2013.9
Putin was particularly concerned about regions in Europe with ethnic Russian or pro-Russian Slavic populations. One group was the Slavs in the former Yugoslav nation of Serbia. They had suffered a humiliating political defeat in a war with NATO that had injected democracy into their political system and had displaced the two Serbian ultranationalist leaders, Slobodan Milosevic and Ratko Mladic. Both would be hunted, captured, and sent to the International Criminal Court in The Hague for genocide trials. The Serb grip on Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Macedonia, and Montenegro had been broken due to NATO, and Moscow did not like it. In 2008, adjacent Kosovo declared independence and was occupied by NATO forces. Once again, to Putin this was a nearly intolerable encroachment by NATO on traditionally Slavic parts of Europe. It was bad enough that Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia had joined NATO and were on his borders with his allies in Belarus and Ukraine. 2008 led to numerous clashes with Russia in “unrecognized breakaway regions” such as South Ossetia and Abkhazia in the Republic of Georgia.10 Though the elected President of Russia in 2008 was Dmitry Medvedev, he was just considered a placeholder by most Russians until the Constitution could be changed for less frequent elections so Putin could return to his post.11 While Medvedev acted as a seat warmer, Putin’s spies in the FSB, GRU, and SVR were exercising his new strategy of Hybrid Warfare, an amalgam of cyber, special operations, and intelligence activities. They were to carry out political warfare missions just short of open war and push back NATO’s influence. Georgia was the first unit on the test bed of hybrid war.
In 2008, Georgia had restarted trade with Abkhazia, the small seaside oblast to their northwest soon after the government of former Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze folded. Eduard Shevardnadze had started making overtures to the United States and NATO. Georgia has always laid claim to Abkhazia and the Georgian government beefed up its military presence there. Abkhazian separatists armed and started to ethnically cleanse Georgians from the region. This led to Georgian forces engaging in combat against them. At the request of the Abkhaz, Russia decided to intervene and assisted their side in the 13-month war that followed. Russian military forces fought alongside the separatists with tanks and aircraft. But during the Russian attack a new dimension was added, Russian intelligence cyber-warriors cut off all of Georgia’s internet access to the world.12 Foreign minister Sergei Lavrov tried to justify the actions of the Kremlin. He claimed they needed to protect ethnic Russians living in South Ossetia and Abkhazia. But it was both from irredentist motives and a warning shot to stop Georgia from joining NATO. Putin believed that the democratic movements that were building in these former Russian states were orchestrated and/or supported by the US via the CIA and nongovernmental organizations. He openly claimed they brought with them NATO troops and cultural changes that Russians found distasteful. America had dedicated itself to pushing liberal democracy worldwide since the end of WWII, and Russia had succumbed to the demand for freedom. Look what it wrought: America’s embrace of ethnic diversity, a gay sexual revolution, and slovenliness had sought to wrench Russia apart. To Putin, America and Europe represented weakness. They had sought to remove from his people the national rigidity in the once strong Soviet Union. Putin’s advisor Gleb Pavlofsky characterized how he was seen as a savior and problem solver for the population once he pushed back against America, “We saw some fluctuations after Putin’s strong actions. We saw that people became pathologically addicted to Putin. In case of any crisis, people would look up to him.”13
The Ukrainian Orange Revolution occurred in 2004 when people demonstrated in the streets at Maidan Square after an election where it was found that the results were rigged in favor of Victor Yanukovych, a pro-Moscow strongman whose campaign was financed with Russian money. Putin funneled an estimated $500 billion into his election campaign and provided “campaign helpers” who “fixed the election.” The election was held again and Yanukovych’s opposition, Viktor Yushchenko, won. However, before he won the runoff election Yushchenko was poisoned by a powerful chemical, TDD, a form of dioxin, and the handsome Ukrainian’s face was horribly disfigured—a warning from Putin. In 2010, Yanukovych ran for president again and won by a slim margin. He continued the corrupt practices of using the state-owned gas company for personal benefit. Russia kept Ukraine within its influence using the price of gas it supplied to Ukraine as incentive to create favorable policies related to Russia. It should be noted that one of Yanukovych’s principal foreign advisors was an American named Paul Manafort.
In 2008, Ukraine had begun discussions with the European Union to create an Association Agreement that would ultimately allow Ukraine a special trade arrangement with the EU. In 2013, under Yanukovych, negotiations intensified with the EU, which had certain requirements prior to proceeding; meanwhile, Putin offered large gas discounts and loans to Ukraine if Yanukovych didn’t sign the deal. In February 2014, when Ukrainians learned the news that Yanukovych dropped the deal, the number of protestors who had been camping out in Maidan Nezalezhnosti Square grew to tens of thousands. After a serious crackdown on protestors that left many bloodied and included government-controlled snipers killing over 100 protestors, Yanukovych agreed to new elections, but the next day he fled to Russia.14
After the fall of Yanukovych, Russia moved troops into East Ukraine and provided heavy weaponry to Russian-supported militants in Luhansk and Donbas; both were ethnically Russian border areas, Russian-armed and agitated for these fighters to seize and separate these regions from Ukraine. After Russian separatist fighting commenced with Ukrainian army forces the US and EU added a second level of sanctions against Moscow. On July 17, 2017, with Moscow’s direct assistance, Russian-backed militants targeted and shot down a Malaysian airliner, an MH-17 that was flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur. The plane crashed and killed 303 passengers and crew. The US and EU added more sanctions against Russia. This was the final straw for Putin. He was determined to seize Crimea from Ukraine, sanctions be damned. Gleb Pavlovsky told American television
“… Putin said, if Ukraine is to join NATO, it will join NATO without the Crimea. And when he came back from a meeting with Bush [in 2008], Putin started developing a plan for taking Crimea. It’s not that he did it personally; the chief of staff was given this task and they developed a plan, and that plan stayed in the safe box for seven years.”15
In 2014, Russia sent Special Forces without insignia to take over governmental administrative buildings in Crimea. Crimea was a peninsula that was part of Ukraine but had an ethnic majority of Russians. Claiming that they were assisting Russians in crisis, Putin held a referendum that violated the Ukraine constitution, and annexed the territory through armed force. The UN did not recognize the annexation of Crimea as Russian territory, and Russia’s actions resulted in the EU and US sanctions against the Russian government.
According to the United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner (UNHCR), as of May 2017, the death toll due to the Crimea conflict is at least 10,090 people. Additionally, over 2,777 civilians have been killed and almost 24,000 people injured. The UNHCR estimates that there are more than 1.6 million people who have been internally displaced. This brought about another round of crippling sanctions from President Obama and the European Union. The game was now set as to which side would prevail. Russia wanted to expand, stop, and get its money back. Obama held NATO, the EU, and its sanctions over their heads like the sword of Damocles. Putin decided to change the nature of the game entirely. If he could not get rid of sanctions he would get rid of the political systems that imposed them.
If a secret cabal was going to be formed in order to push the election of Donald Trump, then Putin’s personal star chamber of close friends would make the judgment on what actions to take. Putin has a small group of advisors, all ex-KGB spies and natives of St. Petersburg known as the Siloviki, but they could be best described as the “Four Horsemen of the KGB.”
The first of Putin’s loyalists is Igor Sechin, the chairman of Rosneft, an oil company owned by the Russian government. In the oil industry, he is called the “Darth Vader of Russian oil.” Putin appointed him in 2004.16 When Putin was deputy mayor of St. Petersburg, Sechin worked as Putin’s Chief of Staff17 and was the leader of the former intelligence officers who surrounded Putin. He served in Africa as a KGB officer and military operations translator in Angola and Mozambique in the 1980s.
In 2011, Sechin secured a deal with then CEO of Exxon now-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson for an agreement between Rosneft and Exxon to drill in the arctic. Tillerson’s Exxon-Mobil had previously been negotiating this deal with Yukos. According to Mikhail Khodorkovsky, it was Sechin who drove the effort to destroy Yukos, which resulted in Khodorkovsky being forced to sell his shares to the Kremlin and flee Russia. He was also accused of having a hand in the arrest of Vladimir Yevtushenko, owner of oil and gas company Bashneft. Like Khodorkovsky, Yevtushenko was arrested and imprisoned until he turned over his shares of Bashneft to the government.
Sechin’s net worth is close to $200 million, but the actual value of his worth is considerably higher thanks to his proximity to Putin. Not one for criticism or public scrutiny, Sechin famously sued Russian media outlets Vedomosti Novaya Gazeta and RBC because they identified that he and his wife Olga luxuriated on a 280-foot, near-$200 million dollar Dutch-built yacht named “St. Princess Olga.” Sechin was awarded $49 million in fines against the paper for “libel.” However, all the newspaper did was publish the owner’s details of the boat.18
The second horseman is Sergei Borisovich Ivanov, who served as Chief of Staff to the Presidential Executive Office from December 2011 to August 2016, a seat previously held by the Russian clandestine foreign intelligence agency (SVR) chief Sergey Naryshkin. Also a former KGB officer, he attended the Red Banner Institute in the early 1980s and spent nearly 20 years in the 3rd Department of the First Main Directorate focused on the UK, Australia, New Zealand, and Scandinavia. This led him to field intelligence assignments in Finland and Kenya. Under the Russian republic, he served in the SVR as first deputy director of the European department. In 1998, he went to the FSB to serve as deputy to then director Vladimir Putin. His duties brought him to lead the department of analysis, forecasts, and strategic planning. When Putin became Prime Minister, he joined as head of the Russian Security Council and as Putin’s envoy to US President George W. Bush.
A longtime Putin loyalist, Ivanov served under several positions of trust. From 2001 to 2007 he served as Minister of Defense. From 2005 to 2007, he filled the role of Deputy Prime Minister, then as First Deputy Prime Minister from 2007 to 2008. In the first Medvedev administration, he returned as Deputy Prime Minister from December 2011 and remained under Putin until 2016. Soon after the hacking of the DNC was exposed, he was replaced by Anton Vaino in August 2016 in an inglorious announcement “Russian President Vladimir Putin has decreed to relieve Ivanov of his duties as head of the Russian presidential administration.”19 It was reported as a firing, but among old KGB officers this may have been a tactical reassignment to show he had nothing to do with the operations. He was subsequently assigned a post for transportation and environmental policy.
The third horseman is former KGB and FSB officer, Viktor Ivanov. He served as the director of the Russian Federal Service for the Control of Narcotics (FSKN) from 2008 until it was dissolved in 2016.20 He served as a KGB and FSB officer from 1977 to 2000. He served as chief of internal affairs and was appointed deputy director of the FSB under Vladimir Putin from April 1999 to January 2000. He was made deputy head of the presidential administration on January 5, 2000, serving until he was made assistant to the president in April 2004. Ivanov was accused of using his power and influence to control Putin’s rivals. This included the effort to take down Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the former oil oligarch in charge of Yukos, the oil and gas exploration company. Khodorkovsky was once named by Forbes as the 16th richest person in the world and was one of the wealthiest oligarchs in Russia until the company was dissolved in 2007.21 Ivanov was also known for ordering the killing of former KGB officer turned Putin critic, Alexander Litvinenko, in which Viktor used a rare poison called polonium-210. Litvinenko had accused Ivanov of being involved with organized crime, notably with the involvement with the Tambovskaya mafia gang led by Vladimir Kumarin. Ivanov was accused of leveraging his power to help the Tambovskaya gang fight their rival, the Malyshevskaya mafia. In a dossier prepared by Litvinenko’s colleague, Yuri Shvets, he says that sources claimed Ivanov was “a hand, which puts things in order.” Shvets said that Ivanov was notably vindictive against anyone who exposed information about him or more importantly, Vladimir Putin.22
Nikolai Patrushev is the fourth of member of the Silovki or horsemen. He is an ex-KGB officer and the successor to Putin at the Russian intelligence agency, the FSB. It was Patrushev who was chief of the FSB when “terrorists” blew up apartments around Russia that killed hundreds and conveniently allowed Putin to easily win the presidency on a counterterrorism platform. It was also his men that were captured planting one of those bombs. He was a chief of dirty tricks and carried out some of the most aggressive punishment campaigns against Putin’s enemies. He ordered the assassination of ex-FSB officer Alexander Litvenenko using the radioactive isotope polonium-210, and was known for killing journalists and opposition members. He was an officer of the hardest KGB school of intelligence. “Death to enemies of Russia” is his apparent motto. He dubbed the Russian intelligence operatives the “new nobility” of the Federation and, along with Putin, takes a devil-may-care attitude toward their active measures in the West. After a decade running the FSB he became the head of the State Security Council, where he advises Putin and gets the intelligence agencies and the oligarchy to do Moscow’s bidding without question.
Putin has used members of security services in almost all key positions in government and the oligarchy since his first term. His trust of ex-KGB and FSB officers would give the new government the feel that the intelligence community was running Russia. Intelligence officers filled key positions in the national reindustrialization and modernization program under Putin. There was no need for political commissars as they ran the ministries and industry. Olga Kryshtanovskaya, director of the Center for Elite Studies at the Russian Academy of Sciences Institute of Sociology, told Radio Free Europe what this advisor board of spies desires most: “They want an authoritarian modernization. They want a strong authoritarian state of the Soviet type without the Soviet idiocy,” said Kryshtanovskaya. “The idiotic Soviet economy and the idiotic Soviet ideology were minuses. All the rest they want to bring back and preserve: a state system without a separation of powers.”
YEVGENIY PRIGOZHIN, ALSO nicknamed “Putin’s Chef,” was a colorful ex-criminal who came to operate a catering company named Concord Management and Consulting, LLC. Concord did in fact provide catering but apparently Putin wanted a loyalist who could operate a non-attributable “off the book” intelligence support agency. Prigozhin started in St. Petersburg as a hot dog seller and grew to open the most exclusive restaurant in the city as well as a fast food chain. His entry into Russian government operations came when he was awarded a $1.6 billion dollar contract to cater food for the Russian army. Putin must have had a soft spot for chefs because his father Spiridon Putin claimed to be a chef for both Lenin and Stalin in the Soviet Union. At some point, the former convict who spent nine years in a Soviet penal colony and grew his company in just 11 years, became involved in multiple covert operations for the Kremlin. His foray into information warfare was when he opened a fake news factory called Kharkiv News Agency. In 2013, Kharkiv was designed to create false pro-Moscow “people” who would hijack website comment pages and disparage the Euromaidan movement, the Ukrainian popular protests to move away from Moscow and toward Western Europe. Putin tapped Prigozhin to set up and operate all of Russia’s off-the-books black operations under the guise of the civilian news company. He would also establish the primary generator of fake news in the West, the secret Russian Federation’s Internet Research Agency (RF-IRA). Prigozhin also runs private security contractors in Syria and Ukraine, and is linked to armed militants in Russian-dominant ethnic regions such as Donbass and Luhansk in Ukraine. These secret contractors have been linked to a secret Russian training base, similar to Blackwater’s former North Carolina facility that has been connected with Russian military intelligence. These same mercenaries would eventually come to grief by daring to attack a US Special Forces base in 2018.
Among Putin’s Russian knights, all were ex-KGB except for the former criminal, turned gray zone dirty tricks man Prigozhin. Putin and his advisors aligned for a mission on the US—a win to be gained by acting as case officers and coaches to Donald J. Trump. Trump was brash, arrogant, and a colorful character. He could be just the man to help lift the crushing sanctions imposed by Obama and Europe. All evidence from the KGB era and FSB collection would show that he was an easily led person. He had an insatiable desire for respect he was not afforded. With the right whispers in the right ears perhaps Moscow could get him to adopt positions that most American Republicans would find odious. NATO was knocking on Russian borders and this had to be stopped. The European Union as a body made Russia’s economic life difficult. If the EU could be disassembled through alluring offers of unilateral trade agreements with Washington, then all the better for Moscow. Donald Trump was a unique character to Russia as well as the world. His TV show The Apprentice was loved in Russia. He had come to Moscow’s 2013 Miss Universe pageant seeking to kiss the ring of Vladimir Putin. Putin would return the favor by making him President of the United States. The Four Horsemen knew he would be an easily handled asset.
Based on my knowledge working in this field for years and the secret intelligence manuals of the KGB, Trump was the kind of quality recruit that spies always sought. Every Russian spy knew that it was the greedy, narcissistic, and self-absorbed conservatives that made for the best assets. Almost invariably, they thought they could handle any situation and rarely looked deeper than their financial pockets. Putin was going to push back against any chance that Hillary Clinton would become president. If that meant having to risk going from a cyber war to a hot war, so be it. Maybe it was time to just introduce a little chaos in America. The American Republican Party had been shifting to the far-right for more than two decades. Many of them supported a strong man and powerful national leader like Vladimir Putin. Putin’s own contacts with the religious right presented him with the opportunity to co-opt an entire party. It was far too tempting to avoid. If it could be done in the United States, it could be done everywhere else in the world—save China. A successful co-option of the American right would lead to an entire wing of supporters operating the most powerful nation on earth and viewing Putin as its closest ally. Russian intelligence would go back and scrub every document and contact about Donald Trump from his overtures made in the late 1980s. If they could pull it off, why not try?
GRIZZLY STEPPE, the operation to destabilize the West and bring Russia to power, would have three legs:
1. Russia would use its intelligence services and Prigozhin’s gray market civilians to steal information, develop Kompromat, and prepare the political propaganda warfare battlefield for intervention in the 2016 election cycle. This planning started in late 2012 and would accelerate in 2013. If Putin’s preferred candidate, Donald Trump, didn’t rise to the top then the activities would be launched to create chaos and allow the Republican Party to savagely attack the likely choice, Hillary Clinton, and hound her for the rest of her administration.
2. Russian oligarchs and diplomats would spread into the field and determine who the frontrunners would be and where Russian influence, money, and friendship would be spread. With major financial decisions such as the Exxon deal in the balance, there would be many Americans more than willing to assist Moscow.
3. Kremlin-aligned Russian citizens and like-minded social groups would spread their influence to see if they could co-opt Americans from the far-right. Groups that were mired on both sides of the Atlantic included the National Rifle Association, biker gangs, and strongman Americans such as actor Steven Seagal, who, along with others, will extol Russia support as being a net positive for any conservative. It would mean delicate but open support for extremist far-right conservatives such as the California and Texas separatist movements, Russian exiles living in the United States, and radicals such as the neo-Nazi movement and Ku Klux Klan, if they could all be brought into a powerful unofficial coalition. They would align America’s cultural losses with the white Christian nationalism they admired in Russia.
To begin his mission, Putin would use diplomats to give his plan the social acceptability for upper class Republican politicians. As all diplomats in the Soviet era were principal points of contact for identification, recruitment, and handoff to the KGB, so were the modern era diplomats for the FSB and SVR. Diplomats would be the first to look for Americans who were of interest to Russia, and who could be exploited by the intelligence services. The top diplomats who have contacts with the Americans would be brought in to ensure a smooth transition. Donald Trump had been fascinated with injecting himself into American diplomacy since 1987. He had met the Russian ambassador and made overtures to coming to Russia to build hotels. His visits during the Soviet era found his affability always increasing when he was in the presence of diplomats. This was to be exploited. Additionally, diplomats were no longer seen as an intelligence threat in America. That oversight would also assist in the recruitment of high-level Americans who could assist without knowing that they were involved in a massive intelligence operation against their own nation. Others, once given promises of access to oil money, wouldn’t care. If the Americans were reliable about any one thing it was that assets and even agents were always easy to buy with Russia’s cash.
The job of the American-wrangling diplomats would be to ensure that they understood Moscow’s position and how it could benefit them personally if they were to make certain of these positions in the Republican Party. The point man for this operation would be the ambassador to the United States, Sergei Kislyak.
Sergei Kislyak served as the Russian Ambassador to the United States from 2008 to 2017. He had served as Deputy Foreign Minister under Sergei Lavrov. In 1977, he had joined the Foreign Ministry and worked his way up through the ranks as a trade representative during the Soviet era. He became the first secretary at the embassy in Washington, DC, and soon after that became a trusted negotiator for nuclear arms control treaties with Ronald Reagan’s administration. His education as a nuclear physicist gave the Americans trust in his ability to understand complex problems. As with any Soviet-era diplomat, he was required to carry out espionage-related duties. John Beryle said, “In modern Washington, he had to do [almost] nothing, as Americans fell all over themselves to become friends with Vladimir.”
If Kislyak was the operative on the ground, then Sergey Lavrov was the heavy above him who was linked directly to Putin. Lavrov was a quiet unassuming man of considerable girth. As Russian Foreign Minister since 2004, he was the principal point of diplomacy for Moscow. However, he had other duties assigned. Lavrov was a lifelong career communist functionary. Born in 1950, he was a child in Stalin’s Soviet Union and became the secretary of his local Komsomol, the Communist Youth League. He studied and graduated from the Moscow State Institute of International Relations in 1972 and was assigned to the Russian Foreign Ministry under Premier Leonid Brezhnev’s regime. In 1994, he was posted to New York as the Russian Federation representative to the United Nations. He earned his stripes during the Obama era as the vocal mouthpiece of Putin’s ire. His diplomatic demeanor is a big fat bulldog, but he can be blunt, direct, brash, and very Russian in countering US positions. In a Newsweek article, John Negroponte, the former US ambassador to the United Nations, referred to Lavrov’s style as, “his two objectives were always the same: veto things for the greater glory of Russia and to take the Americans down whenever possible…”23 This was how Lavrov earned his nicknamed “Mr. No.”
Every intelligence operation would need funding. Putin had just the man: Sergei Gorkov was the head of a Russian state investment bank, Vnesheconombank (VEB). Gorkov graduated in 1994 from the same KGB school of intelligence as Putin. He never went into active field operations, which made many believe that after basic service, he was tasked to become a banker-spy in a NOC position—Non-Official Cover. These were the deepest of spies, as they had no visible ties to their agencies. He worked his way up through Russian banks including the Menatep Financial Group under Mikhail Khodorkovsky. This included the oil giant Yukos. In 2002, he attended the GV Plekhanov Russian Economic Academy. During his time at Menatep-Yukos, he emerged clean from a massive tax scandal that rocked the industry. Khodorkovsky had publicly fought with Putin over corruption and bribes in the government. Putin filed charges against Yukos for tax evasion, fraud, and corruption. Khodorkovsky was arrested and imprisoned for eight years. His oil company assets were nationalized. Gorkov walked away free and became a close ally of Putin.
In 2008, Gorkov worked for Sberbank, Russia’s state-owned bank. Not surprisingly, Sberbank is represented in the US by Marc Kasowitz, President Trump’s attorney, who was named lead attorney in defending the company in a federal civil lawsuit.24 In 2016, Gorkov was appointed to head VEB. The VEB is considered to be Putin’s personal bank for special projects. It is also under US sanctions related to Russia’s invasion and annexation of Crimea and for its reputation as “The Bank of Spies.” Many Russian intelligence activities were funded from their coffers.
Putin’s team of wranglers would support the operations that were necessary to stop the encroachment of the United States and particularly that odious Democratic frontrunner, Hillary Clinton. The days of second fiddle to Obama and his incessant talk of spreading democracy would end in 2016 one way or another, and the sanctions would be released. Russia would not respond to America’s shoves. Putin did have a vision to destabilize the West. It was a long-ball plan. It would happen when he, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, chose. When the plan was executed he would Make Russia Great Again.