Fear, Honor, and Ambition: Mr. Putin’s Campaign to Kill the West’s Cow
The more powerful enemy can be vanquished only by exerting the utmost effort, and most thoroughly, carefully, attentively, and skillfully making use without fail of every, even the smallest, “rift” among the enemies.
—V. I. LENIN
GENEVA IS the ideal city for a confidential diplomatic meeting. It is easy to blend in there. The city hosts more than three thousand official meetings annually, attended by more than two hundred thousand delegates. Government airplanes flow in and out of the airport. Convoys of black limousines and SUVs crisscross the city. Officials of friendly and not-so-friendly nations arrive at each other’s consulates, shake hands, and sit across from one another at long conference tables. At the U.S. Mission to the United Nations and other international organizations, my meeting in February 2018 with Nikolai Patrushev, the secretary of the Security Council of Russia, fell into the not-so-friendly category.
Patrushev asked to meet me soon after I became national security advisor in early 2017. I agreed. I thought it important to open a routine channel of communication between the White House and the Kremlin below the level of Presidents Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump. Russia is, of course, a nuclear power, and a strained relationship is better than no relationship, if for no other purpose than to prevent misunderstandings that might increase the chance of war. There was much to discuss.
By 2017, it was clear that Russia was pursuing an aggressive strategy to subvert the United States and other Western democracies. Russian cyber attacks and information warfare campaigns directed against European elections and the 2016 U.S. presidential election were just one part of a multifaceted effort to exploit rifts in European and American society through propaganda, disinformation, and political subversion. As social media began to polarize the United States and other Western societies and pit communities against each other, Russian agents conducted cyber attacks and released sensitive information. Although Russian leaders routinely denied responsibility, the Kremlin was reportedly directing a sophisticated campaign.1 Russia also used cyber attacks and malicious cyber intrusions to create vulnerabilities in critical infrastructure, such as in the energy sector. For example, by early 2018, the United States knew that Russia had conducted the NotPetya cyber attack that first infected Ukraine’s government agencies, energy companies, metro systems, and banks.2 It spread later to Europe, Asia, and the Americas, costing ten billion dollars in losses and damages around the world.3
Having studied the evolution of Russia new-generation warfare (RNGW) for years, I looked forward to talking with Patrushev to understand better the motivations behind this pernicious form of aggression that combined military, political, economic, cyber, and informational means. The day after our meeting with Patrushev, I gave a speech at the Munich Security Conference pledging that “the United States will expose and act against those who use cyberspace, social media, and other means to advance campaigns of disinformation, subversion and espionage.” During my year as national security advisor, we had worked hard to impose costs on Russia. I hoped to convince Patrushev of the dangers associated with Russia’s continued implementation of a strategy that pushed our two nations along a path toward worsening relations and potential conflict.
The potential for conflict with Russia was growing. The civil war in Syria was a particular concern. In March 2019, Russian general Valery Gerasimov cited the Syrian Civil War as a successful example of Russian intervention to “defend and advance national interests beyond the borders of Russia.”4 The war was a humanitarian catastrophe. Russia had supported the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad since the beginning of the conflict in 2011. In August 2013, the Syrian regime used poison gas to kill more than fourteen hundred innocent civilians, including hundreds of children, but it was not its first use of chemical weapons, nor would it be the last. From December 2012 to August 2014, the Syrian regime used them against civilians at least fourteen times. Despite President Barack Obama’s declaration in 2012 that the use of these heinous weapons to murder civilians was a red line, the United States did not respond. President Putin likely concluded that America would not react to aggression. By the end of spring 2014, an emboldened Putin had annexed Crimea and invaded Eastern Ukraine. And then, in September 2015, Russia intervened directly in the Syrian Civil War to save Assad’s murderous regime. After another massacre with nerve agents at Khan Shaykhun in April 2017, President Trump ordered the U.S. military to strike Syrian facilities and aircraft with fifty-nine cruise missiles.5 By 2018, Russian-supported forces fighting for Assad’s regime were converging with American-supported forces fighting the terrorist group ISIS. When I met Patrushev, the danger of a direct clash between Russians and Americans on the ground in Syria was not only more likely—it had already happened.6
On February 7, 2018, the week prior to the Geneva meeting, Russian mercenaries and other pro-Assad forces reinforced with tanks and artillery attacked U.S. forces and the Kurdish and Arab militiamen they were advising, in northeastern Syria. The mercenaries were from the company owned by Yevgeny Prigozhin, a Russian oligarch known as “Putin’s cook,” a man indicted by U.S. Special Counsel Robert Mueller and sanctioned by the Trump administration for his role in sowing disinformation during the 2016 U.S. presidential election.7 It was an ill-conceived and poorly executed attack. U.S. forces and their Syrian Democratic Forces partners killed more than two hundred Russian mercenaries while suffering no casualties.8 Eager to suppress negative news prior to the forthcoming presidential election, the Kremlin lied about the number of casualties suffered. Putin wanted to win the election by the widest possible margin. News of a costly defeat brought on by Russia’s need to finance reconstruction of a country it had helped destroy would not help achieve this. The ultimate purpose of the Russian-led attack was to seize control of an old Conoco oil plant that promised to generate revenue and defray the costs of the war and reconstruction. No battle like that between Russians and Americans had ever occurred, even during the height of the Cold War.
A year had passed since Patrushev suggested we meet. I had delayed in deference to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who wanted to make a personal assessment of Russia’s intentions first. Tillerson had hoped that his preexisting relationship with President Putin and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, which he developed as chief executive officer of ExxonMobil, might deliver some improvement in U.S.-Russian relations. He wanted to offer Putin an “off ramp” in Ukraine and Syria based on the assumption that those interventions, including U.S. and European economic sanctions imposed on Russia, might entice Lavrov to negotiate an eventual Russian withdrawal. In Lavrov’s case, it was not clear that he could deliver even if the possibility for improved relations existed.
Lavrov’s approach to foreign policy was old-Soviet style, reflexively anti-Western and suspicious of new initiatives. Lavrov invariably accused the United States and the West of instigating the 2003 Rose Revolution in Georgia, the 2004 Orange Revolution in Ukraine, and the 2005 Tulip Revolution in Kyrgyzstan, as well as large-scale protests in Russia in 2011. It seemed that Lavrov had neither the independence of mind to come up with solutions nor the latitude to make basic decisions. By early 2018, it was clear that Tillerson’s valiant efforts to find areas of cooperation with Russia had foundered. It was past time to establish a direct channel of communication between the White House and the Kremlin, other than the occasional phone calls and meetings between Trump and Putin. Since Putin had centralized power in an unprecedented way, even for a country with a long history of authoritarianism, it was important to have a relationship with someone close to Putin himself. Patrushev, Putin’s right-hand man, who occupied a position that is the Russian equivalent of national security advisor, was the ideal candidate.9
No one on our team believed that the Geneva meeting would solve our problems with Russia. Events of the following month confirmed that belief. Soon after our meeting, Russia used a banned nerve agent in an attempted murder of a former intelligence official in Salisbury, United Kingdom, and Putin made a chest-thumping speech in which he announced new nuclear weapons. We hoped, however, that this new channel of communication between the White House and the Kremlin might lay a foundation for some bilateral diplomatic, military, and intelligence engagement with Russia across both governments. Discussions between the U.S. National Security Council staff and the Secretariat of the Security Council of Russia had existed under prior administrations. We could foster a common understanding of each nation’s interests and an awareness of where those interests diverged or converged. The two countries might then manage their differences and find some areas for cooperation. Mapping our interests might be a first step toward avoiding costly competitions or dangerous confrontations like the recent clash in Syria. At the very least, we might prepare more fully for the president’s meetings with Putin to secure favorable outcomes.
I traveled with Dr. Fiona Hill, the National Security Council’s senior director for Europe and Russia, and Mr. Joe Wang, director for Russia. During our long flight on the “big blue plane,” as we referred to the air force Boeing 757, we discussed Vladimir Putin, Russian policy, and the man whom I would soon meet, Nikolai Patrushev. Fiona is one of the foremost experts on Russia under Putin. In her book Mr. Putin, coauthored with Clifford Gaddy, she observed that “Putin thinks, plans, and acts strategically.” She also observed, however, that “for Putin, strategic planning is contingency planning. There is no step-by-step blueprint.” Our other travel companion, Joe, a bright young State Department civil service officer of ten years, judged that prospects for a near-term improvement in U.S.-Russian relations were dim mainly due to Mr. Putin’s need for an external foe to prevent internal opposition. This need to direct the Russian people’s attention away from internal problems drove an increasingly aggressive foreign policy, while the need to generate support for that foreign policy amplified rhetoric designed to conjure the external enemy as a menace. In his March 2018 speech announcing new nuclear weapons, Putin even showed “automated videos depicting” nuclear warheads descending toward the state of Florida.
On the plane, I recalled what I knew about Patrushev. He and Putin had a lot in common. Both entered the KGB in the 1970s. Patrushev succeeded Putin as director of the FSB from 1999 to 2008. Putin, Patrushev, and other prominent former KGB officers who moved into influential Kremlin positions after the 2000 Russian presidential elections believed that they were the ultimate patriots. Putin trusted and relied on Patrushev. Both men understood that, especially in Russia, knowledge is power. Their base of knowledge allowed them to form a protection racket that propelled Putin to the pinnacle of power and kept him there for more than two decades. The future Russian president’s climb began in the late 1990s, when he was head of the GKU, the government’s inspectorate charged with uncovering fraud and corruption in government and federal agencies. He used that position to build dossiers on Russian oligarchs, powerful businessmen who had accumulated great wealth during the era of Russian privatization in the 1990s. He detailed their finances and business transactions. Putin had dirt on everyone. Because the rule of law had broken down in Russia, the oligarchs regarded him as an arbiter whose persuasive power derived from holding them hostage. Putin prevented infighting that might have collapsed the corrupt system and crushed all of them. When he became the head of the FSB in July 1998, he named Patrushev as head of a new Directorate of Economic Security. He and Patrushev then used their skills as KGB case officers to collect and monopolize information. In exchange for respecting the oligarchs’ property and allowing them to amass wealth, Putin expected them to act as his agents, use their business activity to promote Russian interests abroad, and comply with direction from him, their case officer, and protector.10
Fiona, Joe, and I landed in Geneva in the early morning of February 16, 2018. Ted Allegra, an experienced diplomat and gracious host who was the chargé d’affaires ad interim of the U.S. Mission in Geneva, greeted us. We held an informative video telephone conference with the U.S. ambassador to Russia, Jon Huntsman. Huntsman, a wise statesman, politician, and businessman who had served previously as governor of Utah, U.S. ambassador to Singapore, and, most recently, U.S. ambassador to China, worked daily in a difficult and hostile environment. The ambassador was supportive of the Patrushev meeting and the opening of a channel between Patrushev’s Secretariat and the NSC staff. He described how Russian harassment of embassy officials had intensified in recent months. But he took a long view of U.S.-Russian relations and felt that we should lay the groundwork for improved relations. I met Mr. Patrushev outside the U.S. consulate. As he exited the limousine, he evinced the self-assurance one might expect from an old KGB official. Two of his senior staff, a deputy secretary of his Security Council and a senior aide responsible for the U.S.-Russia relationship, along with a staff officer serving as a note taker, accompanied him.
After introductions, I offered coffee to the Patrushev delegation—none of them touched the light refreshments we had on hand—and we sat down across from one another. I welcomed the delegation and, after mentioning my interest in Russian history and literature, reviewed the purpose of the meeting and the sustained dialogue that was meant to follow it: to develop mutual understanding of our interests. I asked Mr. Patrushev to begin. He spoke for the better part of an hour. His version of the Kremlin’s view of the world revolved around three main points. First, he portrayed Russia’s annexation of Crimea and invasion of Ukraine as defensive efforts to protect ethnic Russian populations from what he described as Ukrainian far-right extremists and U.S. and European attempts to engineer a pro-European Union and, therefore, an anti-Russian government in Kiev. Second, he described the expansion of NATO countries and the rotation of NATO forces into areas that Russia considered traditional spheres of influence as threatening. Third, he argued that the United States, its allies, and its partners had increased the terrorist threat across the greater Middle East through ill-conceived interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya.11 Finally, perhaps in anticipation of my comments, he flatly denied attacking the 2016 U.S. presidential election or attempting to subvert Western democracies. None of what Patrushev said was surprising, and I did not want to waste time rebutting his assertions or denials. Instead, I endeavored to elevate the discussion to generate mutual understanding of our vital interests in four areas.
First, I noted that both our countries were interested in the prevention of a direct military conflict. Russia’s annexation of Crimea and invasion of eastern Ukraine was particularly dangerous to peace, not only because it was the first time since World War II that borders within Europe were changed by force, but also because Russia’s continued use of unconventional forces in Ukraine or elsewhere in Europe could escalate.12 One of the historical parallels to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was Austria-Hungary’s invasion of Serbia in 1914, which triggered World War I. World War I was a powerful analogy because it was a war in which none of the participants would have engaged had they known the price they would pay in treasure and, especially, blood. Many people wanted war, but no one got the war he or she wanted. Moscow and Washington both needed to acknowledge the risk that the next Russian attempt might trigger a military confrontation, even if Russia intended to act below the threshold of what might elicit a military response from NATO. I wanted Patrushev to see the U.S. and European Union sanctions on Russia for invading Ukraine and annexing Crimea as more than punitive; they were meant to deter Russia from future actions that could lead to a destructive war. I thought that Patrushev might agree that we were in a dangerous, transitional period. Communicating the United States’ vital interests and our determination to counter Russian aggression would disabuse Kremlin leaders of any belief that they could exploit perceived American complacency and wage new-generation warfare without risk.
I also wanted Patrushev to understand that the United States was awake to the danger of Putin’s playbook and, in particular, RNGW. Russia’s actions in Crimea and Ukraine were analogous to a long-standing Russian military strategy known as maskirovka, or the use of tactical deception and disguise. Like maskirovka, Putin’s playbook combined disinformation with deniability. The new playbook added disruptive technologies and the use of cyberspace to enable conventional and unconventional military forces. And, where possible, the Kremlin fostered economic dependencies to coerce weak states and deter a response to aggression. The parallels to previous dangerous periods, not only in the nineteenth but particularly in the twentieth century, were striking. In recent years, Russia had acted aggressively, counting on American complacency based on the self-delusion that great power competition was a relic of the past. Consider Secretary of State John Kerry’s comments: “You just don’t in the twenty-first century behave in nineteenth-century fashion by invading another country on completely trumped-up pretext.”13 I thought it important to let Patrushev know that we were prepared to compete and would no longer be absent from the arena.
Second, both our nations sought to preserve our sovereignty or the ability to shape our relationships abroad and govern ourselves at home. Russia’s sustained campaign of disinformation, propaganda, and political subversion was a direct threat to our sovereignty and that of our allies. I suggested that it was in the Kremlin’s interest to stop this activity because Russian actions would unite Americans and other Western societies against Russia. Their recent efforts to influence election outcomes had failed or backfired. For example, Russian disinformation aimed against Emmanuel Macron in France during the 2017 presidential election increased support for the candidate and probably helped Macron win the presidency. Another example of Russia’s heavy-handed tactics backfiring was the failed October 2016 coup in Montenegro that intended to prevent that country’s accession to NATO. Russia’s meddling actually accelerated Montenegro’s admission to NATO and its application for membership in the European Union. Finally, Russian efforts to convince the Trump administration to lift economic sanctions in 2017 failed as the administration instead sanctioned more than one hundred individuals and companies in response to Russia’s continued occupation of Crimea and aggression in Eastern Ukraine. More sanctions would follow under the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act.14 During my conversation with Patrushev, I joked that Russia’s efforts to divide Americans and meddle in our election made the imposition of severe sanctions on Russia the only subject that united Congress. In fact, the first major foreign policy legislation to emerge from the U.S. Congress after President Trump took office was a sanctions bill on Russia, the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act, which passed in the Senate in a 98–2 vote after flying through the House by a 419–3 margin.15 At this, Patrushev cracked a smile, perhaps to acknowledge that we both were very much aware of Russia’s subversive activities.
Third, both nations must protect our people from jihadist terrorist organizations. That is why it did not seem to be in Russia’s long-term interests to provide weapons to the Taliban in Afghanistan or to spread disinformation that the United States supported terrorist groups. Such actions strengthened organizations that posed a common threat to both our countries. Moreover, Russia’s support for Iran, Iran’s proxy militias, and Bashar al-Assad’s forces in their brutal campaign in Syria not only perpetuated the humanitarian and refugee crisis, but also fueled a broader sectarian conflict that strengthened jihadist terrorists like ISIS and Al-Qaeda. These terrorist organizations draw strength from the fear that Iranian-backed Shia militias generate among Sunni communities, allowing them to portray themselves as patrons and protectors of those communities. I hoped that Patrushev might see that Russia’s support for Iran only reinforced jihadist terrorist recruitment and support among Sunni Muslim populations.
Finally, I raised the subject of how Russia seemed to act reflexively against the United States even when cooperation was in its interests. I used the case of Russia’s circumvention of UN sanctions against North Korea as an example. In addition to the direct threat of North Korean nuclear missiles to Russia itself, a nuclear-armed North Korea might lead other neighboring countries like Japan to conclude that they needed their own nuclear weapons. Moreover, North Korea had never developed a weapon that it did not try to sell. It had already tried to help Syria develop an Iranian-financed nuclear program in an effort that was only thwarted by a September 2007 Israeli strike on the nuclear reactor under construction near Dayr al-Zawr, Syria. Ten North Korean scientists were reportedly killed in the strike.16 What if North Korea sold nuclear weapons to terrorist organizations? What nation would be safe?
Patrushev listened but showed no discernible reaction. After a break, we agreed to charge our teams with mapping our interests and preparing materials for presentation to Presidents Trump and Putin in advance of their next meeting. I departed Geneva convinced of the importance of our work. I realized, however, that relations were unlikely to improve due to Putin’s motivations, his objectives, and the strategy he was pursuing.
When he assumed the presidency at the turn of the century, Putin worked to strengthen the system that had put him there. His overarching goal was to restore Russia’s status as a great power. He would be patient, estimating that Russia would need fifteen years to build strength before it was ready to challenge the West.17 Indeed, approximately fifteen years later, he annexed Crimea, invaded Ukraine, and intervened in the Syrian Civil War.
OUR EFFORT to map Russian and U.S. interests as a way of managing our relationship addressed only one dimension of the challenge before us. That is because Putin, Patrushev, and their colleagues in the Kremlin are motivated as much by emotion as by calculations of interest. As the Athenian historian and general Thucydides concluded twenty-five hundred years ago, conflict is driven by fear and honor as well as interest.18 President Putin and those, like Patrushev, whom he brought with him into the Kremlin were shaken by the collapse of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (aka USSR, aka Soviet Union) and feared the possibility of a “color revolution” in Russia. They were proud men whose sense of honor had been insulted by the West’s victory in the Cold War and whose livelihoods depended on the Soviet system. Putin described the breakup of the empire and the end of Soviet rule in Russia as “a major geopolitical disaster of the century,” one that not only was a “genuine drama” for those who suddenly found themselves outside Russia, but also caused problems that “infected Russia itself.”19 The breakup resulted in the loss of half of the former Soviet population and almost a quarter of its territory. At the height of Soviet dominance, Russian influence extended as far west in Europe as East Berlin. Since the USSR’s collapse, Russia had lost control of nearly all of Eastern Europe. Ethnic Russians were scattered across the newly independent successor states of the USSR, such as Ukraine, Georgia, and Estonia. Russians who remember Soviet greatness, including Putin, Patrushev, and their KGB colleagues, watched as their former vassal states, unshackled from Communist authoritarian control, liberalized and eagerly joined other free and open societies under the European Union and North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
The Soviet Union had a truly global reach, penetrating into Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Throughout Communist states, Russians were often looked up to as big brothers in an ideological war—or at least that was how many Russians imagined their Communist brethren viewed them. But then men like Putin and Patrushev saw their mighty empire, one of two global superpowers, fall to the status of a struggling regional power—and it stung. Once Putin achieved the presidency, he set about restoring Russia’s lost grandeur, a process that is still under way. Above all, Putin fears an internal threat to the kleptocratic political order he has built with the oligarchs and his cronies in the KGB. To allay fear and restore honor, he has consolidated his base of power internally and gone on the offensive against Europe and the United States.
By the time Putin became president, the cheerfulness associated with the prospect of transforming post-Soviet Russia into a successful state with a booming economy had given way to gloom. In the 1990s, Russian efforts to transition to a market economy proved unable to overcome the complete collapse of the Communist system. Greedy apparatchiks, members of the Soviet bureaucratic political apparatus, were empowered in the wake of that collapse. Because market reforms threatened their grip on power, Russian politicians led a backlash against free-market reformers. The failure to either establish an adequate legal framework or to eliminate Soviet-era bureaucracy made the transition to a market economy even more difficult. The final straw was the financial crisis of 1998, when the Russian ruble lost two thirds of its value. The failure of market reforms and the rise of the oligarchs created a system that was not only fragile, but also ideal for Putin and those who retained political control through the post-Soviet transition to consolidate their power. As journalist (and later Canadian foreign minister) Chrystia Freeland observed, Russia was “an ex-KGB officer’s paradise.” Under Boris Yeltsin’s government, the Siloviki (hard-line functionaries of the Soviet-era Ministry of the Interior, the Soviet Army, and the KGB) comprised only 4 percent of the government. Under Putin, it grew to 58.3 percent. Fear of losing control as the post-Soviet economy and social structure were collapsing propelled the Siloviki into power. And Putin, Patrushev, and their Siloviki colleagues wanted Russia to be feared again.20
Putin, Patrushev, and the Siloviki did not view U.S. assistance in the post-Soviet period as it was intended. The United States wanted to assist Russia with the traumatic transition and reduce dangers and complications. Under the Freedom Support Act, the United States aimed to increase security by dismantling nuclear weapons through the Cooperative Threat Reduction program, provide food aid, and support Russia’s transition with $2.7 billion in appropriated funds and technical assistance. However, Putin and the Siloviki viewed U.S. assistance as an affront to Russian sovereignty and an effort to exploit Russian weakness. In their telling, their former enemy lorded its Cold War victory over Russian heads, insisting on reforms that left their nation in economic meltdown. In a 2015 speech to leaders of the FSB, Putin stated that “Western special services continue their attempts at using public, nongovernmental and politicized organizations to pursue their own objectives, primarily to discredit the authorities and destabilize the internal situation in Russia.”21
Putin made a strong debut as president. Recognizing the connection between foreign policy and popularity at home, he ferociously prosecuted a war in Chechnya against separatists and terrorists who had conducted a series of attacks against Russian civilians. That war, which caused an estimated twenty-five thousand civilian deaths between 1999 and 2002, inspired only praise in Russia and weak statements of disapproval from the West. But Putin’s fears and suspicions of unrest and opposition grew as he witnessed the so-called color revolutions in Georgia in 2003, in Ukraine in 2003 and 2004, and in Kyrgyzstan in 2005, which toppled undemocratic regimes and led to the election of new presidents. He vowed that protests like those would never hit Russia: “For us, this is a lesson and a warning, and we’ll do everything so it never happens in Russia.” But they did. His anxiety may have peaked in 2012–2013, during widespread protests sparked by a rigged election in which he “won” 63.6 percent of the vote, according to Russian media.22 Protests returned in 2017 and 2018, concerning corruption and an increase in the retirement age. Then, in the summer of 2019, massive protests erupted in Moscow following the removal of opposition candidates from the ballot in the Moscow city Duma elections.
Although the color revolutions and the protests in Moscow were based on the populations’ desire for freedom and improved governance, Putin saw U.S. and European hands behind them.23 Fear and the sense of lost honor were mutually reinforcing and would continue to drive his foreign ambition. To protect himself from internal opposition and restore Russia to greatness, Putin revived Russia’s nationalist mission. He portrays Russia as unafraid and designs his foreign policy to intimidate neighbors and subvert Western democracies.
RNGW BECAME Putin’s playbook for surviving while weakening competitors. Russia does not have the power to compete directly with the United States and its allies in Europe and Asia. By all measures, the combined economies of the United States and European nations dwarf Russia’s economy. The European Union and the United States had a combined gross domestic product (GDP) of $36.5 trillion in 2017; Russia’s GDP was a meager $1.5 trillion. Russia’s GDP per capita in 2017 was approximately $10,750, roughly one sixth of the U.S. GDP per capita and ranking below far less powerful countries such as Chile, Hungary, and Uruguay. Russia’s economy is also woefully undiversified, with oil and gas products comprising 59 percent of all exports, leaving it vulnerable to shifting oil prices in a year that saw a 48.1 percent decline in crude oil prices. That same year, in 2014, the Russian ruble declined 45.2 percent relative to the U.S. dollar. Though the Russian economy improved under Putin, with real income doubling between 1999 and 2006 due in large measure to rising oil prices, Putin’s creation of institutions and a system to maintain his exclusive control impeded economic growth and modernization. Sanctions in response to Russian aggression did not help. But corruption is the greatest impediment to investment and economic growth; Russia ranks 135th globally on the Corruption Perceptions Index.24
Nor are demographic trends in Russia’s favor. In the past three decades, due to declining fertility rates, Russia’s population dropped from 148 million in 1991 to 144 million in 2018. In addition to a fall in the birth rate, despite government incentives like payments to mothers and childcare services, declining migration also contributed to the population drop. Russia’s population is expected to fall to 132.7 million by 2050. Health is also poor due to risky behaviors such as excessive drinking and smoking. In 2019, life expectancy in Russia was seventy-two years, with a one-in-four chance of a Russian man dying before the age of fifty-five. This is equivalent to life expectancy in developing nations such as Nepal and Bhutan.25
But, consistent with what they did as KGB case officers, Putin and Patrushev seemed less interested in building Russia up than in tearing other nations apart. In an old Russian joke, a farmer has only one cow and hates his neighbor because he has two. A sorcerer offers to grant the envious farmer a single wish, anything he wants. “Kill one of my neighbor’s cows!” he demands.26 We might think of President Putin as the farmer with only one cow. To kill his neighbors’ cows, Putin employs sophisticated strategies designed to achieve objectives below the threshold that might elicit a concerted response from either the targeted state or others, such as the NATO alliance.
Rather than build Russia up to a position of predominance, Putin wants to drag others down, weaken rival states, and unravel alliance networks that give those states strategic advantages. In a 2013 article, Valery Gerasimov, the chief of Russia’s General Staff (the Russian equivalent of the U.S. chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff), argued that “the very ‘rules of war’ have changed.” He added that “non-military means of achieving political and strategic goals have grown and, in many cases, exceeded the power of force of weapons in their effectiveness [sic].”27 These comments became known as the “Gerasimov Doctrine.” Whether under the moniker of Russia new-generation warfare, the Gerasimov Doctrine, or hybrid warfare, Putin’s playbook combines disinformation and deniability with the use of disruptive technologies to target states’ strengths and exploit their weaknesses. It also entails cultivating economic dependencies, especially on Russian-supplied energy, while brandishing and using improved, unconventional, conventional, and nuclear military capabilities. With this playbook, Putin aims to kill his neighbor’s cow and restore Russia’s relative power.
TO UNDERSTAND the sophistication of the Kremlin’s strategy, it is worth examining more closely one of the issues I raised with Patrushev: Russian interference in other nation’s domestic politics. Efforts in 2016 to subvert democracy in Ukraine, Montenegro, and the United States demonstrated the range of actions available in Putin’s playbook.
Russian propaganda has been described as a “firehose of falsehood” that spews rapid, continuous, and repetitive disinformation.28 Typically, successful disinformation and propaganda campaigns prioritize consistency in messaging. Russia under Putin, however, abandoned consistency because the aim was not to make audiences believe something new but to question just about everything they heard; the purpose was to disrupt, divide, and weaken societies that Putin saw as competitors. The Kremlin uses many tools to fulfill that purpose, such as direct financial support of fringe political parties at the opposite ends of the political spectrum. Russian disinformation is designed to shake citizens’ belief in their common identity and in their democratic principles, institutions, and processes by manipulating social media, planting false stories, and creating false personas. Russia also uses media arms such as the television network RT (formerly Russia Today) and the news agency Sputnik to broadcast a steady stream of disinformation. RT has a $300 million annual budget for broadcasting propaganda that looks like legitimate news in multiple languages. The network has more subscribers on YouTube than Fox News, CBS News, or NBC News.29 RT and other Kremlin-sponsored media emphasize conspiracy theories designed to raise doubts over the reliability of real reporting as well as the virtue and effectiveness of democratic governance. Furthermore, as part of a number of influence mechanisms known as “active measures,” even Russian leaders often make patently false statements to reinforce these disinformation efforts. The repetitive nature of these narratives is intended to portray a certain point of view as a popular perception. Additionally, the targets of this information are no longer limited to audiences at home and in the West, but are expanding into regions such as Africa, in an effort to establish Russia as a global superpower by fostering wide influence.30
Corrupting elections is only one part of the broader effort to kill the cow of confidence in democratic processes and institutions. After multiple attempts at engineering election outcomes across a decade, the Kremlin and its intelligence arms, the Main Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces (GRU) and the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), improved and modified their objectives and approach. In 2004, Russian support for Viktor Yanukovych’s presidential candidacy in Ukraine not only consisted of over three hundred million dollars in funding but also probably included the poisoning of his main opponent, Viktor Yushchenko. In a runoff election between the two candidates, efforts to assist Yanukovych included ballot stuffing and the busing of voters from one polling station to another to cast multiple ballots. The GRU and SVR succeeded in throwing the election to Yanukovych, but their brazen actions jump-started what became known as the Orange Revolution. Ukrainians protested against the rigged elections. The Ukrainian Supreme Court ruled the runoff results invalid, and Yushchenko, still in pain and permanently disfigured from the poisoning, was elected in a new runoff election held under the watchful eyes of more than thirteen thousand foreign observers.31
Five years later, in 2009, the Kremlin succeeded in engineering another Pyrrhic victory in Moldova for an anti-European Union party.32 That party could not form a government, however, and a European-friendly party won in fresh elections later that year. Still, the GRU kept refining its methods. Returning to Ukraine in 2010, Russia finally succeeded in helping Viktor Yanukovych secure a victory in the Ukrainian presidential election. But in 2014, it failed to get him reelected, despite a massive effort that combined election influence operations with cyber warfare (including coordinated cyber attacks to fake vote totals and infect election servers).33 Amid protests and with the country on the brink of a civil war, Yanukovych was ousted, a move the Kremlin denounced as a “coup.” Following that, the pro-European Union candidate Petro Poroshenko won in a special election. After 2015, Russia expanded attacks on democratic elections in NATO and European Union countries and, in 2016, the U.S. presidential election. Although the Kremlin often fell short of the outcomes it wanted, efforts to subvert democratic processes in the United Kingdom, Germany, the Netherlands, Montenegro, Italy, Bulgaria, Austria, Spain, Malta, France, and the Czech Republic contributed to its principal goals of weakening citizens’ confidence and polarizing their societies.34
The Kremlin has learned to tailor disinformation campaigns to the target country. In smaller countries less able to resist Russian efforts, such as Montenegro, a country of 640,000 people on the Adriatic Sea, the Kremlin made audacious attempts to determine an election outcome. In large, more distant countries like the United States, Russia prioritized undermining confidence in democratic institutions and processes. Disinformation and sabotage in Montenegro and in the United States, both in 2016, reveal how the Kremlin customizes its campaigns based on opportunities, risks, and the ability of the target country to resist and retaliate.
“The smaller we are, the more vulnerable we are,” Montenegrin president Milo Dukanovic observed. In 2016, the Kremlin applied a broad range of new-generation warfare capabilities to prevent Montenegro from joining NATO and the European Union. Montenegro would be the last piece completing the jigsaw puzzle representing NATO’s control of the Adriatic coast. In the run-up to the October parliamentary election, Russian state entities directed funds to the parties challenging Mr. Dukanovic’s candidacy for president. Russia spread disinformation on social media and conducted cyber attacks against government and news websites. Russian agents felt especially emboldened in Montenegro, a small country with a large Slavic ethnic minority that tends to feel a kinship with ethnic Russians. If the election results did not go the Kremlin’s way, Russian agents were ready to initiate a violent coup d’état, assassinate Dukanovic, and install a pro-Russia government. On Election Day, Dukanovic was the projected winner.35
The coup failed. The night before, Montenegrin authorities arrested twenty Serbian and Montenegrin citizens. After the arrests, Serbia’s prime minister, Aleksandar Vucic, revealed that Serbian law enforcement had uncovered the plot and passed the information on to the Montenegrin authorities.36 Vucic soon received a visit from an angry Nikolai Patrushev. Serbia was supposed to support Russia’s efforts in the Balkans. In 2017, the Montenegrin High Court tried fourteen suspects, including two members of the GRU in absentia. Russia’s heavy-handed approach failed to determine the outcome of the elections or inhibit Montenegro’s application to NATO. Even though opposition parties sympathetic to Russia burned NATO flags, Montenegro’s parliament voted 46–0 to become the twenty-ninth member of the alliance, joining officially in June 2017. Montenegro applied for membership in the European Union not long afterward. On May 9, 2019, the court found all fourteen co-conspirators, including the two GRU agents, guilty of plotting the coup.37
Russian interference continued to push west, as reports surfaced about Russian agents using social media to influence the June 2016 referendum on the United Kingdom’s exit from the European Union. Most analysts concluded that Russia also tried to influence the outcome of the 2016 presidential election in the United States, but recognizing limitations on its ability to do so, it focused primarily on polarizing America’s polity and undermining confidence in democratic principles, institutions, and processes. It succeeded.
Conditions in America were ripe for polarization. Many Americans were frustrated with politicians who did not seem to understand them and the problems they faced. Transformations in the global economy had left many without jobs. Though there were nearly nine million more jobs in the United States in 2016 than in 2007, the gains were not evenly distributed. Many white Americans, 700,000 of whom lost jobs over those nine years, were upset about their economic outlook. Furthermore, some remained impoverished in the wake of the housing and financial crises of 2008–2009. Others were burdened with student debt. Many voters were weary of protracted and indecisive wars overseas or disappointed that government remedies for problems, such as access to health care, had not delivered as advertised. People in neighborhoods depopulated after the departure of manufacturing jobs were vulnerable to crime and drug addiction, particularly a growing opioid crisis. Some neighborhoods became “food deserts” as businesses closed and people lost access to affordable and nutritious food.*38 Those left behind were angry over increasing income disparity and other inequities in services such as education. There was a crisis of confidence in America, and Russia took full advantage.
Donald Trump in the Republican Party and Bernie Sanders in the Democratic Party appealed to a frustrated electorate looking for iconoclastic candidates. Sanders, a self-proclaimed Democratic Socialist, had nontraditional views. The most progressive candidate in the race, he advocated for universal health care, tax hikes for the rich, free college education, and climate change legislation. His views appealed to young voters disillusioned by their work prospects and mounting student debt. In the 2016 presidential primaries, Sanders captured 29 percent more votes among those under the age of thirty than either Trump or Hillary Clinton.39
Trump was a threat to the Republican Party establishment just as Sanders was to the Democratic Party establishment. While many were appalled by his rhetoric and personal behavior, other voters found in Trump what they thought the country needed: an antiestablishment candidate with wholly unconventional views who spoke his mind. They liked that he was “capable of saying anything to anyone at any time and anywhere.”40 Colleen Kelley, an associate professor of rhetoric, observed that a democratic socialist from Vermont and a billionaire from New York City both took advantage of disenfranchised voters who were tired of establishment politicians whom they regarded as corrupt, out of touch, and incompetent.
Democratic and Republican political party establishments opposed the two unconventional candidates. As the general election began, many Republicans, distraught over Trump’s nomination as their presidential candidate, signed “Never Trump” letters. At the Republican convention, “Never Trump” delegates made a failed attempt to revise the convention’s rules package to block Trump’s nomination. Similarly, party leadership of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) undermined Sanders to smooth the path for former First Lady, senator, and secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton to receive the nomination. Members of the DNC highlighted less favorable aspects of Sanders, such as his religious beliefs, affinity for socialist policies, and soft spot for Communist dictators. Divisions were apparent not only between the Republican and Democratic Parties, but also within them, and the Kremlin was quick to exploit those divisions.
Two years earlier, the Kremlin had intensified its use of the internet to widen political and social discord in the United States. It had learned from previous efforts, and by 2016, conditions were ideal for its refined cyber-enabled influence campaigns. The Internet Research Agency (IRA), a front organization for the GRU, turned the social network ecosystem invented in the United States against the American people, their democratic system, and their common identity. The IRA used Facebook (including its Instagram), Twitter, Google (including its YouTube, G+, Gmail, and Google Voice), Reddit, Tumblr, Medium, Vine, and Meetup to post content or support false personas. Russian agents even used music apps and games like Pokémon Go to reinforce themes and messages. The IRA maximized the potential of Facebook’s features, including Ads, Pages, Events, Messenger, and even Stickers. Cumulatively, it reached 126 million people on Facebook, posted 10.4 million tweets on Twitter, uploaded more than 1,000 videos to YouTube, and connected with more than 20 million users on Instagram.41
The IRA was persistent and sophisticated. It used vulnerabilities in the U.S. information ecosystem to exploit fissures in society. Facebook and Instagram were perfect platforms for persistent messaging to amplify divisive issues. Agents cultivated strong ties within social media groups with content designed to gain approval. They also inserted content intended to drive groups to extreme positions, sometimes pitting members against one another or against members of other groups. Some IRA content cultivated support for U.S. policy favorable to Russia, such as the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Syria or Afghanistan. Russian agents recruited witting and unwitting American accomplices. The IRA and its abettors used Twitter to bend reactions to current events in divisive ways, using “click farms” to manufacture popularity and draw attention to extreme messages. On critical topics, the IRA created “media mirages,” interlinked ecosystems that surround audiences with a cacophony of manipulated content. The GRU used digital marketing best practices, evolving the page logos and typography over time.42
Russian manipulation was effective because of social media companies’ business models, their blind avarice, and their narrow focus on functionality without due consideration for how their platform could be used for nefarious purposes. Because tech companies prioritize holding users’ attention to expose them to more ads, the companies’ algorithms do not prioritize truth or accuracy, but instead help disseminate fake news and disinformation. The algorithms that determine the presentation of content in social media encourage further polarization and extreme views. For example, YouTube algorithms, in suggesting which videos to watch next, guide users toward more extreme and polarizing content. Those who interact on network platforms self-segregate into homogenous groups that share beliefs on contentious issues such as gun control, climate change, and immigration. Liberals interact with liberals and conservatives interact with conservatives. The most divisive and emotional topics amplify different rather than common views. The internet and social media thus provided the GRU with a low-cost, easy way to divide and weaken America from within.43
Russian efforts to discredit Clinton in favor of her Democratic rival Sanders and in favor of the candidacy of Donald Trump were connected to the overall objective of weakening American society through racial, religious, and political polarization. While Russian disinformation showed a clear preference for Trump and a concerted effort to discredit Hillary Clinton, the majority of the content focused on socially divisive issues such as immigration, gun control, and race. The IRA’s main effort was to foment racial division, which it accomplished by amplifying white militia content while creating content for black audiences that highlighted the mistreatment of black Americans by police. The IRA began producing videos toward that end in September 2015. Of 1,107 videos across 17 channels, most content, an astounding 1,063 videos across 10 channels, was related to Black Lives Matter and police brutality.44
The IRA even tried to use race and anti-immigration sentiment to support fringe groups advocating for Texas and California to secede from the United States, using the same playbook Russian agents had used in support of the Brexit movement (which culminated in the 2020 departure of Britain from the European Union). It is likely that the GRU pulled that playbook out of KGB archives. In 1928, the Soviet-led Comintern (Communist International), an organization founded to spread Communist revolution globally, planned to recruit southern blacks to advocate for “self-determination in the Black Belt.” By 1930, the Comintern had initiated an operation to encourage a separate black state in the South that would expand the Communist revolution to North America.45
To conceal itself, the IRA used false identities co-opted from existing organization names and set them up as offshoots of real groups. These included United Muslims of America and Black Guns Matter. The Kremlin went to great lengths to achieve its goals, even recruiting Americans to propagate Russian-backed social media messages and participate in political rallies in the physical world. When the DNC announced that it had been hacked, the IRA created the online persona Guccifer 2.0, a “lone Romanian hacker,” to publish the stolen documents on a Word-Press blog. To conceal its identity, the IRA used a network of computers located outside Russia, including in the United States, and paid the bills using cryptocurrency. To make it difficult to identify hostile pages, it often used portions of existing memes or local stories and modified the content to suit its purposes.46
Diminishing trust in authoritative sources of information, such as American mainstream media, made cyber-enabled manipulation easier for the GRU. The IRA attacked the professionalism and integrity of journalists across all community groups while portraying WikiLeaks (an organization that through anonymous sources publishes news leaks) positively. While candidate Trump further diminished confidence in the mainstream media with cries of “fake news,” the Russians set up actual fake news sites. For example, at least 109 IRA Twitter accounts masqueraded as news organizations. The IRA used conspiracy theories to diminish further confidence in information. Conspiracies on Facebook and Instagram covered topics such as Hillary Clinton’s health and the DNC hacks. One extreme example, dubbed Pizzagate, was a fictitious story of a pedophile ring supposedly run out of a Washington, DC, pizzeria by Hillary Clinton and her campaign chairman John Podesta. Initiated and fueled by conspiracy theorists posting it on social media sites, the ridiculous story gained traction, forcing the New York Times and the Washington Post to debunk it. The GRU promoted other fantastical stories across both left- and right-leaning sites. Yet, the mainstream media often aided Russian disinformation even as reporters tried to debunk conspiracy theories: falsehoods reported tended to be falsehoods believed.47
Fomenting division and diminishing confidence in sources of information complemented the GRU attack on the integrity of the U.S. electoral process. The systems that the IRA attacked proved as vulnerable to physical manipulation as the American polity was to emotional polarization. In March and April 2016, twelve GRU officers hacked the Clinton presidential campaign, the Democratic National Committee (DNC), and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC). It was easy. The GRU monitored the computers of DCCC and DNC employees, implanted malicious computer code (“malware”), and extracted emails and other documents. The malware allowed Russian agents to track employees’ computer activity, steal passwords, and maintain access to the network. When the DCCC and DNC identified the attack in May 2016, the GRU employed countermeasures to avoid detection and remain on the network.48
A week prior to the Democratic National Convention in July 2016, the GRU used two cutouts, DCLeaks and WikiLeaks, to release 19,254 emails and 8,034 attachments. Much of the content was embarrassing and exposed the DNC’s effort to bolster Clinton’s candidacy and suppress Sanders’s popularity, forcing the resignation of DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz and other top officials. IRA-generated Facebook and Instagram posts amplified fears of voter fraud, claiming that certain states were helping Secretary Clinton win. One site stated that civil war was preferable to an unfair election. Others falsely reported that militias were deploying to polling stations to prevent fraud and called on others to join them. False reports claimed that “illegals” were overrepresented in voter polls in Texas and elsewhere, or were voting multiple times with Democratic Party assistance. The page Being Patriotic posted a hotline for tips about possible cases of voter fraud. It seems that the GRU, like most Americans, did not expect Donald Trump to win; it was prepared to foment acrimony and division through claims that the election had been rigged in Hillary Clinton’s favor. After the surprising result on Election Day, the right-targeted voter fraud narrative shifted to suggestions that President Trump would have won the popular vote had it not been for voter fraud. Trump boosted those claims, asserting that millions of people had voted illegally.49
After the election, Russian disinformation efforts intensified, with the IRA continuing to target right- and left-leaning groups. Posts and tweets advocated for the elimination of the Electoral College. Many called for in-the-streets action and marches to protest the election outcome. The marches allowed Russian agents to cross over from cyberspace to the physical world, as they had before the election in Houston, with dueling protests fielded by IRA’s weaponization of social media. In the post-election period, agents attempted to discredit individuals and institutions that advocated for strong responses to Russian aggression in Europe and the Middle East and its waging of cyber-enabled information warfare in the United States. Their attacks against conservative think tanks and their personal attacks against me and the National Security Council staff heightened in the late summer of 2017. The post-election attacks employed many of the same tactics used against Hillary Clinton in the 2016 campaign. GRU efforts to discredit Special Counsel Robert Mueller spanned almost the entire time of his investigation into Russia’s attack on the 2016 election.
Both campaigns exercised poor judgment that made it easier for the Kremlin to undermine confidence in the electoral process. For example, when Russian intelligence endeavored to compromise candidate Trump and those around him through potentially lucrative real estate deals, Trump’s company attempted to negotiate for a Trump Tower Moscow, offering to give Putin a $50 million penthouse in the proposed tower. The Kremlin undoubtedly knew that the proposal put Trump at risk of breaking the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. When Russian agents approached the Trump campaign claiming to have incriminating evidence on Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump Jr. responded, “I love it.”50 The agents never delivered the promised “dirt.” And the Trump campaign’s hiring of the political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica to influence potential voters with microtargeted messages based on the data of more than 87 million Facebook users created the perception that social media–based tools had skewed the election results.51
The Clinton campaign also reinforced the GRU’s efforts, working through cutouts to obtain incriminating information on Trump from Russian intelligence agents. Clinton lawyer Marc Elias hired opposition research firm Fusion GPS to produce the “Steele dossier,” named for the retired British MI6 officer Christopher Steele, whom Fusion GPS had hired to solicit allegations of Trump improprieties. Steele used undisclosed Russian intelligence sources to compile a fantastic report that was published ten days prior to President Trump’s inauguration.
Thus, regardless of the outcome of the election, the Kremlin was well positioned to undermine not only Americans’ faith in their country’s democratic processes and institutions, but also public confidence in the man or woman who would win the election. Partisan politics magnified the effects of the Kremlin’s campaign and perpetuated America’s vulnerability to Putin’s playbook. Yet the GRU gave equal opportunity to both parties to step into the trap of kompromat, the use of compromising material for negative publicity or extortion—or in this case, to diminish further Americans’ confidence in their leaders and in democratic processes and institutions.
The U.S. government and both presidential campaigns were not prepared for Russian efforts to compromise the candidates and the democratic process. But they should have been. David Cohen, former deputy director of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, observed, “We’ve seen Russian interference in Europe for the past ten years. We saw identical techniques: stolen information, misinformation, all of that, in a variety of countries . . . and one of the things we did not do as well as we should have was sound the alarm. . . . We didn’t do a good enough job of better preparing ourselves, of saying, ‘The Russians did that there, so there is no reason to think they’re not going to do the same thing here.’”52
DENIABILITY IS critical to Russia’s disinformation and subversion. As evidence mounted of its attack on the U.S. election and its sustained effort to polarize American society, Putin stated that “the Russian state has never interfered and is not going to interfere into internal American affairs, including election process.”53 Russian denials often provide opportunities for willful ignorance among those disinclined to confront Russian actions. The Clinton and Trump campaigns found it convenient to turn a blind eye to Russian subversion. The DNC was embarrassed by the documents that revealed their effort to tip the balance in favor of Hillary Clinton during the primary and did not want to draw more attention to their actions. And candidate Trump exploited Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s use of a personal, unclassified email account to access and pass highly classified material as a focal point of criticism. The Trump campaign even encouraged more Russian hacking. At a rally in Doral, Florida, in July 2016, candidate Trump called on the Russians to find the thirty thousand missing personal emails that Clinton had deleted during her tenure as secretary of state. As for the Obama administration, after it became aware of the hacking, it did not respond in a concerted manner. Later, President Trump, because he conflated Russia’s attacks on the election with the legitimacy of its outcome, seemed to take Vladimir Putin at his word when the former KGB case officer denied it. As late as July 2018, President Trump continued to cast doubt on the universal finding of all U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies that Russia had in fact interfered in American elections in 2016. On July 16, 2018, President Trump stated at a news conference with President Putin in Helsinki, Finland, “They said they think it’s Russia; I have President Putin, he just said it’s not Russia. I will say this: I don’t see any reason why it would be.”54
Disinformation enables Russian deniability. The Kremlin manipulates the news to confuse and sow doubt. Peter Pomerantsev, a former Russian television producer, identified the goal as the creation of an environment in which “people begin giving up on the facts.”55 A particularly egregious example came after British intelligence identified the two Russian agents who had attempted to murder Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, with a nerve agent in Salisbury, placing more than 140 people at risk, including children. Later, a British woman died after she handled the container the nerve agent was in. Russia claimed that the two agents were in Salisbury to visit cathedrals, and insinuated that they were a gay couple touring the United Kingdom. Russian officials propagated dozens of lies and conspiracy theories about the Skripal attempted murder through media and Twitter accounts. Indeed, the Washington Post likened the Kremlin’s effort to “an elaborate fog machine to make the initial crime disappear.” Stories blamed a toxic spill, Ukrainian activists, CIA agents, British prime minister Theresa May, and Skripal himself.56
President Trump authorized strong action in response to the Skripal poisoning, including the expulsion of sixty undeclared Russian intelligence officers and the closing of the Russian consulate in San Francisco, California.57 He did so after a concerted effort across the U.S. government to understand the facts and coordinate a global response with the United Kingdom and other allies. I spent many hours on the phone trying to get some reluctant allies and partners to take resolute action. Although roughly twenty countries joined the United States and the United Kingdom in condemning the attack and expelling at least some Russian agents (153 were expelled worldwide), some allies’ actions were disappointing. The Kremlin’s disinformation efforts had been at least partially successful. The response to the attempted murder of Skripal revealed that the European consensus that emerged after the shock of Russia’s annexation of Crimea and invasion of Ukraine was wearing off. Even in the face of an egregious attack using a banned nerve agent that could have caused hundreds of casualties in a NATO member country, some U.S. allies in Europe were reluctant to take strong action against Putin. They rationalized the attack as score settling with a defector. Putin’s playbook had worn down their resolve. When I told President Trump about the small numbers of agents expelled from Germany and France, he was incensed; he felt that European nations should take more responsibility for their own security. He was right.
Denial enabled by disinformation allows Putin to get away with murder, literally. Russia has issued implausible denials to its role in crimes ranging from the attempted murder and murder of individuals to mass murder. In 2006, Russian agents murdered defector Alexander Litvinenko in London with polonium, a radioactive material that causes a slow and painful death. In 2009, Sergei Magnitsky, a Russian tax accountant who knew too much about President Putin and the oligarchs who surround him, was murdered in a Moscow prison. In 2015, Boris Nemtsov, an opposition politician, was murdered on a bridge just outside the Kremlin. And in 2017, Denis Voronenkov, an exiled critic of Mr. Putin’s and a former member of the Duma, the lower house of the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation, was gunned down in Kiev, Ukraine. The Kremlin murdered journalists as well as politicians. Notably, in 2006, Anna Politkovskaya, who was famous for her coverage of the Chechen wars.58
The Kremlin denied the Assad regime’s undeniable use of chemical weapons and indiscriminate bombing to murder innocents in Syria. Yet, not only did it deny these events, but the Kremlin also produced and spread disinformation about them. When Assad’s forces murdered more than seventy innocents with nerve agents on April 7, 2018, even before the attack occurred, Russia began to claim that there was intelligence of a potential chemical attack planned by Islamist militant groups. Later, the Kremlin claimed the attack was a false-flag event designed to blame Russia.59
Russia never took responsibility for murdering 298 people in the shootdown of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over Ukraine on July 17, 2014. Photos and video of the missile’s route captured on social media, evidence of the missile launches on social media, and evidence at the wreckage site all proved incontrovertible, but when asked about Russia’s role, Putin responded, “Which plane are you talking about?”60
Disinformation creates confusion about what to believe. Deniability, in the Kremlin case, fosters a sense of helplessness and incites fear concerning what Russia might do to target the United States and other free and open societies. As the philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell observed, those “who live in fear are already three parts dead.” Putin’s playbook generates a destructive cycle. Fear consumes compassion and contributes to the polarization and weakening of the targeted society.
RNGW IS designed to accomplish the Kremlin’s objectives short of major armed conflict. But conventional military strength is important to intimidate weak neighbors and deter U.S. and NATO forces from responding to Russian aggression. Here Putin faces a challenge: Russia does not have the defense budget to compete with the United States and its NATO allies, either in advanced conventional weaponry or in the ability to conduct integrated land, aerospace, maritime, and cyberspace operations—what the U.S. military calls joint warfighting. But just as the internet and social media provided opportunities to revise maskirovka (tactical deception and disguise), Russia has integrated disruptive technologies into its military to exploit perceived U.S. and NATO vulnerabilities.
Since he took office, Putin led an ambitious program of military reform that integrated new technologies, improved discipline, and reorganized the force. There was much work to do. What was supposed to be a short, easy war to reestablish Russian control over Chechen territory lasted from December 1994 to August 1996, ending with the Russian Army’s humiliating withdrawal. The Chechen War was a nightmare for poorly trained, underfed, ill-equipped, and undisciplined Russian soldiers, who sometimes surrendered to the enemy without a fight or sold arms to the Chechens for food or drugs and alcohol.61
As it undertook massive reforms in the 2000s, the Russian military did not try to match U.S. and NATO capabilities. Instead of exquisite systems, Russia invested in cheaper combinations of air defense, offensive cyber and electronic warfare, drones, long-range missiles, and massive artillery. This approach seemed to work. During the annexation of Crimea and the invasion of Ukraine in 2014, the Russian military established air supremacy from the ground with sophisticated air defenses rather than expensive stealth fighter jets.
A reforming Russian military was emboldened under Putin. In the years following the invasion of Ukraine, Russia routinely held large military exercises in the Baltic Sea and on its most western border, staring down NATO, and joint exercises with the Chinese in far eastern Russia. Russian naval vessels and aircraft conducted dangerous intercepts of U.S., allied, and partner aircraft and vessels, including in the Nordic-Baltic region. An annual large-scale exercise named Zapad (“West”) drew its name from strategic military exercises designed to demonstrate the military strength of the Warsaw Pact along the Soviet Union’s “Western Front” during the Cold War. As with RNGW, Russia’s conventional force prowess, shown through these maneuvers and the positioning of nuclear-capable missiles, was meant to have a psychological effect on NATO.
Still, given U.S. conventional military tactics and Russia’s limited defense budget, traditional military reform was insufficient to incite fear and restore Russian national prestige. Putin was determined to expand Russia’s nuclear arsenal and announce a nuclear doctrine designed to intimidate NATO countries and weaken the alliance. Its doctrine of “escalation control” called for the threat of early use of a nuclear strike on Europe to pose a dilemma for the United States: risk a nuclear holocaust or sue for peace on terms favorable to Russia. In developing the capability to enact its doctrine, the Kremlin violated the 1988 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty.
While threatening nuclear war, Russia demonstrated how its offensive cyber capabilities threatened the United States and its allies. Prior to its attack on the 2016 U.S. election, Russia conducted malicious cyber intrusions targeting U.S. critical infrastructure.62 The Kremlin had already revealed its capabilities overseas. On Christmas Eve 2015, the lights went out in Eastern Ukraine, affecting more than two hundred thousand people. It was the first time that a cyber attack switched off a nation’s power grid. As the Russians were turning off the lights in Ukraine and hacking the Democratic National Committee, they inserted malicious code into American water and electric systems, as they had attempted to do earlier at U.S. nuclear power plants.63 Like the nuclear strategy of escalation control, Russian cyber threats to infrastructure are meant to intimidate and deter the United States and other NATO allies from responding to Russian aggression against a member of the alliance.
ECONOMIC COERCION through dependence on Russian energy is another powerful tool of Putin’s, as it augments the threats from Russia’s conventional, nuclear, and cyber capabilities. The countries that gained independence from Soviet control after the demise of the Warsaw Pact and the dissolution of the Soviet Union are particularly vulnerable because they inherited a transportation and energy infrastructure that depends on Moscow. Moscow demonstrated in Belarus, Ukraine, Armenia, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan that it will restrict access to energy supplies or use energy pricing tactics to coerce target countries. In 2010, Russia forced Ukraine to grant a twenty-five-year extension of the lease to its Black Sea Fleet’s base in Crimea, one of the bases Russia used to annex Crimea by force years later. Moscow used economic coercion to convince Kyrgyzstan and Armenia to join the Eurasian Economic Union, an organization designed to compete with the European Union and extend Russia’s influence over former Soviet territory.64
Even Germany made itself vulnerable through policy choices that eliminated alternative sources to Russian natural gas. Shameless corruption played a role. In 2005, during his final months as chancellor, Gerhard Schroeder gained approval for a multibillion-dollar Nord Stream pipeline project with the Russian state gas company, Gazprom, to transport gas from Russia to Germany. Soon after he left office, Schroeder became chairman of the pipeline shareholders’ committee. In April 2017, Nord Stream II AG, the developer of the pipeline, signed a deal for a second pipeline under the Baltic Sea called Nord Stream 2 that will double the amount of gas being transported from Russia to Germany through the Baltic Sea. The pipeline not only deepens Germany’s dependence, but also punishes Ukraine, which will lose up to $2 billion a year in transit fees, or 1.5 percent of its GDP. The pipeline also denies transit fees to other NATO and European Union members, including Poland, Slovakia, and Hungary. The Polish government deemed the pipeline a “hybrid weapon” born of Moscow and intended to divide the European Union and NATO.65 In early 2020, the U.S. Congress placed sanctions on companies completing Nord Stream 2 in an effort to “stop construction.” It was too little too late, however, as the pipeline was nearing completion. The sanctions succeeded mainly in souring relations between the United States and Germany.
GERMANY IS the most prosperous and powerful nation in Europe, which makes it a particularly attractive target for Putin—for weakening Europe is the priority in Putin’s effort to break apart the post–Cold War order and reestablish Russia as a great power. Indeed, the continent remains the principal battleground for RNGW’s combination of disinformation, denial, disruptive technology, and dependence to sow division and exhaust the will of European nations, the EU, and NATO.
Writing about the period between the world wars, the diplomat and historian George Kennan observed that Soviet diplomacy depended not on the “strength of their ideas,” but on “the weakness of the Western community itself: from the spiritual exhaustion of the Western people.”66 Although the challenges Europe faced in the 2000s paled in comparison to the trauma of the First World War, they were sufficient to generate spiritual weariness if not spiritual exhaustion. At the end of the Cold War, Europe celebrated freedom from Soviet domination and Communist totalitarianism, but as newly freed peoples confronted practical problems such as inefficient agriculture and tired industries, solidarity based in newfound freedom slowly gave way to economic concerns and a tendency to take their rights for granted.67
To diminish confidence in the European Union, the Kremlin exploited events, magnifying crises such as the global financial crisis of 2008; the European financial crisis in 2015 that strained the euro; the refugee crisis from 2011 onward associated with the civil war in Syria and violence from Afghanistan to North Africa to the Maghreb; Britain’s referendum to exit the European Union in 2016; the gilets jaunes (“yellow vest”) movement in France in 2019, and the rise over several years of nativist, secessionist, and Euroskeptic political parties in Spain, Hungary, Italy, and Poland.68 The weakening of Europe began well before the turn of this century, however. Economic internationalism of the 1990s affected Europe as well as the United States. Factories moved to cheap labor markets, and many citizens were left behind by the transforming global economy and growing income inequality.69 As the promise of free-market capitalism at the end of the Cold War confronted the realities of lost jobs and income disparity, skepticism of the European Union grew. The Union expanded rapidly, growing from twelve countries to twenty-eight between 1995 and 2013. As the introduction of the euro moved monetary policy away from the states and EU bureaucracy and regulations grew, so did sentiment across the Continent that “faceless” men and women in Brussels, including the 732 elected members of the European Parliament, were usurping national sovereignty. Skepticism of the European Parliament and unbounded globalization gave rise to populist parties that polarized European politics and created opportunities for Russia to weaken NATO and the European Union.
Strained transatlantic relations between the United States and Europe created still more opportunities for Russia. The Atlantic alliance was adrift for much of the post–Cold War era. Although Europe supported the United States after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, many Europeans opposed the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and opposition to that war grew in ensuing years. After President Barack Obama continued to withdraw the bulk of U.S. forces from Europe and violence spread across the greater Middle East, centered on the rise of ISIS and the civil war in Syria, some Europeans blamed U.S. precipitous disengagement for emboldening Russia and exacerbating crises. When President Obama declared his desire to pivot toward Asia, many Europeans concluded that he was turning his back on seven decades of transatlantic partnership. Then, in 2016, Republican candidate for president Donald Trump professed profound skepticism about NATO, suggesting that the alliance was “obsolete.” He described the European Union as a competitor rather than a union of allies and like-minded nations that shared democratic principles. After President Trump took office in January 2017, his revival of the “America First” slogan seemed to herald disengagement from Europe and the abandonment of American leadership of the postwar international order. President Trump’s sudden decision in October 2019 to withdraw U.S. special operations forces from northeastern Syria surprised NATO allies and put their forces in a precarious position. Those allies saw the lack of consultation as an example of diminished U.S. commitment to NATO and Europe. Soon thereafter, French president Emmanuel Macron described the European Union as on “the edge of a precipice,” noting that the combination of Great Britain’s impending departure from the Union and the EU’s internal divisions could make it “disappear geopolitically.” He also partly blamed Trump for the Union’s struggles, saying that the U.S. president “doesn’t share our idea of the European project.” At the end of 2019, after starting a new diplomatic initiative with Russia, Macron stated that NATO was experiencing “brain death” and asked rhetorically how Turkey could remain a member of the alliance and still purchase sophisticated defense systems from Russia.70
Putin, of course, took advantage of tensions among European nations and between the United States and Europe. Indeed, in the first two decades of the twenty-first century, he has been undeterred due to a lack of unity among these allies, to diminished confidence among them, and to their failure to impose costs on the Kremlin sufficient to force Putin to abandon his playbook. Putin’s perception of Europe as weak, combined with the unenforced red line in Syria in 2013, almost certainly contributed to his 2014 decision to annex Crimea and invade Eastern Ukraine. Perceived European impotence and American reluctance probably contributed to other Kremlin decisions, such as attacking elections in Europe and the United States, the Skripal poisoning in the United Kingdom, and support for Assad’s use of chemical weapons to commit mass murder in Syria. Despite sanctions on Putin’s regime and the Russian defense industry, Nord Stream 2 was a reminder of how Russia could extend its influence in Europe despite egregious violations of international law and infringements on European sovereignty. While subverting Europe politically, Russia was rewarded financially and gained coercive economic influence.
Russia’s appearance of strength, however, belied significant weaknesses that cut across its economy, demographics, public health, and social services. As former U.S. secretary of state Madeleine Albright has observed, Putin’s Russia played a poor hand well.71 The United States and its allies, particularly in Europe, played a much better hand poorly. Or, as the Stanford professor of international relations Kathryn Stoner pointed out to me, understanding the game that is being played is more important than the face value of the cards a player holds. Understanding the Kremlin’s strategy and the fear, sense of lost honor, and ambitions that drove its actions is the first step in parrying Putin’s playbook and protecting our free and open societies.