Battlegrounds

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