TOP
Joshua Yaffa
Chapters
The FRONTLINE Interviews
Joshua Yaffa
The New Yorker
Joshua Yaffa is an American journalist based in Moscow. A fellow at New America, Yaffa is a regular contributor to The New Yorker. His March 2017 story, "Trump, Putin, and the New Cold War," co-authored with David Remnick and Evan Osnos, examined the motivations for Russia's interference – and what lies ahead for U.S.-Russia relations.
This is the transcript of an interview with FRONTLINE's Michael Kirk conducted on July 13, 2017. It has been edited in parts for clarity and length.
This interview appears in:
Text Interview:
Highlight text to share it
Putin's Vision for Russia in his First Term
We've all heard the famous story of Bush looking in his [Putin's] eyes and seeing his soul in Slovenia when they first meet.But during the beginning year or two of Putin's presidency, what do you think he wants from America?
I think the first few years of Putin's presidency he was, on the one hand, just trying to put back together the state at home in Russia, a state that he thought, not incorrectly, had largely fallen apart and lost its authority in the ’90s.He was most consumed with a kind of state-gathering or state-building project at home.As concerns relations with the West, he was under no illusion about Russia's relative power to the United States at that moment, of course a much weaker, fragile or vulnerable power compared to the United States, and he believed that there could be a way to, if not enter into alliance exactly with the United States, then at least to find areas of cooperation, common ground, that might have the cascading effect of building up Russia's own power; of helping him with his state-building project at home; helping restore Russia's reach, influence and presence on the international stage by attaching to, essentially, the world’s largest superpower on some particular projects or initiatives.
He especially really believed in this narrative that took shape right after the Sept. 11 attacks of a global fight against terrorism, the Bush administration’s global war on terrorism.He really thought in the early days of that campaign and in the heightened interest in Washington and around the world in fighting terrorism that Russia might have a role to play in that, and it might be a way in to cooperation with the United States, and the United States might genuinely be interested in Russia's capacity and Russia's participation in that fight.
In the way we hear the story, as people look back over the Yeltsin years, one of the things that Putin would want is to rekindle respect in the world for Russia and, of course for him, from the United States, which has certainly had its way—the United States, the EU, NATO had their way with Russia, and he wanted, I gather, a place at the table?
Absolutely.I think he was under no false illusions about Russia's relative power in, say, 2001 to the United States, but he also thought with the Bush administration and with his interest in fighting terrorism wherever it may occur around the globe, that that would give Russia a seat at the table, a way to participate as an equal with the United States in various policy initiatives and operations around the world.
Of course, what happens?Does the United States warmly embrace Vladimir Putin and Russia?
… I think what Putin didn’t quite understand or anticipate is the degree to which he was intent on creating a new relationship with the United States, trying to enter into a partnership, at least on the terrorism front, with the United States; that Washington was neither here nor there about that partnership.[Washington] had very different priorities, very different objectives.Sure, they weren't opposed to working with Russia in certain areas, but it’s not as if in 2001 and 2002 the main overarching strategic policy objective of the United States was improving relations with Russia.There were very different objectives relating with terrorism [and] soon [with] Iraq, and Russia could not fit into those plans as the demands of the day and the demands of the immediate tactical objective required.
But for Putin, that left him ultimately feeling disrespected, on the outs, Russia's interests not really taken into consideration.The United States could work with Russia when it liked, but wasn’t really committed to building a better relationship with Russia; happy to disrespect, as it were, Russia's interests in Central Asia by putting a heavy U.S. military footprint there—all these things that made Putin very quickly feel like, from his perspective, whereas he was interested in extending a hand to Washington and to the Bush administration, that they would take it when it suited them, reject it when it didn't, and go on doing exactly what they liked around the world, not really taking into account Russia's own interests, Russia's "sphere of influence," something that Putin believed in and believes in in the former Soviet states.
I think very quickly, Putin soured on what he thought was an overture of friendship and cooperation to the United States that wasn't really fully accepted.
Putin Consolidates Power in his Second Term
… Which brings us to the moment of the Munich speech in 2007 where he really, at least according to people like Toria Nuland and others that we talked to, they had head-snapping moments when he stands up there and says what he says.Tell me the story of what he’s doing in Munich at that time.
The Munich speech is a time where he is very purposely and knowingly announcing to the West that he is making a historic break, as it were, with trying to accommodate Russia to Western interests, to try and hold out hope that this kind of alliance of sorts with the United States and the West more broadly that had been discussed starting in 2001 was still something Russia was holding out hope for, aiming for.I think the fact that it was a head-snapping speech was by design.It was meant to be a very abrupt and public and sharp breach with a period in which Russia was trying to make itself essentially an aspirational partner to Western states, that its ultimate goal was to find areas of cooperation and common interests with the West.1And even if that wasn't working in the particular moment, even if there were difficulties day by day, that was still what all parties assumed was the ultimate strategic end point that Putin ultimately wanted to get to even if it wasn’t able to happen on this particular day or that particular day.
1
I think the Munich speech was an occasion where Putin announced to the world that that's no longer actually the strategic end point, something by then that was not necessarily a surprise.The era of Russia trying to cooperate with or accommodate itself to American and Western interests had effectively ended long before that.But this was the kind of official announcement, as it were, of that period coming to an end.
So we've talked about him going in and what he wanted at the beginning with Bush.We find ourselves in 2007 with him declaring that's failed and that he’s going in another direction.On a personal level, gauge for me the arc of Vladimir Putin, the president, the person, that puts him on that stage in 2007?
… I think that Putin's years as president can be divided into discrete stages.Of course they bleed into one another, but nonetheless we can talk about Putin at various phases of his rule.I think the first phase, starting in 2000 with his ascendancy to the presidency, was about restoring the basic functioning and authority of the Russian state.He saw a state that in the ‘90s had lost its authority, in some cases lost its basic ability to govern or at least administer the affairs of government, as it were.
His first years in office were about gathering back authority and power for the central state apparatus, building what ultimately became known as the vertical of power, a system of government administration that answered to him and to him alone all the way down to the local level, the smallest affairs of regional politics.
The second phase was about … creating a de facto agreement, unspoken, with the Russian people in which they would give up certain political and civic freedoms in exchange for expanding economic freedoms, as it were, coming in the form of increasing GDP, higher wages, a consumer wonderland blossoming in Moscow and other cities, the likes of which the Russian people had never seen in all of their history.
For many years, that tacit agreement with the Russian people held.On the international arena during that time, … Putin's agenda was to restore a sense of historical justice as he saw it, undo the wrongs that were visited upon Russia in a time of what Putin saw as asymmetrical, ahistoric weakness.There was a period in the late ’80s during perestroika in the final years of the Soviet Union, the ’90s after the Soviet collapse, when, as Putin saw it, Russia was ahistorically weak, weak in a way that was not reflective of Russia's long historical role, historical birthright, almost, in geopolitics, and that the West, the United States in particular, took advantage of Russia in this ultimately short-lived period, as Putin saw it, of weakness.
As Russia emerged from that period of weakness, thanks largely to the rise in global oil prices which gave Putin the economic freedom to build his authority at home and to begin to project power abroad, he wanted to embark on a project of essentially undoing those wrongs and restoring to Russia what he saw as its historic geopolitical birthright.
The Munich speech was also an announcement of that project, that Russia, having gotten back on its feet economically, geopolitically, militarily with some of those oil profits being funneled into a military modernization program, that Russia was back, as it were, and the United States, countries in Europe, should be under no illusion or make no mistake about Russia under Putin's intent to win back for itself the position and stature that Putin sees as naturally appropriate for Russia given its history, its size and so on.
Putin Tests the Waters in Estonia and Georgia
One month later, speaking of projection of military power, or some form of projection of power, in Estonia, the president gets up and turns on his computer, checks his bank balance, whatever it is—you'll tell me the story—and suddenly there's a cyberattack.I guess nobody knows where it really comes from, but by now we know where it really comes from.Tell me the story of what happens in Estonia in a kind of narrative form, if you can.
Estonia is an interesting case of how history is still so alive in this part of the world and in the mind of Russians, Putin especially but not only, because the story really begins with what sounds like a simple symbolic but ultimately not that meaningful decision about where to place a statue.The Estonian government had decided to move a World War II statue, a statue created by the Soviets after the war commemorating the Soviet victory in the war, outside of the city center.
That decision was taken by ethnic Russians, Russian speakers in Estonia, but more importantly by the Russian government back in Moscow, as a great affront to historical memory, as a great affront to Russia, both its past glories and its present, because of course in today’s Russia, the past is present, and the memory of Russia's victory in World War II, which came at an enormous personal and human cost, is something that is very much alive in the imaginations of Russians today, officials and ordinary people.
The decision to move this monument was taken as an affront to that memory and set in motion a quite vitriolic and dramatic Russian response.I was here at the time, and I remember protests by youth activists very much organized by the Kremlin, but there was also something indeed genuine about them in that these Russian young people seemed to be really upset about this move of a statue.There were protests for days in front of the Estonian Embassy here in Moscow, and there are all sorts of diplomatic démarches being sent back and forth, the Russian Foreign Ministry protesting, the Kremlin protesting this move.
It all leads to this cyberattack in which much of Estonian online and digital infrastructure is essentially rendered inoperable.2In hindsight, it seems to be one of the first cases where we can talk about Russia marshaling those sorts of cyber resources to further its geopolitical interests.
2
… So it’s a new weapon.… What do you know now about what that was, where it came from?
I should say I know very little about the inner workings of Russia's cyber operations.No one really seems to know exactly the details of Russia's cyber capabilities, their composition, where exactly the hackers or people working on these cyber forces are.Are they attached to the Defense Ministry? Are they attached to the intelligence services?The answer seems to be both—they're everywhere—but to really judge exactly in what numbers and which kind of unit is doing which sorts of activities is something we don’t really have a lot of information on.
But one thing I've heard from Russian sources over and over again, they’ve implored me to remember that everything the Russians do, at least in the cyber realm and in other realms connected to defense and military operations over the past 20 or so years, have essentially been lifted from the American playbook.The Russians have seen how the Americans wage modern warfare, especially from a technological or organizational perspective, and rather than reinvent the wheel, they just bring those frameworks, bring those kind of organizational operational methods to Russia.
Of course it’s worth saying they do this in a way in accordance with how <i>they</i> think American operations work.That's not the same thing to say they're actually bringing American knowhow, as it were, in the cyber realm to Russia.They're bringing what their interpretation, their understanding, their vision of how they’ve seen American operations work and incorporating them into their own.And I think—I’m going to go off on a tangent if that's all right.
This question of Russians essentially copying what they think or perceive to be American modus operandi is also important for understanding the how and the why the Kremlin might decide to try to influence a foreign political environment all the way up to trying to influence an American presidential election.That's because as far as the Kremlin sees it, that's exactly what America has done all over the world, not just in the 25 years since the collapse of the Soviet Union, but going back all throughout the Cold War history as well, throughout the 20th century.
It would be impossible to convince a Kremlin official all the way up to Putin that American intelligence services, American diplomatic corps, State Department, all the way up to the White House, doesn’t have an extensive track record of meddling in foreign political processes and foreign elections, installing presidents and so on.
So the Russian decision to try and get into the game of affecting politics abroad, you would never convince a Kremlin official, and I'm convinced you would never convince Putin himself, that they weren't doing exactly what the Americans have done; in fact, taking or copying right out of the American playbook.I think that that's important understanding not just the motives to the Russian action, but also understanding it operationally; that Russian officials involved in these kind of operations don’t think they're doing anything that original, but merely doing what the Americans have long done, and probably done better, than the Russians as they would argue.
… So the short take home from the Estonia action is?
I think that Russia realized, perhaps smartly, correctly, that it could get a lot of bang for the buck with cyber operations.I don't think that there was any appetite then, nor is there now, for entering into a direct military confrontation with Estonia.It’s a NATO country.I think that at the time, certainly, there was more certainty about the American and overall NATO commitments of Article V of collective defense, and Putin understood that that was a losing game.Entering into an overt military confrontation or intervening in Estonia in an undeniable, conventional military way was a nonstarter for the Kremlin.
I think they realized, again perhaps smartly, wisely, correctly, that they could get a lot of mileage out of a cyber incursion, a kind of asymmetric means of warfare and a means of warfare that kept their fingerprints off the operation, especially back then when there was much less understanding about how these sorts of things worked.Russia was able to achieve its objectives while avoiding a conflagration and standoff with NATO itself [and] with the United States.It was able to do it on the cheap and do it essentially successfully, I think, a lesson that the Kremlin took to heart.
Early road test?
I don't think that necessarily Putin and those around him in the Kremlin in 2007 knew or could even imagine that one day they would, say, try and influence an American political election by hacking the servers of the Democratic National Committee and so on.I think that that wasn't even a pipe dream at the time.It wasn't that this was necessarily a test for something bigger.But at the time, it was an attractive, tactical tool for solving this particular problem.And again, it worked.The fact that it worked retroactively turned it into a kind of road test and something that was bound to surface in Kremlin operations going forward.
Putin Returns to the Presidency, Sparking Protests and a Crackdown
Let’s follow the trail of the Web, of cyber disinformation and add a new dimension, which is social media.Let’s jump to 2011 and the protests forming in response to the Duma elections and the elections, going all the way up to the anger at the switch, the switch back between Medvedev and Putin.Help me understand what Putin knew and when he knew it about the power of the West and the Web through those protests?
… I think there's some people in the Russian government, perhaps Medvedev, but by no means should we turn him into a kind of Silicon Valley libertarian, but there are some people in the Russian government who understand the way social media works and understand the way that that's able to amplify or unite genuine voices across the political and social spectrum.But I don't think that's Putin, and I don't think that's the opinion of the other security-minded officials who have great influence who make up Putin's inner circle in the Kremlin.
For that cohort, for that generation, for those men—and they're essentially all men with backgrounds in the secret services and security forces—there's no such thing as genuine motivation; there's no such thing as pure, genuine ideology.It's impossible.It just doesn't fit into their conception of the world that people form and act based off of nothing more than true, genuine, internal, moral conviction.The world is made up of interests as they see it and forces that try and control and corral those interests.
So the narrative in Putin's mind that seems to have emerged from the 2011 and 2012 protests was not that hundreds of thousands of his citizens spontaneously and genuinely decided to go out into the streets to express their true dissatisfaction with his rule and the way that Russia was being governed at the time.But there clearly, by definition, must be some outside forces trying to stoke up those feelings, manipulate them.I think that's why we see at the height of these protests Putin blaming personally then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for activating the protests somehow, for giving the signal, as he said, for the protesters to go into the streets.
That may have been a cynical joke on Putin's part, but I also think it reflected something very genuine, which is, again as he saw it, people don’t just go out into the streets.3People don’t just express their personal civic political position just like that.They're always being directed, manipulated maybe even against their knowledge.But nonetheless, there are always higher outside forces at work.
3
Putin and Hybrid Warfare
And when he learns, perceives the power, and somebody must tell him, yeah, you're right, and the West is using the Web to pull people out of their homes, get people lined up in the streets holding “Stop Putin” signs?
… A very interesting and revealing article appeared in 2013 in a rather obscure military journal in Russian written by a man named Valery Gerasimov, the top military official in Russia, akin to Russia's chair of Joint Chiefs of Staff.4The article was written at the height of the wars and revolutions and protests that came out of the Arab Spring.In this piece, Gerasimov talks about a kind of new form of warfare, one that isn't based around conventional military exchanges, but relies on the manipulation of public opinion, the use of information dissemination, the media, social movements, social media.
4
What's important about this text—there are a few things that are interesting to understand about Gersimov’s article, but one is that he starts out by diagnosing the way that the West wages war.In other words, as he sees it—and I think that this is reflective of the opinion of Putin and others—the Arab Spring, for example, was essentially a case of the United States and other Western capitals destabilizing regimes, stirring up protests, spreading and using information and the media to create discontent and disorder.In the case of Libya, as Gerasimov writes, when all those methods don’t work, then you can also, as it were, send in the fighter jets.
Gerasimov is describing in this article what he sees as how in the 21st century the West achieves its geopolitical objectives through a new kind of warfare, something that doesn’t look at all like war as we're used to, but nonetheless has the same ultimate effect.
The second and no less important thing to understand about this article is that it’s seen inside the Russian security and defense and political establishment as a kind of call to arms.It diagnoses what the West is doing around the world.The implication is the West would like to do this to us as well, to foment discontent, to weaken the system and the regime from within, to stir up political passions and discontent, and therefore we need to get in the game, too.
Although Gerasimov in the article doesn't explicitly say let’s create similar capacity and similar forces in Russia, that's the ultimate effect and the ultimate intent, I think, of the piece, was to tell the political leadership of the country, Putin himself, that this is what they are doing around the world; this is what they want to do to us.We’d better understand these methods and develop the capacity to use them ourselves if we want to be geopolitically competitive in the 21st century.5
5
Any doubt in your mind that Putin reads this, reacts to it and says, “I'll take that road now”?
I don't know if Putin is a regular subscriber to the <i>Military-Industrial Courier</i> or wherever that this article actually appeared, but I certainly think that Gerasimov is an extraordinarily influential figure with direct personal access to Putin.[He] was talking about these issues.And the very fact that the text appeared indicates that it was something under discussion in high-level political circles here in Moscow.An article like that doesn't just appear accidentally or on a whim; it’s reflective of a mood and a certain intent.
The Reset and Arab Spring: Putin as Prime Minister
And at exactly this moment, he is, or at least right around this time, we've had people tell us this story of Putin watching the murder of Qaddafi, transfixed, almost as if he’s looking into a crystal ball at his own future.
There are a few reasons to think that the fall of Qaddafi and the NATO-led air war in Libya represented a kind of turning point for Putin.At the time, he was not president; that role was being formally filled by Dmitry Medvedev.And very consequentially, with Medvedev’s direction, Russia abstained from a vote in the U.N. Security Council that paved the way for this military operation in Libya.Putin, as we understand, could never forgive Medvedev for this mistake, as Putin saw it.He also understood it as a mistake of his own in the fact that he had taken his hands off the reins, and when he wasn't monitoring and in charge of every decision, especially as concerns foreign policy and Russia's geopolitical role, that things like the fall of Qaddafi were inevitable, or at least more likely when Putin's eye wasn’t on the ball.
The fact that what started out, as Putin and those in the Kremlin saw it, [as] protests in Libya surely, inevitably stirred up and supported by Western capitals, turned into a chaotic, bloody, awful civil war in which the West then intervened directly militarily.All of that just fit perfectly with Putin's developing view of the world, a view of the world that he had come to believe in after revolutions in his backyard, in Georgia and Ukraine and elsewhere, and looking across the Middle East and across the world.… Libya was the quintessence of what he saw as this kind of amalgam of forces the West brings to bear to bring about regime change, essentially.And the fact that that regime change was capped off with this gruesome and ugly murder of Qaddafi being dragged out of essentially a sewer pipe in Libya drove home to Putin how these things really end for leaders who fall under the crosshairs of the West.Would he be such a leader one day?
I think all of this reconfirmed his certainty that on the one hand, the West, led by the United States, is out to change political regimes it finds either unsavory or undesirable, not useful in some way, and that as someone who’s stood up to Western interests time and again, he might fall under those same crosshairs himself one day.And all of that redoubled his commitment to make sure that that never happened, both by strengthening his own system and rule internally and also projecting power outward to keep the West at bay geopolitically across the globe wherever he could.
Putin Asserts Himself on the World Stage in his Third Term
So he’s meeting regularly or often or sometimes with Gerasimov, hearing about the new toolkit.And he’s locked and loaded?
Yeah. I think that one advantage of a top-down authoritarian system is that you can do things quickly.Once the political decision, the political will is there, you can really marshal resources across the board to achieve an objective.And we saw that very quickly in Ukraine, in Crimea, in the run-up and during the annexation, and also in eastern Ukraine in the Donbas region in the war that broke out there shortly thereafter.The nature of Russia's political system allows it to be a kind of mass mobilization state, as it were, in that when it sets its targets on a political objective, it can bring everything to bear from the information and propaganda resources of state television to the use of quite impressive and now, as we've seen in Crimea and elsewhere, advanced special operations forces, cyber capability.All of those resources can be marshaled and brought to bear quickly and in a way that are all working in kind of concert with each other.
Western states, the United States in particular, is at a disadvantage there in that it can't with one phone call or one closed-door presidential meeting bring together everything from NBC to Central Command.Those aren't necessarily resources available to an American president, but they are to a Russian president.
And he did it.I mean, he literally did it.Take me with some specificity—we don’t have to go all the way down to all the fine-grained details, but tell me the story of the annexation of Crimea, and maybe go back to Maidan.But do whatever you want to do to set the stage for us to see him swing into action in Crimea and Ukraine.
There's one interesting parallel between Crimea and the influence operation in the American political election, and I think it's worth talking about for a minute.And that's something that someone inside the Russian defense and security establishment told me when I pushed for some explanation about what Russia might have even theoretically done in the United States in the run-up to the election.
What he explained to me is that look, we're not alchemists here; we're not able to turn water into wine.We can't make something out of nothing.But what influence operations and covert operations can do is to take existing sentiment, take existing social and political factors, and stoke them, manipulate them, add a little bit on top so that they reach some critical mass and create an outcome that is desirable.I think that was the case in Crimea, and both potentially the case in the United States as well.
And in Crimea you had—
So Crimea really is a road test for something that's coming in the future?
In hindsight, yes.In Crimea, you have a geographically defined territory.It's a peninsula that exists on its own, jutting out into the Black Sea with a disproportionately large Russian population, ethnically Russian, Russian speaking, people who have historic, cultural and even political affection for Russia, many of whom feel themselves more Russian than Ukrainian.That population was also concerned, dismayed, frightened by the appearance of anti-government protests in Kiev that had taken place that fall and winter.The Maidan movement—Crimea was not full of Maidan supporters.If anything, it was probably full of Maidan skeptics.
In that environment, it didn't take a very big match to light a fire.Russia was able to come in, pump in information and propaganda programming on Russian state television, which everyone in Crimea watched, warning even more of the danger of protest leaders in Kiev, calling them fascists, stoking this fear that the first thing after the success of the revolution is all of these anti-government revolutionaries from Kiev would come to Crimea to somehow subjugate or exact revenge on the Crimean population.Those sorts of messages played right into the existing fears and prejudices of the Crimean population.Russia was able to quite effectively use the language issue.The majority of Crimean citizens, people living in Crimea, were Russian speakers with a fear that that language, Russian language, might lose some official status in Ukraine after Maidan.Russia was all too happy to stoke that fear through its information television diplomatic channels to make the Crimean population maximally afraid of that outcome.
In that environment, in the chaos and fear and disorder of the immediate post-Maidan period, the days after former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych left and there was a power vacuum in Kiev, Russia was quite skillfully able to step into that vacuum and to take this latent or pre-existing sympathy or support for Russia and whip it up into a referendum in which the Crimean population voted to join Russia, a referendum held in a period of maximum disorder, maximum fear, with Russian special forces essentially taking de facto control of the Crimean peninsula.
But it all worked out to be an operation that in Putin's eyes was considered a great success.All of this began in late February or early March, and by the end of March, Crimea was a new federal republic in the Russian Federation.I think the speed and seamlessness with which Russia was able to pull off that operation was both incredibly pleasing to Putin and gave him confidence about how those methods used all in concert could be deployed elsewhere.
Now, we talked about the Munich speech in 2007.Here we are now in 2014.Seven years later, he gives another speech, March 18, I think, about Crimea and another chapter of the evolution of Vladimir Putin as president, warrior, international force.Before we talk specifically about the speech, let's go back once more.You said there were many phases of Putin that one needs to keep track of.Let’s add this, I suppose, as another phase.
Absolutely.The third phase, the phase that I think we're currently still in, which began with Putin's return to the presidency in 2012, but really took shape in 2014 with the events in Ukraine, the annexation of Crimea and the war in Donbas and the standoff with the West that all of those events created, was Putin delivering both for himself and for the Russian people a measure of historical revenge; to once and for all bring Russia back to the table, the geopolitical table on its own terms, no longer trying to accommodate itself to the interests of the United States and the West; to pursue only its own interests and really overturn decades of disrespect; to have Russia rejoin the club of nations, not as Washington or Brussels saw appropriate, but as Russia saw appropriate in accordance with its historical mission, its historical birthright, things defined by Putin and tapping into the Russian psyche which after the collapse of the Soviet Union, I think you could say collectively suffered from a sense of imperial longing, imperial hangover, the disorientation at the loss of superpower status and empire.
Putin very skillfully was able to play into those pathologies and especially with the annexation of Crimea, and even with the standoff with the West.6In a sense, worsening relations with the West were a kind of proof that Russia was on the just and correct historical course that by definition a standoff with the West meant that Russia was pursuing its own eternal interests and that the more Putin found himself in conflict with the West, the more that was a demonstration that Russia was again a proud and independent superpower.
6
Putin Returns to the Presidency, Sparking Protests and a Crackdown
There's a component to all of this which we should address, which is the United States’ role in Ukraine itself, the active State Department presence in somebody like Toria Nuland, for example, … the wiretapping, the phone call from her to the American ambassador to Kiev, and the weaponizing of that phone call as an historic moment of finally we're going to use information we gather surreptitiously as a weapon.That feels like a central moment in the cyberwar story, which has been a subtheme here.
I think from the Kremlin perception, the Maidan protests in Ukraine were really not so much about the concerns of Ukrainian citizens who came out to Maidan to protest, but really that was an information war waged between Moscow and the West.I think that that's potentially lost in the American understanding of those protests, and I don't think was fully understood at the time; that what to State Department and White House officials might have seemed like this genuine manifestation of popular discontent on the streets of Kiev, in Moscow was seen less about Ukraine itself and more about Ukraine as a kind of platform or canvas setting for a standoff between the West and Russia, yet another standoff in a whole series of geopolitical standoffs.
This one in particular was really an information war.It was an information campaign.That was the ammo in this battle, and both sides, as the Kremlin understood it, were wielding information and the spread of information, the control of information, to pursue their objectives.So the decision, for example, by the Kremlin to publish this surreptitiously recorded phone call between Victoria Nuland, a State Department official, and the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, I don't think the Kremlin saw that as a kind of great breach, as if the Kremlin was entering into some new phase of international relations, new phase of information warfare.7
7
I think as the Kremlin understood it, Maidan was a no-holds-barred information war between the United States and Russia.So the publishing of this phone call was just another salvo in what had become, again in Putin's eyes, a kind of dirty war of information in which there were no holds barred in the way that Washington and Moscow would try and compete for geopolitical influence in Ukraine, using information in the way that information can be used to stir up crowds and enflame political passions in the street.
So why the big deal?Why was it made such a big deal, certainly by the U.S. side?
… I think in Washington, the Maidan protests were seen as the result of very real and genuine political sentiment led first and foremost by the Ukrainian people who came out in huge numbers to protest the corruption and authoritarian leanings of the Yanukovych government.I don't think the Kremlin took that perception of Maidan seriously at all.I think from the very beginning, they saw it as a U.S.- and Western-led and -sponsored operation to overthrow the Yanukovych administration, which the West didn’t like and saw it as less convenient and less palatable as some more pro-Western alternative.
The publishing, the release of that Nuland-[Geoffrey] Pyatt phone call, offended Washington's virgin sensibilities, who thought that what Maidan was, you know, the West is supporting the genuine democratic aspirations of these thousands of people in the central square of Kiev, where to Russia, since Maidan was this dirty information war between Russia and the West, why was publishing this phone call any different than as in the Russian perception, all of these other dirty tricks and attempts to manipulate and stoke public opinion that the West was doing?
Going back to, say, the Gerasimov text as a kind of instructional guide as to how Russia views these things, there are very few moments where I think a Russian official, Putin himself, would genuinely think we have done something particularly novel or transgressive here.We've changed the rules of how relations between our two countries work.I think in just about every case, the Russian argument would be we're just doing exactly what you've done all these years.It’s not our fault if you don’t like the taste of your own medicine.
Putin Asserts Himself on the World Stage in his Third Term
And just as long as we're along this road, the “little green men”?What's up with that?
“Little green men” was a funny neologism for the unacknowledged Russian special forces who suddenly emerged in Crimea right after the Maidan protests and in the days before the annexation.
… I remember arriving to Crimea just a few days after the Maidan protests ended, and still a period of great uncertainty.This was before anyone really understood exactly what Russia was up to, and no one then was talking about annexation.But nonetheless, the airport where I landed was surrounded by some men in green fatigues with machine guns.They looked very well equipped; they looked like a professional fighting force.This was not a ragtag band of local vigilantes, but they wore no insignia; they didn't identify themselves.They tried not to attract too much attention, though it’s hard not to attract attention when you're standing with a machine gun outside of an airport.
But they were the little green men.They were the, in hindsight, what we know as Russian special forces, many of whom were already based in Crimea because of Russia's longstanding pre-existing military agreements with Ukraine, but who came out of their bases to essentially pave the way for the referendum, pave the way for annexation to take over Ukrainian military bases in Crimea, fanning out all over the peninsula and essentially creating a fait accompli for Russia before the rest of the world understood what was going on, before very chaotic, very weak post-revolutionary government in Kiev could come up with any sort of plan.Before anyone could really react and come up with a counterstrategy or reaction, Russia had essentially already taken over Crimea with the help of these little green men.
In the aftermath, the immediate aftermath, Putin lies.Yeah?
Yes, Putin repeatedly laughed off the notion that there were Russian soldiers in Crimea.The Russian state media amplified that message, calling Western governments, Western journalists, I suppose by extension myself, a bunch of paranoid hysterics who were seeing ghosts and inventing things and reporting not at all the facts, which were that in the Russian narrative, this was just a local uprising of Crimeans who were concerned about the new government in Kiev, all of which, of course, at the time was laughingly false.No one was under any illusions about who these little green men were.
But even with time, Putin himself admitted it, laughingly in an aside a year or year or two later that “Oh, yeah, of course, actually those were Russian special forces,” and, “Oh, yeah, we did have troops on the ground.”It was as if the statement from a year ago meant nothing about a statement today, and truth itself was kind of malleable, or at least nothing more than yet another instrument in this larger macro-strategic standoff with the West; that information was a weapon, so it can be used just like all other weapons to achieve the maximum effect for your own side and to inflict confusion or sow weakness on the opposing side.
There's a dispute, and a pretty good one, in Washington about lethal arms for the Ukrainians.…What was the effect in Moscow as it watches Washington and the president of the United States try to make a decision about what to do about this?
I spent a good part of the summer of 2014 in eastern Ukraine in and around the battlefields in the Donbas on both sides; on the side of the Ukrainian army and on the side of the separatists, rebels, very much supported and backed by Moscow.8I think it was clear that that war was always going to mean much more to Moscow than it meant to Washington.It was in Russia's backyard; there were Russian soldiers on the ground there.As a strategic objective, the outcome of that war and the ultimate composition of a postwar settlement and exactly what form would those rebel territories take in Ukraine, all of those questions were existential to the Kremlin in a way that they weren't really, when it comes down to it, first-order strategic questions or priorities for Washington.
8
What that meant, and you could see it in the dynamic of the war on the ground, is that under no circumstances would the Kremlin let the rebels whom it was backing lose.There was no outcome one could imagine in which Putin would allow for a kind of battlefield or military defeat of the rebel force that Russia was backing, therefore depriving Russia of this instrument or wedge by which it could manipulate Ukrainian politics, and therefore achieve its own geopolitical objectives in its own backyard.
As regards the weapons question, I didn't at the time, nor do I now, have a personal policy view on the question or think the Obama administration should have or have not given weapons.But I think what's clear is that however far the Ukrainian military escalated with the help of new advanced Western American weaponry, the Kremlin would not have backed down from that war.I don't think it would have allowed the rebel forces who it was supplying, backing and at times assisting with direct military intervention to lose on the battlefield.I don't think they would have walked away from that fight.It was too important, too strategically central and significant to Putin, a question of prestige on the world stage, prestige at home, but also what happens in Ukraine is simply more important to Putin than it is in Washington.
And however far the United States escalated by introducing new, more powerful, more advanced weaponry on the battlefield, Putin would have matched or tried to exceed himself, only making that conflict all the more bloody.
Putin and Hybrid Warfare
… I think another example of disinformation and denial … is MH17.And what happens there.What happens, and why does it matter?
The Russian response to MH17 is very indicative of how Russia information and propaganda operations work in the modern Putin era, as we can call it.It's a very clear, in a way a perfect case, of how Russia has come to treat the information sphere and how it’s come to think about the question of propaganda.If in the early 2000s, in the early years of Putin's presidency, propaganda information operations meant trying to convince the viewer, convince the world of the Russian position, of trying to make Russia somehow look good, of somehow having the Russian view or the Russian position on a particular subject be the dominant one and to actively counteract Western narratives, American narratives, of a particular policy question by presenting a very clear and hopefully convincing Russian counter narrative of the subject, that shifted.It didn't shift overnight; it shifted gradually over time, and we can see it, for example, in the way that RT, which started out as Russia Today, shifted its own approach to explaining and narrating the news.We saw it over the breadth of the Putin states information and propaganda operations.
The evolution, where it eventually led us, is to an attempt to make the very notion of truth, the very notion of being able to arrive at some objectively correct, true notion of events impossible; to essentially throw up as many even laughable, absurd, farcical counternarratives as possible that are themselves internally contradictory, confusing, so that the ultimate effect on, say, the viewer is that you just throw your hands up and say: “I can't make heads or tails of this.I'm hearing so many different contradictory, impossible versions of this event, I'm not even going to try to get to the bottom of it.I'm not even going to take one position or another.As a viewer, I'm just going to say everybody’s lying; it’s all hopeless.Everyone’s covered in mud equally, and I refuse to even have a belief or have a position,” a kind of post-truth framework.
MH17 really was a case where we saw this in action, a very concentrated way, the apotheosis of this approach.In the days after MH17 was shot down, you saw all manner of, in retrospect, quite laughable versions of this event on Russian television.There was an idea in the early hours after MH17 was shot down, in fact it was the Ukrainian or American militaries trying to shoot down Putin's presidential plane, which was somewhere else over the skies of Western Europe at the time.You had quite disgusting versions that this was all a kind of staged setup, that the plane was already full of dead bodies and shot down out of the sky as a provocation; that it was a Ukrainian fighter jet that shot down the passenger plane; that it was no, the Ukrainian military using a Buk anti-aircraft missile.In fact, Russian state television, Russian authorities, still haven’t to this day settled on one canonical, official version of events surrounding MH17.You still get all manner of contradictory versions of what happened, but it’s a very purposeful mess.It's a very purposeful, opaque stew that's impossible to make heads or tails of, that the intent, the purpose of which is so that the viewer, the person who’s interested, say, in actually understanding what happened to MH17, starts wading through this morass of impossible-to-parse fact and just gives up because they see the Dutch, for example, version of events, what Dutch authorities have rather painstakingly put together through their own investigation proving that the plane was brought down by an anti-aircraft missile fired from rebel-held territory, a missile presumably provided with the aid of the Russian military.
That version is just one of many versions, no less believable, no less absurd than all the other versions that have been purposely injected into this media atmosphere, and that ultimately knowing the truth is impossible.
How does this progression take place from early basic propaganda, with which we're all familiar, up to this moment?What's the origin moment where it switches over?Is it something that's centralized and run out of an office around the corner from Putin's, or is it freelanced?Where does it come from, and how does it happen, and why did it happen?
I don't think the switch in how the Russian state thinks about information propaganda operations happened overnight.I don't think there was a turning point, a before-and-after moment.I think it was a growing realization, a correct one, a wise one, that putting forward the Russian version of events in a convincing way, getting the viewer or getting foreign officials, foreign governments, to believe the Russian take on issue X was very difficult, if not impossible.If Russia Today was still devoted to telling the viewer or convincing the viewer that Russia's position on X or Y issue was the correct one, I think that's a much harder sell and much harder to pull off than essentially what Russia Today and other arms of the Russian media and information apparatus became, which is just knowing the truth about issue X is so impossible, so murky because everybody’s lying, everybody’s covered in mud, everybody is cynical, and everyone is manipulating the truth.That's essentially much easier to do than to get someone to believe in the Russian position on any one issue.It fits into some already pre-existing currents and trends in how modern societies function.It's not something that Russia invented—the questions that grow out of societal distrust, distrust of the establishment elites, establishment media.All of those things are happening not because Russia willed them into being.Those are big social and political forces at play in the United States and in Europe that Russia was able to harness and took note of and [was] able to play with and manipulate for its own purposes.But those aren't social phenomena that Russia invented.
If we wanted to watch or chart its course, could we watch it happen on RT from one kind of programming and orientation to telling stories to what it ultimately becomes?
… A telling case of where officials in the Kremlin and those who work on media and information operations understood that something isn't really working was the 2008 war with Georgia, a war that Russia essentially won militarily, very quickly in a matter of days.Russia, of course, has a far more powerful military than Georgia.It wasn’t really a fair fight militarily, [and it was] no surprise that Russia was able to gain the upper hand purely on the battlefield in a matter of days.
Despite that battlefield victory, a narrative emerged in Moscow of Russia having lost the information war.I've talked to Russian officials close to the Defense Ministry and in the security establishment who talk about essentially bragging about what a cakewalk it was militarily and that, of course, the armed forces of relatively small Georgia were no match for the behemoth of the Russian military.That surprised no one.
But these officials were really dismayed at how the Georgian narrative of that war became the dominant one, the one accepted on international airwaves in Western capitals, and that the military victory for Russia was a shallow or at least incomplete one, because they had so wholly lost the information war in terms of understanding the why and the how of that conflict: who was the aggressor, who was the victim, who started it and so on.On all of those questions, Russian officials, including some who I've spoken to, felt very aggrieved at how badly Russia lost that part of the conflict.
I think it was after Georgia that there was a lot of soul searching to the extent that Kremlin officials engage in that sort of thing about how did that happen, why did that happen, lessons learned.How was Georgia, this country we defeated on the battlefield in a matter of days, able to defeat us in the information sphere?After the Georgia war is when you saw Russia getting a lot savvier in terms of how the modern information game works.If before Georgia Russian information operations had a Soviet tinge to them—a Propaganda 1.0 approach of trying to convince the other side that your position is right and the other one is wrong and that's it—that didn't work in Georgia.That failed miserably, as Russian officials themselves would admit.
After Georgia, you saw an attempt to do a lessons learned and to update how Russia thinks about the information question in terms of geopolitics.
And the answer they came up with is chaos, disruption, lies and obfuscation.
Over time, I think they came to see that it’s much more effective to just introduce a whole lot of noise into the information space, to muddy the waters, and that ultimately is both more effective and services Russia's interests more than Russia in a Khrushchevian way, banging its shoe on the table trying to get its position across and have the viewer or the foreign government believe Russia's version of events.[It's] much easier, much more effective just to make the very notion of truth seem impossible.
I think we really can say, given hindsight, that Ukraine, Crimea, were the field tests of the information war strategies and even cyber.Even in the fall, the Dukes, [the hacking group also known as Cozy Bear], crack the State Department and the Defense Department and even the White House.We haven’t really talked about the cyber side of hybrid war, but obviously they're moving, testing, probing even, in the United States of America.
As Russia built up its cyber capacity, in a sense that's to be expected.For Putin, for officials in the security and military establishment around him, these are men—and again, they're essentially all men, who come from a generation of the last cold warriors—these are people who came of age when the Soviet Union was engaged in this superpower struggle with the United States.That struggle for them never really went away.It may have taken different forms and gone through different phases, but the main central, strategic adversary of Russia remains the United States.
Even in periods when there might have been relatively friendlier or even congenial relations between the countries.That doesn't mean the United States stopped in this inevitable, almost eternal way, being Russia's largest and central strategic adversary.So of course as Russia developed these new capabilities, who would they be directed against?Of course, first and foremost, the United States.
So let’s go to the—
Can I add one thing on that?
Yeah.
Returning to this idea that as far as Putin and other Kremlin officials see it, whatever they might do, the United States has done before and probably even better, though they might not like to admit it.I've also heard from people in the defense and security establishment here in Moscow that the very successful use of the Stuxnet virus by American and Israeli intelligence services was yet another wakeup call for Russia, that Russia felt really flatfooted when it came to cyber when it realized the efficacy and power that a cyberweapon can have in a geopolitical question, one as weighty and consequential as the Iranian nuclear program, a question in which Russia was very much involved and very much a player on the diplomatic negotiation process.
Seeing how something as simple, though of course it’s not simple at all, as a cyber tool, a cyberweapon, could completely disrupt that process, could have such a powerful effect I think was something that Russian officials hadn’t quite understood, or at least internalized before.And watching Stuxnet and the effect it had was yet another point at which Russian officials realized, “We have to get in the game, too.”
Intervention in the U.S. Election
Armed with all of that motivation, capacity, an understanding of the methodology of fake news and having had early probes at State [Department] and White House, DNC, RNC, take me from Moscow’s perspective, Putin's perspective, to the 2016 presidential election.Take me there.
Sorry, I don’t quite understand.Where in the timeline do you want me to pick up?
Fall of ’15, Cozy [Bear], Fancy [Bear], wherever it feels like the right way to enter telling the story from these people's … perspective.
I think that Putin saw the 2016 presidential elections well ahead of time, let’s say a year in advance, some time in 2015, as of great import to Russia and to himself personally in ways that maybe Washington didn't quite understand at the time, to how much Putin felt personally invested in the outcome of these elections.9… Putin saw in Clinton someone, in his understanding of the world and the way it works, a person who personally had tried to undermine his power in 2011 and 2012, someone he saw as essentially a Russia hawk, a foreign policy hawk, someone who in Libya was in favor of regime change and in Putin's worldview might well want to do the same thing to him one day.I think he had a visceral, almost existential fear of a Clinton presidency in a way that wasn’t fully appreciated at the time, how personal this was to him, how much he felt like Russia might be next in the crosshairs if Hillary Clinton were to become U.S. president.
9
At the same time, he saw in the appearance of Trump on the scene a person who was a bull in the china shop, and that was attractive to Putin not even because of who Donald Trump was as an individual, what Trump might be able to offer him personally, whatever kind of relationships Russian businessmen might have with Trump.All of that we know relatively less about and remains an open question.But I think it’s enough to say the fact that Trump was this incredibly disruptive force in American politics was in and of itself enough to make him a very appealing character to Putin, someone who on his own was shaking the foundations of the American political system, sowing doubt, weakening public faith in the institutions of American democracy, causing a re-examination of those institutions, calling into doubt a lot of assumptions that the American public and American politicians had about the functioning of that system.
The fact that Trump was doing all of those things on his own couldn’t help but make him a very attractive candidate to Putin, whose strategic goal long before Trump ever arrived on the scene and surely long after Trump departs the scene, his strategic goal is to essentially weaken the United States, to weaken its institutions so as to give himself and to give Russia a freer hand, to improve Russia's position in what Putin sees as the great strategic standoff that defines Russia's geopolitical birthright.It’s a superpower standoff with the United States, and if Trump is able to distract, weaken, sow confusion, doubt, and introduce turbulence in the American political system in a way that distracts, weakens, undermines America's authority on the world stage, what's not to like, as Putin sees it?
And the means and methods that Russia presumably employed to execute that vision?
… What we seem to know the most about is the hacking of the DNC and John Podesta’s email accounts by cyber forces linked to the Russian intelligence services.10The fact that they were able to get into those email accounts in and of itself isn't shocking or all that newsworthy if it ended there, considering what we know about Russia's attempts to infiltrate all manner of American government institutions over the years, long before the 2016 elections—the White House, State Department, other branches of U.S. government.
10
Russian hackers, hackers working for the Russian government were all over those institutions for years.The fact that they might want to gain access to something like the DNC servers or the email of Clinton's campaign chair isn't a shock given what we know about their targeting of American institutions with cyberattacks before that.
The key moment is, of course, the decision, which we don’t know the ultimate details of, to make the contents of those emails public.That's where what was a classic intelligence or espionage operation, gathering information about a foreign adversary, something all countries do, became a covert operation, what in Russian intelligence circles is called an active measure, an attempt to actually influence the outcome of a political event in a foreign country.And that's where we enter into relatively unprecedented territory as concerns the post-Cold War relations between the United States and Russia.
Putin and Trump
Of course what's happening in the States right now is everybody is, especially because of the Don Trump Jr. stuff, everybody’s looking very closely at—before we get to obstruction of justice, at collusion, what actually was happening, meaning the meeting with the banker, the meeting with Donald Trump, meeting with the woman who supposedly had dirt on Hillary Clinton?
Without knowing the details, of course, of exactly what happened in the run-up to the presidential election and who Russian officials or Russian agents might have had contact with, was there contact at all, there are some things we can say and know for sure more broadly about the Putin system in the way it tends to operate.One of them is that the Putin system as a kind of organism doesn’t believe in institutions; it believes in individuals.What that means is that personal relationships are key to Putin and to the way the Putin system operates.It doesn’t, certainly domestically and even internationally, put much faith in processes, in institutions, in systems that work bigger than or beyond the personal will and personal interests of particular individuals.It doesn't trust or understand those kinds of models of political relations inside Russia domestically or on the world stage.
What the Putin system does understand are the very personal motivations and interests of particular people and trying very much to rely on personal relationships.Everything can be decided between two people.That's why, put simply, one of the reasons why Putin doesn't like the European Union, there's no one really to reach an agreement with there.The European Union is the kind of epitome of a sprawling, faceless bureaucratic structure.Who is your counterparty there?Who is the person you can sit down and have a heart-to-heart conversation with and come up with some sort of agreement?Nobody.And that makes Putin very uncomfortable.
Where Putin's comfortable is where there's one individual whom he can study, understand the psychology of, the motivations of, and reach a deal with.And who is more of a self-professed deal maker than Trump and those around him?I think in that, Putin and Trump are very similar.Both of them are art-of-the-deal-type figures for whom sitting in a room with your counterparty, understanding who they are, what they want, the levers by which you can influence them and what you can provide to them in terms of motivation, that's how things get done.I think we can say with certainty that that's the modus operandi for the Putin system.
The U.S. Response to Russian Measures // 2016
… If the president of the United States walks up to the president of Russia and essentially says, “Come over here,” and says, “Knock it off,” what's the likelihood of that being the definitive measure that will stop him from continuing?
I think that a request from the president of the United States to stop getting up to bad behavior is far from sufficient to actually stop that behavior if Putin sees it in Russia's strategic interests.If Putin sees it as something of great potentially existential importance, he’s going to keep doing it, just as he kept doing it in Ukraine throughout that crisis.In Crimea, in the war in the east, how many moments were there when Western governments, the Obama White House above all, told Putin: “Stop that.Don’t annex Crimea.Don’t provide weapons and other support to the rebels in the east.Don’t intervene directly militarily with your own forces in eastern Ukraine”?How many times was Putin told, “No,” or, “Don’t do that”?In all of those cases, he went ahead and did it anyway, because for him, doing so was of higher strategic importance in his understanding of Russian interests than whatever conflict or worsening in relations with the United States would result from him not doing that.
In that sense, we can talk about Putin being essentially a rational actor, a rational actor according to the framework and hierarchy of interest as he sees it.If it’s more important for his interests, for Russia's interests as Putin defines them, to keep doing some bad behavior that the United States is warning him off of doing, whatever he achieves from that is worth more to him than risking a worsening of relations with the United States, which, by the end of 2014, were pretty much in the dumpster anyway.
Intervention in the U.S. Election
Speaking of bad behavior, bots, trolls, fake news, it’s unleashed in the summer.Explain.
I think a few things came together in Russia attempting and understanding how to use the information space to further its objectives.One, we've talked about the shifting understanding of what effective propaganda is, going from being something where you're trying to convince the other side or your position to just trying to throw as much mud into the water as possible so as to make it opaque; also, as we've also talked about, this belief, very genuine, firmly held belief in the Kremlin, that the revolutions across the post-Soviet world in the 2000s, the Arab Spring revolutions, that all of those political upheavals were caused in part by America's manipulation of the information space, of local media resources, of stirring up civic and political passions through the manipulation of information.
With that belief and with the new understanding and how post-modern propaganda works, Russia decided to marshal those resources and apply them in the U.S. political context.The understanding was there; the tools were there; the capacity was there; the motivation was there in terms of why Russia would want to intervene in that way.When you take all of those factors together, it then becomes, why wouldn't they?Why wouldn’t they do it, if all of those other pre-existing conditions are met?
Q: … What is that [troll] business?How important is it?Is it coming out of the military here?Is it coming out of the intelligence agencies here?Is it subcontractors who are in the private world?When we talk about the people who are actually involved in these kinds of operations, the ground level, whether it’s hackers, trolls, other people involved as the kind of foot soldiers in the Kremlin’s information war, we don’t really know exactly who they are, because that world remains very opaque.We know, for example, that there is something like a Cyber Command inside the Russian Ministry of Defense, but we actually don’t know who its commander is; we don’t know its size or structure.In that sense, there's less understanding of how Russia conducts its operations than the United States.Again, not that we know the detailed inner workings of how American cyber forces works, but we at least have the kind of organizational or hierarchical—we can make some organization hierarchical guesses about how those forces are structured.
Here in Russia, it's much more difficult.There seem to be overlapping cyber forces inside the Ministry of Defense.One can presume that their interest in targets are of a more military nature, penetrating and perhaps manipulating or weakening the kind of military command and control structures of adversarial countries.You have cyber forces inside various intelligence structures, inside the FSB [Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation], the main security services successor to the KGB, though you also have different cyber structures inside the GRU, or the military intelligence unit.You also have a patchwork of what you might call public/private partnership hackers, cyber security companies and labs, research centers working on state orders on state commissions.These are laboratories close to the security services but technically independent.You also have a very interesting phenomenon that's been documented here in the Russian press of former criminal hackers, people who were sitting in their bedroom stealing credit card numbers online, being pulled in by the FSB and offered a deal: Instead of going to jail, how about you come work for us?
That's a very interesting aspect.That's one narrow window that we've gleaned into how these forces are put together, that not only is there some evidence that the Russian military and security services recruit among the graduates of the country’s most prestigious and advanced technology institutes and computer science programs, but also reach into the world of the criminal underground, pulling out hackers who have run afoul of the law and are given the choice of avoiding jail time and going to work for the state.
Putin and Trump
So when Trump wins, what's the reaction here?
I think in the early moments of Trump's victory, there was surprise and confusion, just like there was in America.In the ultimate run-up to the vote, in the final weeks before Election Day, officials in the Kremlin were operating under a very similar set of assumptions as were those following the election in Washington and throughout the United States.The Kremlin doesn't have any better polling or research data than <i>New York Times</i> or 538 or any number of resources who were tracking in great and exacting detail the day-by-day shifting calibrations in polling data before the election.
The Kremlin didn't know any more about the way the actual voting might go than did anyone else following the polling numbers quite closely in the days before the vote.What that means is the Kremlin was essentially bracing itself for a Hillary Clinton victory.It's very instructive, I think, to watch Russian state television, not because you'll find out something all that revelatory or necessarily even true, but it’s a very good prism into understanding the mood of the day in official circles in Moscow, and it’s a good translator of the official mood from the Kremlin onto state airwaves.
If you go back and watch coverage of the election in the last, say, two weeks before the vote, the tone of that coverage was really striking.It was about discrediting the American political system as a whole.It wasn't so much about presenting Donald Trump as this great white hope, as this incredible, virtuous, preferred candidate.It was preparing the viewer to believe that the American political system was rigged, that of course the American political establishment would never allow Trump to win, … paving the way for a Clinton victory, a victory that the Kremlin was prepared to greet with clenched teeth, but nonetheless anticipating that Clinton would win and that the message would be the American political system is somehow fixed, broken, not to be trusted, even as one of Russia's more bombastic hosts on state airwaves was suggesting, that there would be impeachment hearings from day one.
So there was this focus not so much on presenting Trump as the imminent victor, but between the lines making do with the fact that Clinton was likely to win.But nonetheless, how can we cast doubt on that victory and weaken what many in Moscow expected to be her presidency?
And Putin's reaction to Trump's victory?
We’ll never really know how Putin responded in the first minutes and hours after Trump's victory.There was famously a moment in the Russian Duma parliament here where when the news was announced to parliamentarians, they stood up in extended standing ovation, applauding for several minutes.One of those parliamentarians later had a party in his office where they popped champagne and toasted Trump's victory.Clearly there was a lot of excitement in Moscow.
But I think that sort of thing is more for show, a more emotional outburst among not necessarily the ultimate decision-making class in Moscow.I think Putin is a savvier, smarter and ultimately much more suspicious figure who I don't think excites too easily.I think he understood that Trump's victory presented certainly Russia with a range of unexpected and perhaps welcome opportunity and room for maneuver.It was certainly more a pleasant surprise than an unpleasant surprise.But I think Putin was never under any illusions about Trump's unpredictability, his brashness, his uncontrollability.11Such an unpolished, unprofessional figure is both what made him attractive as a wrecking ball inside the American political system.But once Putin realized he would actually be U.S. president, I think that also must have given him some pause.
11
Let me ask these guys what we missed before we run out of time.Mike, what do you have?
In the wake of the election, what has Putin learned?Is this the strategy he would continue, or is this something he wouldn’t do again?What's his approach now?
I think it's too early to say does Putin consider this operation ultimately a success or not.Certainly [it’s] successful in the sense that if one of the strategic objectives was to weaken, disrupt, undermine the American political system, on that score I think you can say mission accomplished.No matter what ultimately comes of the Trump presidency, the degree of chaos and distraction that has been introduced into politics in Washington certainly fits with the objective to cast doubt on the durability and stability of the American political system.
The American political establishment is certainly distracted and inward-looking in a way it hasn’t been in some time, which does give Putin a great degree of flexibility and room to maneuver in areas of his geopolitical interests around the world.
The degree to which there will be blowback from that operation brings to light uncomfortable, unsavory things about how the Kremlin does business.That remains to be seen, and it’s possible that as investigations, journalistic, Congress, special prosecutor and others move forward, the world will begin to learn things about how Russia conducts its operations that will be very unwelcome for Putin, who is accustomed and likes to do things without much scrutiny or oversight.That's certainly what he has become used to here in Russia, not having the nitty-gritty of his operations laid bare for the world to see.… I'm not really sure you can put this genie back in the bottle, and that's just a function of the way the world works today.RT will exist and find an audience, if not through the airwaves, then online.The Internet, obviously, one would hope, will never be controlled or constrained for American users.So Russia will always have a way—not just Russia; all manners of foreign states and actors will always have a way of reaching foreign audiences, including American ones, going forward.No one can turn that switch off, it seems.
Just a quick question, Josh.I'm still puzzled by the tension between the idea that Putin is a strongman, centralizer.He’s eliminated competition in politics; he's got so much control.And yet we get this other picture that in something as important as influencing the American election, he relies on freelancers and oligarchs, and there's this loose coalition of royal court that tries to impress him.Lawyers from Moscow Oblast do things.I mean, can both these things be true or which of them is true?
I think both are true at the same time.Putin is an authoritarian leader with a great deal of singular control over his political system, a political system that has become very personalized over his now 17 years and counting in power, that relies on his authority, and in many cases breaks down or ceases to function when his authority isn't present in a decisive way.But at the same time, the system can be incredibly weak, inefficient, chaotic.To say that it’s controlled and administered by Putin's singular authority is not the same thing [as] to say it’s a well-oiled machine.It oftentimes is not.It oftentimes is a very flimsy-seeming construction that's barely held together and operates more by the logic of chaos and improvisation than anything grandly strategic.
If you talk to a lot of Russian journalists in the know, respected people who have covered Putin and the Kremlin for years, they laugh at this notion of Putin as being presented as a great chess master thinking many moves ahead.12To them that seems a farcical notion.Putin is very quick on his feet.He’s best when he has to make a decision in an improvisational, tactical way.He’s very good at making the best of opportunities presented to him, oftentimes by other people's weakness or the disorder or dysfunction on the side of his adversary.He's good at maximizing that moment to ultimately punch far above his and Russia's geopolitical weight.
12
He has the advantage of not having to consult with parliament, of not having to take into account public opinion, of not having to make sure he’s operating in concert with business and corporate interests.He can move when he wants in a very decisive and singular way.But that's not the same thing as saying he has a master vision that he pursues with great consistency and persistence and efficacy over time.
If you talk to Russian journalists who have covered Putin for years, they say behind the scenes, it’s all a bit of a mess.It's all a bit of a chaotic, improvised game that Putin often plays well.But that doesn't mean he’s this great strategic visionary.
… Is the perception that Putin is the puppet master of all of this, in some ways, a fiction we have created growing out of the Cold War and our perception of Russia or the Soviet Union then as the great enemy?I mean, if they're reacting to us, we’re also reacting to them, and certainly the press may suffer from this 10-foot-tall puppet master named Vladimir Putin.
I know from talking to people who circulate on the outer rings of power in the Kremlin that Putin and those close to him are ultimately pleased at how they're being presented in the American narrative.13They very much like this image of themselves, of Putin personally as this kind of puppet master, pulling the strings of something as mighty as the American political system.In a way, that’s the ultimate prize, the ultimate compliment.I think that’s essentially false and overplays Putin’s role, and gives Putin too much credit.
13
Whatever the Russian government did to try to influence the outcome of the U.S. presidential election, it doesn’t make the outcome of that election Putin’s singular doing.It doesn't make Trump a president installed by Putin.Trump was a president ultimately elected by American voters.In understanding the role of Putin personally and the Russian state more broadly in the 2016 presidential election, it’s important to remember that this is ultimately an American story, not a Russian one.By making it all about Putin and his seeming omnipotence and brilliance in being able to manipulate everyone from the president of the United States to voters in swing states gives him far too much power.It’s ultimately analytically incorrect, and perhaps, in a sense, strategically unwise, because it gives him exactly what he has been craving all these years, a power balance with the United States.It makes him not just a superpower on par with the U.S., but almost above it and dominant over it, something that he could have only dreamed of all these years and has now been given by many parts of the media, American political system and so on.
Fabulous. Thank you.
Latest Interviews
Latest Interviews
Policies
Teacher Center
Jon and Jo Ann Hagler on behalf of the Jon L. Hagler Foundation
Koo and Patricia Yuen
FRONTLINE is a registered trademark of WGBH Educational Foundation. Web Site Copyright ©1995-2025 WGBH Educational Foundation. PBS is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization.
Funding for FRONTLINE is provided through the support of PBS viewers and by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Additional funding is provided by the Abrams Foundation; Park Foundation; the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation; and the FRONTLINE Journalism Fund with major support from Jon and Jo Ann Hagler on behalf of the Jon L. Hagler Foundation, and additional support from Koo and Patricia Yuen. FRONTLINE is a registered trademark of WGBH Educational Foundation. Web Site Copyright ©1995-2025 WGBH Educational Foundation. PBS is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization.
