Biden orders wide assessment of Russian hacking, renews nuclear treaty

US President Joe Biden yesterday ordered a sweeping review of American intelligence about Russia’s role in a highly sophisticated hacking of government and corporate computer networks, along with what his spokesperson called Moscow’s “reckless and adversarial actions” globally and against dissidents inside the country.

At the same time, White House officials said the president would seek a clean, five-year extension of the last remaining nuclear arms treaty between the two countries, which expires in two weeks.

While Biden has long favoured the extension, there was debate among his top aides about how long it should be. He chose the most time available under the treaty’s terms, in hopes, his aides said, of preventing a nuclear arms race at a time the new president expects to be in a state of near-constant, low-level competition and confrontation with Moscow around the world — and particularly in cyberspace.

“This extension makes even more sense when the relationship with Russia is adversarial as it is at this time,” said Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary.

Taken together, the paired announcements make clear the complexity of Biden’s two-step approach to contain the actions of President Vladimir Putin of Russia. Biden’s aides have said they have no interest in a “reset” in relations of the kind that President Barack Obama and his secretary of state at the time, Hillary Clinton, tried.

But that puts Biden in the awkward position of seeking to extend the nuclear treaty — which Putin has already said he is willing to renew — while very publicly discussing the need to make Russia pay a price for the hacking. He has few alternatives: If the treaty is not extended, both countries would be free to deploy as many nuclear weapons as they want starting on February 6.

But Biden’s aides have privately cautioned that his options for retaliation in response to the attack on the “supply chain” of software used by the government and private industry are limited. In part because the evidence amassed so far suggested the Russians used their covert access chiefly to conduct espionage — something all nations engage in and that the US conducts against Russia, often through software manipulation.

Biden’s order for a study of the SolarWinds hacking comes as intelligence officials concluded that more than 1000 Russian software engineers were likely involved in it, according to people involved in the investigation.

That suggests it was a far larger and stealthier operation than first known — and raises anew questions about why the National Security Agency and its military counterpart, US Cyber Command, missed it. The Russians were active for nine months in those networks before a cybersecurity firm, FireEye, and Microsoft Corp alerted the government, and then the public, about the hacking.

Intelligence reviews are routine but in the case of Russia, it is particularly vital: From his first meeting with Putin in Hamburg, Germany, in 2017, President Donald Trump seemed oddly deferential to the Russian leader.

Trump appeared to endorse Putin’s denial that Moscow had anything to do with the 2016 effort to influence the presidential election, and in December, Trump suggested that maybe China, not Russia, was behind the hacking of government systems.

He was contradicted within days by his own intelligence officials and, as far as it is known, did nothing to respond to the Russian hacking.