A big surprise for the Kremlin
Analysts say Moscow didn’t expect strong blowback in the U.S. from cyberattacks.
Russian leaders probably didn’t expect heavy fallout from their meddling in the U.S. election, analysts say.
MOSCOW — The Russian cyberattacks that targeted last year’s U.S. presidential elections were as much about wanting to keep Hillary Clinton out of the White House as about proving to the world that the Kremlin was capable of pulling off this feat, a leading Russian expert on cybersecurity said Monday.
“Russian hackers deliberately tried to weaken positions of Hillary Clinton,” said Andrei Soldatov, author of a 2015 book on the Kremlin’s cyberwars against its critics. “She was seen as Russia’s enemy No. 1, a person who inspired Moscow protests [against President Vladimir Putin], a person who would harm Russia the most.”
But Moscow may have miscalculated the fallout of its intrusion, which has so far led to resignation of a high-ranking U.S. official, congressional investigations and a bipartisan circling of the wagons around the need to protect the integrity of America’s democracy, several leading Russia experts said.
“The blowback has been very strong,” William Courtney, an adjunct senior fellow at the Rand Corp., said in an interview as the House Intelligence Committee opened hearings into allegations of Russian hacking into the 2016 presidential campaign. “The story has magnified more than the Russians expected.”
Traditionally, former Soviet governments were reluctant to get involved in the internal politics of America because of the risk of retaliation. “But Putin has been willing to do that and to take extra risks,” Courtney said.
Moscow has rejected claims that it meddled in the U.S. presidential vote, but subversion tactics reportedly included propaganda spread through Russian government-backed media, the use of Internet trolls to disseminate fake news and sow discord through social media, and cyberspying.
“The fact that they were willing to do it openly suggests Putin is trying to fire a shot across the bow, in a political sense, to show that Russia has the capacity to make it look like the integrity of the U.S. elections is not as strong as Americans think it is and to undermine confidence … that the democratic process is honest,” Courtney said.
FBI Director James B. Comey acknowledged during Monday’s hearings that the Russians were “unusually loud in their intrusions,” though others said the use of private hackers was a typical Russian tactic aimed at maintaining deniability.
Although Russia may have been caught off guard by the swiftness and extent of the reaction, the power pendulum might still swing in Putin’s favor, some analysts said.
“On the one hand, the political context in Washington is more hostile to Russia as a result,” said Leon Aron, director of Russian studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative Washington-based think tank. “On the other, Russia is seen as a force shaping U.S domestic politics. Given Putin’s self-imposed mission of restoring Russia to the glory of the Soviet super-powership, I think on balance he is quite content.”
On Monday, Kremlin loyalists argued that the hearings were aimed at undermining Moscow’s ties with Trump.
The aim of this week’s hearings in Washington “is not to allow Trump to improve ties with Russia,” said Sergei Markov, a Moscowbased political analyst and former lawmaker with the ruling United Russia party. “Very serious circles in the U.S. think that they can’t let Russia become a great power, that Russia should be pressed, pressed, pressed.”