A Russian boost to Brexit?

This appeared in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:

The British are now looking into whether President Vladimir Putin’s Russia intervened in the United Kingdom’s June 2016 referendum on continued membership in the European Union. The “Brexit” won by about 52 per cent, but it’s unclear whether Russian interference in the affair, through social media buys or other means, made a difference. Many people in Britain long have had reservations about integration and complaints about the EU, so the outcome did not come as a shot from the dark.

At the same time, Russia was in favour of Britain’s leaving the EU as a means of putting the cat among the pigeons among the EU members, which include former satellites of the former Soviet Union.

Russia has also interfered in recent elections in France, Germany and the United States. It has showed itself capable of weighing in both through media and through technological capacities in the field of communications, hacking into innerparty communications and, less clearly, voting mechanisms.

Negotiations between British and EU representatives over Brexit, which still has the support of the British public, is giving the U.K.’s political leadership, including Prime Minister Theresa May, fits.

If nothing else, Putin has to be wringing his hands with glee at both the intra-British quarrelling over Brexit and the tension occasioned by the negotiations over Brexit between the British and the rest of the Europeans — just as he must be smiling at the energy Americans continue to expend battling each other over Donald Trump’s election.