Yes, I know - everyone (including me) is tired of Putin this and Putin that. But this afternoon I was reading in a back issue of
The Atlantic a story entitled "Putin's Game."
It wasn’t a strategic operation,” says Andrei Soldatov, a Russian journalist with deep sources in the security services, who writes
about the Kremlin’s use of cybertechnology. “Given what everyone on the
inside has told me,” he says, hacking the U.S. political system “was a
very emotional, tactical decision. People were very upset about the
Panama Papers.”
In the spring of 2016, an international consortium of journalists began publishing revelations from a vast trove of documents
belonging to a Panamanian law firm that specialized in helping its
wealthy foreign clients move money, some of it ill-gotten, out of their
home countries and away from the prying eyes of tax collectors. (The
firm has denied any wrongdoing.) The documents revealed
that Putin’s old friend Sergei Roldugin, a cellist and the godfather to
Putin’s elder daughter, had his name on funds worth some $2 billion. It
was an implausible fortune for a little-known musician, and the
journalists showed that these funds were likely a piggy bank for Putin’s
inner circle. Roldugin has denied any wrongdoing, but the Kremlin was
furious about the revelation. Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, whose
wife was also implicated, angrily ascribed the reporting to “many former
State Department and CIA employees” and to an effort to “destabilize”
Russia ahead of its September 2016 parliamentary elections.
The
argument was cynical, but it revealed a certain logic: The financial
privacy of Russia’s leaders was on par with the sovereignty of Russia’s
elections. “The Panama Papers were a personal slight to Putin,” says
John Sipher, a former deputy of the CIA’s Russia desk. “They think we
did it.” Putin’s inner circle, Soldatov says, felt “they had to respond
somehow.” According to Soldatov’s reporting, on April 8, 2016, Putin
convened an urgent meeting of his national-security council; all but two
of the eight people there were veterans of the KGB. Given the secrecy
and timing of this meeting, Soldatov believes it was then that Putin
gave the signal to retaliate.
The
original aim was to embarrass and damage Hillary Clinton, to sow
dissension, and to show that American democracy is just as corrupt as
Russia’s, if not worse. “No one believed in Trump, not even a little
bit,” Soldatov says. “It was a series of tactical operations. At each
moment, the people who were doing this were filled with excitement over
how well it was going, and that success pushed them to go even further.”
Way more at the longread link.
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ReplyDeleteSounds plausible.
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