Russian President Vladimir Putin will not stop trying to influence democratic elections like the ones the U.S. will be holding tomorrow. Despite public and diplomatic warnings, Russian intelligence continues to assault U.S. and European election systems and political parties with the explicit objective of undermining public confidence in election outcomes.

After so many years in power, Putin’s understanding of the world is plain. He’s schooled in revisionist history about the Soviet Union and burned by his personal experience in the breakdown of East Germany. In 2005, he famously termed the dissolution of the Soviet Union the “major geopolitical disaster of the century,” setting off “an epidemic of disintegration [which] infected Russia itself.” Just this March, Putin told a public forum in Kaliningrad that the one event he would change is “the collapse of the Soviet Union.”