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.”
Putin feels justified undercutting the United States and the West, just as he believes they undermined the Soviet Union, which is why he nurtures a sense of grievance and need for national revenge against the West and its Russian supporters. The Russian president also propagates a messianic air of superiority over Western liberalism while indulging in tit-for-tat payback with the U.S. as his main liberal adversary.
Putin’s actions in Crimea and Georgia reveal his opportunistic attitude toward borders and separatism. He annexes territories and reshuffles borders to expand his sphere of influence, while promoting the same kind of regional separatism abroad, even here in America. At his most bold, Putin and his media promote disintegration of the United States through small and dubious grassroots efforts to support independence and reorganization of the American Southwest, Texas, and California — just as, Putin alleges, the West did with former Soviet satellites. Tit for tat, he might argue.
Putin relies upon “political technologists” trained in the 1990s to counter free elections in Russia and neighboring states. In the 1990s, U.S. groups such as the International Republican Institute and its Democratic Party counterpart, NDI, were invited to assist with organizing free elections in Russia, but were expelled from Moscow not long after Putin rose to his full power. Both party institutes, for good measure, were branded as “undesirable” by the Russian Prosecutor General just before the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
Going into the midterm elections, we should expect that Putin has already tried to infiltrate political parties and campaigns to subvert the election process. If he has not already, Putin can be expected to focus on groups for parallel vote counts, public opinion polling, media analysis, election observation, and promotion of public policies in the U.S. that serve his needs, such as America’s withdrawal from NATO.
How do we stop Putin?
With shrewd investments before the next presidential election, we can slow efforts to infiltrate our election system and influence voter registration and turnout operations. If we fail — and many will say we will — we still can carry out meaningful election improvements, while subjecting Putin and his personal allies to deeper sanctions.
For example: Sorry, no posh boarding schools or London flats for budding oligarchs.
The West should bat down Putin’s interference across American and Western domestic politics by expanding public-private partnerships and the types of private efforts that led to the recent identification of Moscow’s fake websites; broadening sanctions on those who sponsor and organize attacks; and increasing counter-intelligence efforts against Moscow-aligned groups that try to subvert our campaigns and elections.
Beyond Putin’s normal level of election mischief, we shouldn’t expect too much from Russia in response to any of these actions. Putin knows he’ll be around for more than a few American presidents. In turn, he’ll blame others and then embrace, fund, ridicule, and reject Western leaders, as he believes we did with his old boss, Boris Yeltsin, and the last of the Soviet premiers, Mikhail Gorbachev.
Christopher S. Siddall, international management consultant and election systems specialist. Mary Catherine Andrews, former U.S. National Security Council Director for Democracy.
