The Russia Conundrum

The noxiousness of such a recasting of the US democratic model and its toxicity for world peace was evident from the January 2021 events in Washington, DC. The storming of the US Capitol and the need for thousands of National Guardsmen to ‘protect law- makers from the American people’ played into Putin’s hands. It allowed Russian state media to decry the US political system as riddled with double standards. ‘The problem is that America’s views of its own democracy … are quite different from when they are applied to other countries,’ reported Russian state television. The theme of US hypocrisy trended on Russian social media, including jokes about alleged American involvement in fomenting political revolts in former Soviet states. ‘Because of international travel restrictions,’ one post read, ‘it has been announced that this year the United States of America will be staging a coup at home.’ ‘Why did the Washington coup fail?’ asked another. ‘Because there wasn’t a US embassy on hand to provide tactical support…’

The departure of Donald Trump in 2021 opened the way for change, and a recognition of the benefits that can flow from a reset in East–West relations. But the undermining of Western liberal democracy seemed to have emboldened Putin. Far from engaging with the new administration, he stepped up his campaign of aggression with a series of damaging cyberattacks on key infrastructure targets in North America and Western Europe. In May 2021, ransomware operations carried out by criminals reportedly linked to the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service disrupted the largest fuel pipeline in the United States, leading to shortages across the east coast, the shutdown of fuel stations, panic buying and the cancellation of American Airlines flights. The White House was still debating how to respond to the SolarWinds hack, which stole data from multiple branches of the US federal government, as well as from NATO, Microsoft and the European Parliament, when further cyberattacks in June shut down everything from the Republican National Committee to kindergartens in New Zealand and supermarkets in Sweden.

US Capitol under siege on 6 January 2021

The scale of the onslaught forced the issue to the top of President Joe Biden’s agenda. When he met Putin in Geneva a week later, he gave him a list of 16 areas of critical infrastructure that should be exempt from cyberattacks. Putin nodded, smiled and did nothing. Biden pledged that the Russian attacks would ‘not go unanswered’, but his national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, conceded that options were limited. He hoped a mix of public measures and private cyber- retaliation might force ‘a broad strategic discussion with the Russians’, but acknowledged that stiffer penalties were problematic. Economic sanctions had shown little evidence of success and there were few potentially effective sanctions left to impose. ‘I actually believe that measures that are understood by the Russians, but may not be visible to the broader world, are likely to be the most effective in clarifying what the United States believes is in bounds and out of bounds, and what we are prepared to do in response.’