Around the time of the annexation of Crimea in March 2014, Russia’s leadership came to a pivotal conclusion: They had the resources and opportunity to directly influence politics in the West. That spawned a campaign to support and create influential political organizations in Europe with financial and political aid from Moscow. The ultimate aim was to put the United States and the European Union under pressure, and to help elect European governments that would recognize the annexation of Crimea as legal – just as France’s right-wing populist candidate Marine Le Pen recently did in an interview with CNN. Legitimizing Russia’s move in Crimea would mean a step toward lifting sanctions, after all.

The Kremlin’s strategy swung into gear at the height of Europe’s migration crisis in 2015. Extremist and populist parties gained traction with anti-immigration messages, planting the seeds of skepticism and doubt concerning the EU – and Moscow stood behind them. It was opportunistic but successful. Nationalist movements that were once considered fringe groups made significant strides in some EU countries, threatening to undermine the European project.

Russia made no secret of its support for Donald Trump in the US elections either. President Vladimir Putin publicly heaped compliments upon Trump; before his brief time in office, National Security Adviser Michael Flynn was paid handsomely to speak at a 2015 RT (formerly Russia Today) dinner, where he was seated next to Putin; at the Russian Embassy in Washington, staffers reportedly met with members of Trump’s campaign team. The most brazen act, however, came when hackers linked to Russia’s secret service intercepted the Democratic National Committee’s email servers, targeting Hillary Clinton and campaign chairman John Podesta and flooding the media with compromising material.

Russia’s IT industry is hardly considered advanced, but these hackers were highly skilled. Using them is part of a larger strategy to build a powerful tool that allows the Kremlin to wield great influence and quash opposition. In a country where censorship is increasingly commonplace, social media and video blogs alone offer the opposition a platform to expose corruption and cronyism. It is no wonder, then, that Moscow is increasingly clamping down on Internet freedoms. The government has used a sweeping anti-terrorism law to massively expand the legal framework of what is allowed and curtail civil society and political engagement online. In June 2016 a new law was passed that forces mobile phone operators to store the calls and text messages of Russian citizens, and security authorities can request access to encrypted correspondence. The Kremlin also has an array of tools at its disposal to block dissident websites, all without judicial oversight.

Deepening Persecution

Meanwhile, the state’s persecution of its opponents has deepened. The Russian supervisory body for telecommunications, Roskomnadzor, has blocked several opposition sites, including the Internet newspaper Grani.ru and Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny’s blog on LiveJournal. Activists regularly face criminal charges for their own comments on social media, and even for reposting what others have shared. Some of the accused are sentenced to volunteer in the community; others end up behind bars.

The government wastes no chance to tighten its grip on social media. Pavel Durov, founder of Russia’s largest social networking site VKontakte, says he was fired, forced to cede his company to Putin’s close ally, Igor Sechin, and flee the country. Since then, state media have repeatedly published opposition activists’ private contact information from VKontakte in a bid to discredit them.
The chief ideologist behind the Kremlin’s online strategy is Putin’s Internet adviser, German Klimenko. He has argued in favor of banning foreign social media from Russia entirely and has threatened to block Telegram, Durov’s popular messenger service, because the company refused to move its servers to Russia.

It is important to remember that Russian leadership believes Washington controls the Internet. Putin was quoted in 2014 as saying: “The Internet started as a CIA project and continues to develop as one.” He has promised to invest more in Russian IT companies.

Russia’s obstruction of the Internet has hobbled the country’s IT industry; many of its brightest minds leave the country to find success abroad. Russian Internet companies are so strictly regulated that they struggle to keep up with international competitors. At the same time, a state-sponsored IT industry has emerged. The secret service is working to bring more IT specialists on board. Some are won over by money, while others are forced to work for the state or face criminal charges.

According to a study conducted by Zecurion Analytics, a company that analyzes the global role of cybersecurity in defense budgets, Russia is among the top five countries in cyber spending, along with the US, China, the UK, and South Korea. China’s “hacker army” costs Beijing around $1.5 billion a year and counts some 20,000 “cyber soldiers.” The UK employs 2000 people in cybersecurity and spends $450 million. South Korea invests $400 million in about 700 people, while Russia’s program cost $300 million and employs around a thousand people.

Opposition as Guinea Pigs

The very technology that has driven innovation in the West has been used to quell dissent in Russia, helping the Kremlin collect information on individuals and organizations, vilify independent politicians, and launch politically-motivated investigations against critics.

In 2011 and 2012, the Gmail accounts of both Navalny and his wife were hacked and years of private email correspondence went public. Navalny says around ninety percent of the emails were genuine while some ten percent were fabricated. It was the start of a large-scale campaign to undermine Navalny. State media networks featured daily programs picking apart Navalny’s emails to colleagues, employees, friends, and family, with Kremlin-friendly experts providing analysis. It was a brazen attempt to slander Russia’s best-known opposition politician.

The hacker attack behind Navalny’s email leak clearly violated his right to privacy, which is protected under the Russian constitution. But authorities argued Navalny was being investigated for his communications with an advisor, Nikita Belykh, governor of the western Kirov Oblast. Their communication caught the eye of investigators and led to trumped-up charges of embezzlement. Navalny was found guilty and lost his right to run for office. The European Court of Human Rights criticized the ruling as arbitrary, and it was later annulled.

The spokesman for the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation Vladimir Markin went so far as to admit that Navalny’s conviction was political: “Politics certainly play a role in these proceedings, and it has to do with the defendant. He is trying with all his might to attract attention and provoke the power of the state,” Markin said in an interview.

Andrey Pivovarov, an opposition leader in St. Petersburg, recently saw his account on VKontakte’s messenger service hacked. His emails, too, were analyzed in great detail on state TV, and his criticism of other opposition activists, expressed in private, were published shortly before a large demonstration. It was a bold-faced plot to divide Russia’s protest organizations and demoralize their supporters.

A Hybrid War

The strategy worked so well against its own opposition that Moscow started to employ it further afield for geopolitical gains. The emails won from the US Democratic National Committee hack were handed over to WikiLeaks; after the election, US intelligence agencies made public their conclusion that the attacks were carried out at the behest of Russian leadership, with direct orders from Putin.

Of course, Russia’s secret service was not entirely responsible for the outcome of the US election. Donald Trump’s shock victory was rooted in the intrinsic ills roiling American society. In fact, Putin probably did not expect that Trump would actually win. There is, however, no doubt that the Kremlin attempted to interfere in the campaign.

Putin is pursuing a type of hybrid warfare with the West. Attacks are carried out under the cloak of secrecy and encryption so the Kremlin can officially distance itself from illicit activities. Putin believes that by demonstrating his power to the West, their governments will become more accommodating.

The US has maintained its sanctions on Russia and stepped up rhetoric, but that has done little to bring an end to the Kremlin’s manipulation. In France, Russia’s secret service supported Marine Le Pen and used strategies learned from the US election campaign to target pro-European centrist Emmanuel Macron. He has been critical of Russia, and in February 2017 Macron’s aides accused Russia of repeatedly attempting to hack their candidate and his En Marche! movement’s website.

Humpty Dumpty

For the Kremlin, hacker attacks are one of the most efficient ways to undercut opponents; Western countries are still struggling to identify the best way to counter attack. The Obama administration expelled 35 Russian diplomats before leaving the White House, imposing sanctions on high-ranking Russian intelligence agents and their private IT companies as well.

But this Kremlin strategy has backfired. Factions within the government have employed hackers to win the upper hand in internal power struggles. In 2014 the prominent Humpty Dumpty group leaked information to the public about Russian officials and state ministries. Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, his deputy Arkady Dvorkovich, Putin adviser Vladislav Surkov, and Timur Prokopenko, a high-ranking official in the Kremlin’s interior administration, were all targeted.

The leaked information blew the cover off the government’s corruption and rampant abuse of power, and Humpty Dumpty was promptly branded as opposition. Yet in 2016 it emerged that the hackers were connected to the FSB intelligence service, which acted, according to the hacking group, as a “handler.” Nearly every member of the group was arrested during the investigation, including Sergei Mikhailov, the deputy head of the agency, and Dmitry Dokuchaev, another FSB officer.

Humpty Dumpty aside, there has been much hand-wringing in the West over how to counter Russian cyber attacks. It is important to accept that almost every message sent online can be made public. The Russian opposition has long since come to the conclusion that the only effective way to protect itself is maximum transparency – in other words, do not send anything in an email you would not be willing to repeat in public. It is a strategy that only goes so far, however. If the Kremlin no longer has access to incriminating material to ruin opponents, it will simply fabricate news.

Read more in the Berlin Policy Journal App – May/June 2017 issue.

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© REUTERS/Maxim Zmeyev

Mr. Yashin, President Vladimir Putin and his United Russia party swept September’s parliamentary elections. From the outside, it looks like Russia is united behind Putin. Is that true? You know, I’ve lived in Russia all my life, and I notice that people are often seduced by the Putin they see on TV, including you. The reality is, people live very difficult lives in Russia. We have all sorts of economic and social problems. Many Russians do support Putin, but not because he’s a really good president. They support him because they see no alternative. All the propaganda, pressure on the media, pressure on the opposition – Putin spent the last 16 years making sure there was no alternative. That’s one of the most significant achievements of his time in office.
At the end of these 16 years you can really see that Putin is a dictator. Alexander Lukashenko said a very funny thing: he said, “You know, now I’m not the last dictator of Europe.” True enough! And if you look closely at the last presidential and parliamentary elections, you notice that people didn’t turn out. It was the first time in modern Russian history where less than 50 percent of voters cast their ballots. That’s the real outcome. People didn’t vote. They just don’t believe in politics, don’t believe they can change anything.

You’ve just published a report documenting the staggering extent of corruption within United Russia. What kind of impact does that have? The view that the Putin regime is immensely corrupt has now been widely accepted in the West, but do ordinary Russians get this information too, and do they act on it? It’s just like anywhere else – Russians don’t like corruption, they don’t agree with it, and they don’t want to accept it. But people in Russia don’t believe they can do anything about it. For a long time, people here were told you can never change the Russian system, you never can change the Russian mentality, that corruption was always part of Russia and it always will be. My colleagues and I don’t agree; we want to fight corruption, we want to inspire people to stand up to it. That’s why I publish my reports, and that’s why Alexei Navalny publishes his investigations into corruption. We’re trying to show our people what’s actually happening in our country.
The Russian prime minister tells pensioners, “We’re really sorry, we don’t have any money for you. Try to hang in there, good luck to you.” But at the same time, we see villas and yachts, castles and expensive watches. We know they have the money. We know they steal it from budgets, from oil and gas – they spend it on themselves, not their people. And that’s our message to Russians.

How much impact did the Panama Papers have? They uncovered astonishing amounts of money stashed in offshore accounts, around $2 billion linked to Putin … Yes, it’s very big. We have information, we have lots of documents and facts, we have lots of arguments – but the problem is, we have no way of communicating with people. We can’t go on TV, we can’t take part in debates, and we can’t go to big radio stations. What we do have is the internet, social media, and we have a number of small regional media outlets like Echo Moskwy and Meduza in Latvia. That’s it, though. It’s nothing compared to Putin’s propaganda machine. It’s like David vs. Goliath. All we can do try to tell people what’s actually happening. I publish my reports, make copies, and go out to talk to people. I hand them copies of my reports and say, “Please read this, you should know about this. It’s interesting information.” I go to Saint Petersburg, Nizhny Novgorod, Yekaterinburg and I talk to anyone who’s willing to listen. It’s very old school but that’s all we can do. And I believe that step by step, person by person, we will create a critical mass.

Before the last presidential election, we saw a protest movement emerge almost out of nowhere in Moscow and other cities. But after the vote it all seemed to fall apart. Why? There are various reasons. The first is, people lost hope. They’d go to rallies because they really did believe that if they went to this rally and the next and the next, something had to give. But Putin’s regime is very strong and very aggressive, and it targeted the protestors. Many of them went to jail – there are more than a hundred political prisoners in Russia today. Belarus only has two or three political prisoners, while we have more than a hundred behind bars, Russians and Ukrainians. So people got scared, a lot of people lost hope. Some left the country to go to the United States or Europe.
And Crimea was a turning point because part of the protest movement actually started to support Putin after Crimea. In 2011 and 2012, they saw Putin as a thief, just a corrupt dictator. But after the annexation of Crimea in 2014 they changed their tune. They said, “He may be corrupt, that’s true. But he’s bringing back Russian land. He’ll go down in history for restoring Russian territory. So if he steals some money, it doesn’t matter – we have Crimea back.”

That was always the suspicion, that Crimea was annexed to regain popularity at home. That’s right, and it’s a big problem for us, because Putin’s propaganda team made Crimea the central campaign issue in elections. For example, when I debate with people from United Russia and bring up corruption with facts, they almost appear a bit bored, and then ask, “Okay, but what about Crimea. Do you consider it part of Russia or not?” That’s typical of the political debate today.

Some of the propaganda targets you personally – accuses you of being a western agent of some sort. How do you respond to that? People who buy into that don’t want to listen to real arguments. Normal people don’t believe it because the reasoning behind it is just plain stupid. For example, there was a report on the Russian channel NTV that portrayed me as a Swedish intelligence agent. They showed a set of “documents” with an agreement between the Swedish government and myself – that I would send information and they would pay me something like €5000 for every document. The “journalist” doing the report even admits that there are no signatures that actually verify the documents “but experts are certain they’re real.” And then they bring on an “expert” who says he has no doubts about the validity of the documents. Then, the other piece of proof they used was video of me entering the Swedish embassy with a woman. “Here we see Yashin going to the ambassador to receive his instructions.” But the interesting fact is that this woman was my mom. We were going to the embassy to get her a visa. She was joking with me the whole time, she said: “Ilya, you are the dumbest spy in the world – you’re the only spy who goes to get instructions with his mother.”

You’ve taken a close look at what’s happening in eastern Ukraine and completed the report Boris Nemtsov, who was murdered within earshot of the Kremlin’s walls, was unable to finish. How do you see the situation today? Is the Minsk agreement dead? The Minsk agreement isn’t working, that’s clear. But this has become something of a frozen conflict – it’s not peace, but it’s also not war. It’s a frozen conflict, and that’s fine for Putin. Because he can use that as a tool to put pressure on the Ukrainian government. And Kiev understands very well that Putin can wield that pressure anytime if he takes the gas…

… and sets it on fire? He could torch it and we’d have the next war – that’s the pressure. He says, “Okay guys, you can do whatever you want. But if you cross a line, I can create big problems for you.” And Germany and France don’t really want to find a solution. They have other problems – Syria, immigration, the economy. They don’t want to solve this problem. They wanted to freeze this conflict and they’ve succeeded in doing that. Actually, it’s a compromise for them, even for Poroshenko and Putin. It’s cynical, but it’s a compromise for all of them.

Some Western countries are discussing fresh sanctions on Russia for its actions in Syria. This is a key part of what happened in eastern Ukraine: Putin realized he can play the geopolitical game, and Western leaders accepted it. That’s the biggest issue. They stood aside and let Putin instrumentalize geopolitics to put them under pressure, and he did. That’s why he decided to get involved in Syria – there was no Western response. None. Not for aggression in Ukraine, not for Crimea, not even for shooting down passenger flight MH17. Nothing.

What would have been the proper response? A political response! We want to bring everyone who was responsible for the war in Ukraine to account, including generals, the minister of defense, secret service officials. We’re talking about ten thousand people who have died. Ten thousand.

The EU has reacted by imposing economic sanctions, though many in Germany and Europe want to see them lifted again. Sanctions never work in the shortterm, never. They work in the long run, and we’ll see the result of these policies in a few years. But if the sanctions are lifted now, they’ll amount to nothing; they shouldn’t have been imposed in the first place.
In my opinion, good sanctions are sanctions against specific people – not against the Russian economy or the Russian people in general, but against Putin’s officials. We should impose sanctions against members of governments, against army officers, against secret services officials, against propaganda agents. That’s more effective than economic sanctions.
Take my friend, Boris Nemtsov. He was instrumental in changing the Jackson-Vanik [trade] amendment in the US – it’s an American sanctions law dating back to Soviet times and a thorn in Russian-US relations; Putin of course wanted to get rid of it but there was opposition in the US. Nemtsov had an idea: he went to Congress, to the Senate and convinced them it was better to target bad individuals than the Russian economy or the Russian people in general. It worked, and they changed the Jackson-Vanik amendment to the Magnitsky Act. It was Nemtsov’s idea and it was a good strategy.

You think Europe should follow suit? Yes, sure. Because when you slap sanctions on the economy, Putin can use that for his propaganda against the West and against the opposition. He uses it to mobilize people, to show that the West is against us. But placing sanctions on individuals makes it hard to mobilize people because the measures only target one person – an official who stole money in Russia and spent it elsewhere. It’s targeting the villa in Miami, the yacht in France – and that’s smart, very smart.

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