Russian Aggression Beyond Ukraine

Panelists discuss Russia's broader strategy beyond Ukraine, including efforts to expand the conflict through cyberattacks and arson across Europe, as well as possible election interference in the United States.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Good afternoon. Welcome to the Council on Foreign Relations meeting about Russian Aggression Beyond Ukraine. I’m Dina Temple-Raston, and I’m the host and managing editor of CLICK HERE, which is a podcast from Recorded Future News. And I’ll be presiding over today’s discussion. If my name sounds familiar, you might have heard me on NPR for years. So if it makes you feel more comfortable when I speak to close your eyes—(laughter)—it’s totally fine.

So I’d like to welcome our CFR members attending in person here in D.C. and virtually over Zoom. And I want to just start by setting the table a little bit.

You know, back in July, U.S. military bases across Europe were placed on high alert for the first time in about a decade. The U.S. had received intelligence that Russian-backed actors were considering carrying out sabotage attacks against U.S. military personnel and facilities. And while that might have caught the attention of Americans at the time, in fact there had been small acts of sabotage and arson that had been popping up all over Europe since the beginning of the year. Just as an example, in Riga, someone set fire to the Museum of Occupation. In the U.K. they found two men with links to Russian intelligence who were charged with trying to set fire to a warehouse that was filled with aid for Ukraine. So we’re going to try and put this all in context for—in our panel today, specifically Russia’s efforts to broaden the conflict outside of Ukraine. And while individually all these acts seem not to be important, when you bring them all together, they’re part of Russia’s hybrid war against the West.

So to help sort us through—help us sort through all of this we have, on the end, Max Bergmann. He’s the director of the Europe, Russian, and Eurasia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Next to me is Adam Segal. He’s the director of the Digital and Cyberspace Policy Program here at the Council.

On virtually with us, but with us in spirit, is Keir Giles, who’s over at Chatham House. And he’s written several books on the subject, including Russia’s War on Everybody, and a new book that’s about to come out, entitled Who Will Defend Europe: An Awakening Russia and a Sleeping Continent.

And last but not least, we have Andrea Kendall-Taylor. She’s a senior fellow and director of the Transatlantic Security Program at the Center for New American Security, CNAS, here in Washington.

So please join me in welcoming our panel here today. (Applause.)

So, Max, I wanted to start with you. I think for someone who isn’t in Europe, it’s easy to miss all these isolated acts of sabotage. Was there one act in particular that made people realize that they were connected and maybe Russia was behind them?

BERGMANN: It’s a great question. And the one that I sort of immediately would go to is actually one where we’re not 100 percent clear that the Russians were responsible. And that’s the destruction of the Nord Stream 1, and partially the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. I think it’s still contested over, you know, the responsibility. There’s been a reporting that maybe the Ukrainians did it. And, you know, I could see the Ukrainians, perhaps in a rush of blood, taking action. But what happened, I think, if you sort of take a step back, that was, I think, the real transition where suddenly the war in Ukraine came to Europe.

If you look back at the sanctions regime that has been set up, Russian gas was never sanctioned by the Europeans because it was such a crucial, vital energy supply, right, for Europe to keep its homes heated during the winter, to keep the power supply on. And if you look at a lot of the German business commentary, particularly in the spring of 2022 when discussion of sanctioning Russian gas and doing sort of a total ban—similar to what the Europeans did, actually, when it came to oil, where they effectively did do an oil embargo—the reaction from the German business community was, oh, my God. You know, what are you talking about? This will be absolutely devastating to us. This will lead to a great depression, not just in Germany but in Europe.

And the end result of the explosion of the pipelines—I mean, Putin had already stopped flowing the gas into Europe. But was, I think, an actual tremendous response by the Europeans that we oftentimes overlook. We’re very keen to focus on our weaknesses, and how weak we are, and how divided we are. But here was a situation where the price of energy absolutely skyrocketed. If you went to Europe in the winter of 2022-2023, what you saw was Europeans, you know, turning the lights off, or dimming the lights, putting on sweaters. The power bill was really high.

Now that made European voters very mad. Probably helped—it definitely helped fuel some of the far-right movement that we’re seeing. But what we didn’t really see is a turn against the war, a turn against Ukraine. And even now that there’s increased speculation and reporting that Ukrainians may have been responsible, no one really wants to talk about that. And I think that’s a good thing, because what we have actually demonstrated is, in some ways, the degree of resilience that European societies have.

When I think about Russia’s actions, I think they have—in some ways, we have very little to deter them right now. We have sort of hit our deterrence button again and again. Or, we’ve released whatever leverage we have in terms of sanctions, in terms of military support for Ukraine, in terms of evicting Russian diplomats, i.e., Russian spies, in embassies. We’ve taken all these, sort of, traditional steps. And so now essentially the gloves are off for Russia. And so, as you mentioned, you have arson attacks across Europe. You have assassinations of a Russian defector in Spain.

And I think these are sort of events that Europe recognizes are happening, NATO recognizes is happening. And what is helpful is—I don’t think there’s an ability to sort of squash this, but there’s a degree of focus that I don’t think was there pre-2022, and maybe not so much pre-the Nord Stream explosions as well. And I think this is a problem that is not going to be defeated. It’s a problem that has to be managed. And when we talk about societal resilience, in some ways what we’re talking about is a society where our government and our democratic structures are too strong that if Russia takes an action, we quickly are able to move on and figure out a way to respond.

And the thing that we need to start thinking about is what can we do to actually deter any sort of big escalation of attacks? What are the things that we can do to actually cause real pain vis-à-vis Russia? And the obvious answer is in Ukraine. But then it becomes, well, if you can do things in Ukraine, why aren’t you already doing those things vis-à-vis Ukraine? And so this is, I think, going to be a very tough problem for policymakers going forward.

TEMPLE-RASTON: And this is where we’ll—as our conversation goes on, this is where we’ll end up, in terms of what we can do in response. But in the meantime, Adam, let me ask you. You know, we’ve been watching a lot of low-grade cyberattacks on Europe and Ukraine’s neighbors since the invasion. Have you been seeing something recently that seems different or new?

SEGAL: So we’ve been seeing actions in three types of cyberoperations. So intel gathering, which has happened from before the war and continues, and it happens on a whole range of NATO and European targets. Preparation for and conducting disruptive and destructive attacks. So sometimes going after transportation networks, water, using ransomware for disruptive purposes. I think we’ve seen a change there, that the cadence of those attacks seems to be going up and some of the actors seem to be blurring about who they would be. You know, there’s a group called Sandworm which is gained a lot of attention, and Andy Greenberg wrote a great book on. And they now seem to have a spinoff which is less known about and maybe more tied to some criminal actors. So I think that would be a—

TEMPLE-RASTON: And they’re called?

SEGAL: They’re called the cyber Russian—Cyber Army of Russia Reborn.

TEMPLE-RASTON: OK, easy to say.

SEGAL: All these names are impossible to keep track. (Laughter.) And, you know, all the—all the security companies call them thirteen different things. But and then, third, we’re seeing information influence operations. And, you know, here that the traditional hack and leak. So, you know, going after politicians, going after Moldova and other states that are having referendum. And then online influence operations. The most recent one that was exposed was Doppelganger. And so using fake websites to spread news and fake stories to undermine support for Ukraine and democracy.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Right. And we’ve also seen just recently news that the GRU and a gang called Evil Corp, not the Mr. Robot version—(laughter)—have more connections than we thought before. Can you talk just a little bit about that?

SEGAL: Yeah, so this is—you know, when you talk about Russia and the connection to the criminal hackers, ransomware gangs, there’s always been an assumption that they are—if not tolerated, that there are connections between the FSB, the SBR, and the GRU, and the hacking groups. We’ve seen previous cases of this. There was a hack of Yahoo in the 2010s. Those guys were working for—or, were eventually recruited to the FSB. But the most recent statements from U.K. and the U.S. talking about Evil Corp, you know, essentially Maksim Yakubets’ father-in-law is an intelligence agent, and seemed to be very actively involved in protecting them from earlier indictments, and then tasking them for tasks. So we’ve all kind of known about this, but here is some specific evidence about how it actually plays itself out.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Yeah, one of the other things they said is that, in fact, I think his father is a professional money launderer. So there’s quite a—it’s set up almost like a criminal family.

SEGAL: It’d be a great family to marry into. (Laughter.)

TEMPLE-RASTON: Yeah. So, Keir, let me ask you, and bring you on here, please. And thank you for joining us. I wonder if you could put this in a wider context for us. A lot of these attacks we’ve seen, the physical attacks in Europe, seem pretty amateurish. And there’s a belief that the GRU may be paying some proxies to do this. Can you talk a little bit about that? Maybe this new special activity division we’ve heard about that might be doing some of this recruiting?

GILES: That’s right. It’s a new branch of the GRU that is being blamed for a lot of this activity. In part, it’s a spin off from the Unit 29155, which become—which has become notorious for gathering together a motley crew of psychopaths and cyber geeks to wreak mayhem across Europe in previous decades. But its role has supposedly expanded. And a lot of the attributed events that we’ve seen so far are being pinned on this organization.

Now, I think there’s a bit of a risk there that we may be in the same situation as we had when looking at the early stages of Russian online information operations. That if there’s a label, if there’s a name to which you can attach the blame for some of these things, then a lot more incidents get hung on them. And that tends to obscure that there’s a much broader ecosystem across all the different intelligence agencies that are trying to do us harm.

But Adam just referred to this nexus between the intelligence agencies and the criminal organizations. That has been more or less traditional in the cyber sphere. Now we’re seeing it expand into physical interventions across Europe, where the GRU and whoever else is behind this is not able to directly influence events in the target countries. Partly because, of course, they have been expelled from those countries. They no longer have such a physical footprint. They are reaching out to recruit online amateurs, proxies, criminals, disaffected local citizens, to carry out attacks on their behalf.

That is one of the reasons why it is so apparently amateurish. But, of course, if you are an intelligence agency for a country that’s already decided as a rogue state, you don’t really care how many of these operations go wrong because even a very low success rate in recruiting and then in carrying out the attack is still achieving your objectives.

But there’s one thing it’s worth stressing when we talk about this pattern of attacks across Europe. That, so far, there’s a mismatch between how this is being described by national security authorities across Europe and the actual scale of the incidents that we’ve detected. Just today we’ve had the EU and, here in the U.K., the head of the security service saying that the mission of these Russian intelligence services has been established as creating sustained mayhem on European and British streets. And looking at what’s actually been reported in terms of what has happened, you could be forgiven for wondering what he’s talking about. Because these attacks that are publicly known about are just pinpricks. They’re relatively insignificant.

If you go to the warehouse that was the main incident that’s been referred to here in the U.K., you would barely notice that anything has happened. So that speaks, I think, to the fact that there is a great deal going on beyond the surface that has not yet reached the public domain, particularly because you have these warnings today after what looks like a bit of a lull in activity after the spike that you referred to in your opening statement. So I’m waiting to see how much more comes out as, for example, prosecutions come to court, as the details of indictments come to light, and we see more of the pattern of activity that’s going on across Europe.

TEMPLE-RASTON: And when you talk about details, you mean, for example, in an indictment we see the connection between, say, Russian intelligence and maybe some local criminal elements who did these attacks?

GILES: For example, yes. Now, in different countries, of course, you have different degrees of transparency about what’s going on. Traditionally, the frontline states, particularly Estonia and Latvia, are overt by default about releasing information about the campaigns that are being waged against their countries. And so it’s from those countries that you actually see the greatest detail about how now the Russian intelligence agencies are going about recruiting these proxies and bringing people in to carry out attacks on their behalf.

In other places, of course, it is far more discreet, it’s far more covert, and you may not even get the information even after the detailed investigations come to light in court proceedings, because those court proceedings may be held in camera. So it’s, as ever, a patchwork across Europe of different degrees of transparency, which in some cases serves to actually conceal the extent of the problem rather than bringing it to light.

TEMPLE-RASTON: So I want you to talk a little bit about that, Andrea. I wonder if you can sort of kick this forward for us. We’ve been very focused on Russia, Ukraine, the war, Europe. But there’s this other thing that you’ve been talking about in your writing and study, which is this axis of upheaval—which is China, Russia, North Korea—China, Russia, North Korea, Iran. Can you talk a little bit about that?

KENDALL-TAYLOR: Sure. I mean, I think all of these examples kind of draw in elements, where you could imagine how these other actors play a role. So thinking of like some of the hybrid things you talked about, just recently there was the Chinese ship, the Newnew Polar Bear that came in and cut the underwater sea cables. So that is, again, a lot on the outside that we don’t know exactly about what happened. But it draws in China, and it raises the important question of whether or not China is now getting in the game. Thinking about some of the disinformation and information operations, it’s notable how China is also getting in the game as well. I think it had long been conventional wisdom that, you know, China was primarily focused on pushing narratives about China’s peaceful rise. And now they’re using AI and other things to supercharge their disinformation operations.

So, I mean, the way I generally see it is that Russia really has been the critical catalyst for the coalescing of these actors. And looking forward, you know, what—the key question for the next administration will be, like, how do we right-size the Russia challenge? What role in national security should Russia play? And one of the important dynamics that I think we have to think about is Russia’s—the risks that come to the United States as a result of Russia’s willingness to so brazenly and overtly challenge the United States. And the more that Russia does in places—with all of these sabotage campaigns and other things, it’s basically an icebreaker that’s paving the way for other actors to get in the game. And if we can’t figure out an appropriate response, then my argument would be that other actors will be ever more emboldened to do the same.

And so generally, like, the cost of resisting Russia will only rise. The United States—what we do today to push back on all of these various activities that we’re talking about will directly shape and influence the nature of the Russian threat that we face tomorrow. So we do need to spend time talking about what to do with these hybrid threats. It’s not hard for me to imagine that, you know, if Russia had been successful in assassinating the head of Rheinmetall, and there had been a somewhat lackluster response, what’s next? Would it be the head of a U.S. defense company?

Those are the things we have to talk about. When they’re moving the buoys or doing other things, what happens, for example, if—in some of these arsons—if citizens of a European country are killed? And then said country comes to NATO under Article Four and says, we feel threatened, and there’s a lackluster response. Then we’re getting ever closer to Putin’s objective of undermining NATO. So I do—as you said, this is going to be a key challenge for policymakers moving forward. I think there’s a lot more we need to think about in terms of how we respond because what we do in response to the provocations today will really shape what they’re doing tomorrow.

The other piece on that the axis of upheaval. So, of course, there’s this demonstration effect. But the other key critical variable here is the way that Russia is directly enabling our adversaries. And so there has been just a plethora of information talking about, yes, we know what Russia is getting, but just as important as what Russia gets from Iran, North Korea, and China, is what it’s giving away in return. And we’ve had now senior U.S. officials talking about the fact that Russia is giving China submarine technology, missile technology. We were just talking in the green room, we at CNAS did a report on Russia-China relations back January of 2022. And we tried to forecast, look forward to understand how that defense relationship could evolve into the future.

And the submarine technology and missile technology was at the very outer bounds of what we could imagine that Russia would be willing to do, given the sensitive nature of technology. We’re only two years past that point, and we’re here. And so I think we have to think very hard, both the Russia as an icebreaker and paving the path for others to get into the game, but also its direct enabling of our adversaries in ways that is increasing the military capabilities of all of our adversaries, while at the same time diluting the foreign policy tools that we have to confront them—like sanctions and other things.

TEMPLE-RASTON: And the report, did that also anticipate that Russia might give satellite technology to North Korea?

KENDALL-TAYLOR: No, because at that time we were just on Russia-China. I mean, really, the critical catalyst of this axis of upheaval, in my understanding, has been Russia’s 2022, invasion of Ukraine. And of course, there were some ties and relations between these countries, but that really was the key accelerant in really drawing these countries together. So at the time, that was kind of the side thing. Russia had a much more pragmatic kind of constructive relationship with North Korea. After the invasion, that has all changed.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Go ahead, Max.

BERGMANN: Yeah, just to build on what Andrea said, I think we can see this really clearly with political interference, especially with our election. Russia interfered in the—in the U.S. election in 2016. There was no real response to that interference. I mean, the hack and leak operations, both targeting the DNC, resulted in the head of the DNC having to resign. Obviously, then John Podesta’s emails. But that was a direct interference in U.S. elections in a very direct, in many ways, overt way. And in some ways has paved—has paved the ground for Iran to now hack the Trump campaign. We have a New York City mayor being indicted because of Turkish influence.

Now, some of this is just traditional corruption. Some of this has, you know, happened before. But what I think we’ve seen is that American politics is now seen as sort of an open space, and that we sort of lost a modicum of deterrence. When I think—I think, you know, what sort of confirmed to me in 2016 that that the U.S. and Russia were on a very adversarial path is that Putin interfered in our elections, thinking that Hillary Clinton was going to win and therefore would likely take strong action against him.

And one good news about what I think we’ve seen in the last eight years is we’re not talking that much now about the political interference side, because I think there’s been a degree of societal resilience built up. But I think there are clear weak points. And I think when you look at Germany and the rise of the far right, there’s been lots of allegations and reporting less about the disinformation side, but really more about traditional espionage of a number of political figures or others, both in Germany and Austria, being agents of Russia. So I think we’re in sort of a stronger position when it comes to political interference on one side, when it comes to—in part because our social media space—we now recognize that it’s a cesspool and a disaster, when in 2016 we may not have appreciated that.

TEMPLE-RASTON: So now that we frightened everyone about how this is all moving in that direction, I wanted to sort of end up our conversation, before we go to questions, with how we fight all this. What we’re doing to combat it. And this time around maybe there’s a little more pushback from NSA than there was in 2016. And I wanted to start with you, please, Keir. Could you talk a little bit about what you see are the effective levers to try to make sure that this is cabined?

GILES: Well, first of all, let’s talk again about that patchwork of responses that you have across different countries. And we heard Andrea talk about the attempted—the murder plot against the CEO of Rheinmetall. And the German response to that is very interesting. Compared to other countries, Germany’s reaction is to try to hush it up because the instinctive default reaction is to try not to bring attention to anything which makes relations with Russia worse. Which is a slightly perverse approach when Russia is effectively in a hostile relationship with a country, that their country is still looking to improve relations no matter what. And that is in direct contrast to some of the more assertive responses that you have from other countries.

And it’s an indication that one of the first steps that needs to be taken is greater public awareness of the threat, particularly in those countries which do not see themselves as traditional victims or traditional adversaries of Russia. Like, for example, Ireland, which has been in the headlines just over the last couple of days because of direct Russian political interference, subordinating members of the Dail in parliament. Much to Irish people’s surprise, because they don’t think that they are going to be anywhere near the target list of Russia. So bringing it to people’s notice in order that they are alert, in a way that societies have not been for a number of decades, is absolutely crucial for heading off some of these attacks, especially if they start to scale up in the way that intelligence and security services seem to be predicting.

But then, of course, there’s the global response. The way to actually persuade Russia not to do it in the first place. And there, it’s a simple case of willingness to use whatever leverage Western countries have. Now we don’t see at the moment, at least not publicly reported, any spread of these kinds of attacks to, for example, the continental United States. Although indirectly, of course, the U.S. has been targeted. As you said in your opening remarks, U.S. bases in Germany. And I think that’s partly a byproduct of the fact that the Kremlin is acutely aware that the United States could lift some of the restrictions that it’s placed on how Ukraine uses the weapon systems that have been supplied by the United States. It could do other things that would be distinctly unpalatable to Russia.

The point is whether Western administrations would actually be willing to do that, and demonstrate, as you’ve heard from the other panelists so far, that Russian actions do have consequences. Because if they do not, then we are on not only a slippery slope, but as Andrea pointed out so clearly, one that is accelerating rapidly. Things are moving at a pace that was faster than we anticipated before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and even just a year ago. So deterrence at this point to head off these actions and to make sure that whatever leverage there is is actually employed to dissuade Russia from escalating things further is absolutely crucial. And, as Max pointed out, I think the most obvious place to deploy that leverage is in support of Ukraine.

KENDALL-TAYLOR: Can I add to what Keir said?

TEMPLE-RASTON: Of course.

KENDALL-TAYLOR: Because I think it—first of all, I really like what Keir said about the awareness piece of it. I mean, I think, like, having these conversations between governments and public so that they understand the nature of the threats and challenges that our societies are facing. And Keir is spot on in terms of using our—the leverage that we have. And I think my wish list or dream response to many of these hybrid things would be that the United States and Europe would figure out how to collectivize a response. It’s something that I’ve been thinking quite a lot about. And because to me, the problem seems to be that if there’s an attack on Estonia, it’s Tallinn’s problem to deal with it. When it’s on the U.K., it’s London. When it’s France, it’s Paris. And that’s exactly as Putin would like it, because then the costs are acceptable.

And so we have to figure out—I mean, I think it would be a fantastic exercise if United States and all of our European allies could go through and come up with an inventory of points of leverage. Non-sanctions, because I think we’ve gotten a bit lazy, and, you know, have this—it’s the only tool that we seem to pick up in response to. But, you know, one example I had heard from some Estonian colleagues is they’ll offer that that, for example, the Russian Orthodox Church that sits in the middle of Tallinn, the land is owned by the Estonian government. So there could be something that they could do to confiscate the church. So could we go through and think of all of the religious, cultural, social, different kind of areas—things that the Kremlin would care about and might actually take some notice—take notice.

And then when something happens, there’s a response amongst many allies, coordinated. We know, in the reaction to the Skripal attempted poisoning and assassination, you know, at the time expulsions weren’t as common, but that coordinated response was something that certainly gained Russian notice.

TEMPLE-RASTON: This was the poisoning in the U.K.?

KENDALL-TAYLOR: Yeah, exactly. And there was a—you know, a very effectively coordinated response across multiple governments that I do think successfully got Moscow’s attention. So are there things that we could do to identify some more creative points of leverage, have multiple countries respond, so that we can try to raise the costs in a way that tries to convince the Russians that is not, you know, an effective approach? And because—my conviction is that if we don’t do it, it will only continue. They will grow more risk accepting and they’ll grow more brazen. And it can be something that ultimately does call into question the credibility of Article Five. We don’t want that to happen. And so I do think we need to think harder about how we’re responding.

TEMPLE-RASTON: So I tend to see a lot of things these days through a cyber lens. And I wonder, Adam, if you can talk about what we can do on the cyber front. I mean, should there be more hacking back? Should we be—should NSA be more aggressive? From a journalist’s point of view, should NSA be telling more people about what they’re up to, so that those consequences are clearer? What do you think?

SEGAL: Yeah, so I think we see two buckets of responses. We see the diplomatic coordination of joint attributions and indictments and sanctions. So getting the U.S. and the EU and others to call out actors, do indictments, and expose the things. Which, you know, doesn’t have—it doesn’t have a huge effect on the Russians themselves, right? You know, unless you’re really dumb and you go to Thailand and you—you know, or you go to—

TEMPLE-RASTON: Dalmatian Island. (Laughs.)

SEGAL: You go to some island that has an extradition treaty, it’s not going to have an effect. But it does have an effect, I would say, with other partners, right? It seems to have actually had a pretty good effect when we talked in ASEAN, to countries there about Russian behavior and how it violates norms of how we want to act. So it’s not a deterrent, but I think it has important diplomatic effects. And it also, to go back to the point that both Andrea and Keir were making about letting the public know, right? So if you’re an operator of critical infrastructure, you have to be more aware now that it’s not just espionage. You have to be worried about disruption and possible destructive attacks.

Now, we are conducting a range of activities, as you said. So the NSA and Cyber Command are conducting what are called hunt forward operations. So at the invitation of a country, NSA goes to sit on their networks and help expose malware and attacks there. So exposing the malware, of course, makes it less useful. General Nakasone, who was, you know, head of NSA and Cyber Command, before he left office mentioned that we had conducted some offensive disruptive operations against Russian targets. We don’t really know what that means.

TEMPLE-RASTON: I’m trying to find out. (Laughter.)

SEGAL: Yes. I’ll look forward to that podcast. (Laughter.) That seems to—you know, we don’t really know how much of an effect that has had so far. I think, you know, there was a lot of worry in the cyber realm, or the—you know, people that watch cyber, that those things were going to be escalatory, right? We were going to start hacking back, and that was going to push the Russians to do things that they hadn’t done. That really doesn’t seem to be the case. So, you know, I don’t really know how far we’ve gone, but it seems as if there’s more runway than we expected in kind of disrupting those operations.

But we also don’t really know. You know, when you take down a bunch of botnets, which are, you know, computers that are taken over and controlled for command and control, how long does it take Russian operators to kind of either reconstruct or rebuild? It doesn’t seem to be a significant amount of time, but it, you know, seems to have some slowing effect there.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Got it. So at this time, I’d like to invite members to join our conversation with their questions. And just a reminder, this is on the record. So don’t say anything secret. And we’ll start with somebody in the room, if you’d like to raise your hand. This gentleman in the middle, please. Could someone bring him a microphone? And if you could please identify yourself and your affiliation, that would be lovely.

Q: Anders Åslund, Georgetown University.

Thank you very much. Very interesting. What strikes me is that it is likely now to be actions that are directed more to the population at large. In Finland, eleven water purification plants have been broken into recently. All the energy facilities of importance in Sweden and Norway have been carefully studied by GRU officials with drones. And in Poland, the railways have been repeatedly sabotaged by GRU officers. They have arrested at least seven people for it. And in Vilnius, in Lithuania, the main IKEA shop was put on fire. Should we look more upon expected attempts as massive killing operations, that this is the next to come? Thank you.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Max.

BERGMANN: So I’m a little bit more optimistic, in the sense—not because I put faith in Vladimir Putin’s humanity, but more in that I think Russia has contradictory goals, right? So part of their objectives of all of these operations, I think, is to cause a general sense of chaos and fear, and a degree of deterrence, right? They want to let Western governments know what they can do to our societies to make us sort of on edge, sort of nervous. On their hand, they really want to weaken Western support for Ukraine.

And so I think the most effective tactic that we’ve seen from them is actually the weaponized migration of flying in oftentimes people from the Middle East into Russia, into Belarus, and then trying to force them across the border, and creating—you know, before the Russia’s invasion this was a huge issue, particularly on the Polish border with Belarus., But basically trying to use the migration issue, which is incredibly politically divisive, plays into the hands of the far-right, to sort of weaken the West.

But if Russia goes too far and is blowing up IKEAs across Europe, then it creates a big opportunity for Western leaders. And this is where I think the Rheinmetall foiled assassination attempt was an opportunity for Germany to rally their population around doing more to support Ukraine. So I actually think if Russia turns the dial up too fast and too hard, that can cause a blowback. And so they’re, I think, going to be somewhat careful. But if there’s not—if they’re not getting any blowback or resistance, then that dial keeps turning, it keeps clicking. And I think that is—that, I think, is one of the big challenges for policymakers. And should lead to, I think, more aggressive calling out of the activities, and also banding together a bit more than what we’ve seen.

TEMPLE-RASTON: We had a question up here, if we could get a microphone up here in the front table.

Q: Louise Shelley, George Mason University.

This was an unusual CFR meeting in that I heard a lot about crime. And heard about crime, both in cyberspace and on the ground. And it seems to me, through my research, that one is finding both the Russians and the Chinese—through fentanyl and other activities—increasingly using crime as part of their playbook at getting after their enemies. But we’re not matching this in the U.S. by focusing on the criminal activity of our enemies. And so I’m wondering if this is an important direction that we should be thinking about. We used to do a lot of this before 9/11, but it’s been absent from the U.S. toolkit since 9/11.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Do you think that’s the case? It seems like I’m seeing a lot of indictments. Who wants to take that one?

SEGAL: I mean, I’ll just say, on the cyber side, there have been a lot of indictments. And there is—we’re now in the third year of the counter-ransomware initiative, which is, you know, specifically focused on cyber gangs around—and the kind of—there’s four or five working groups on disruption, payment technologies, all those—all those issues. That is mostly diplomatic. It’s not criminal, although some criminal cooperation on that side as well. But I think from, you know, the cyber side of it, it’s mostly been indictments and then cooperation at Interpol and other places.

And the people who have had these arson attacks or sabotage, they’re being brought up on charges in various places in Europe as well.

BERGMANN: Correct. Maybe Keir or Andrea can talk about this, but the—I mean, a lot of times it is—you know, the Russians are just paying people to do these acts. And there’s a long history of the Russian state working hand in glove with organized crime. And I think, if anything, that is definitely increasing not just because they’re trying to hit back at the West, but also because they really need lots of, you know, advanced technologies, parts and components, that they need smuggling networks. And so it’s, you know, probably a very good moment if you’re in organized crime and connected to Russia or Central Asia.

TEMPLE-RASTON: We have a question virtually, if our virtual voice can talk.

OPERATOR: We’ll take our next question from Jill Dougherty.

Q: Oh, thank you very much. This is really great.

I have a question that I feel incompetent to ask, but I’ll ask it anyway. I wanted to move from sabotage—let’s call it terrestrial sabotage—to space. And this—I obviously am very interested in this, especially satellites that can be used both for, you know, let’s say, watching what’s going on and reconnaissance, let’s call it, to perhaps actually carrying it out—using these weapons to carry out sabotage, et cetera. I do not—and my question would be, number one, do you know if any of this is happening? And to what degree is Russia using space in Ukraine in a military sense? And then also, could that be, you know, spread to Europe and the United States?

TEMPLE-RASTON: It’s nice to hear your voice, Jill, again. Does someone want to take that? I was just at a space conference in which this is—in Colorado Springs—in which this is all they were talking about. So does anyone in particular?

SEGAL: Why don’t you answer? (Laughter.)

TEMPLE-RASTON: Yes, there’s a lot of it going on. And one of the things that’s really interesting about this conference, it was an ISAC summit in Colorado Springs. And one of the things that we’re talking about was, in fact, that we hadn’t set up—sorry—we were kind of late to setting up standards for the internet. We were a little late for setting up standards for social media—and know what kind of power it had. We’re a little better about setting up standards for AI. And now the focus is on setting up standards for space. And so these ISACs are supposed to have across governments, across companies actually talking to each other to say, we see these vulnerabilities. We have seen these people trying to get a little too close to our satellites.

One of the most interesting things they talked about was space weather, which I’ve never really thought very much about. But while we were all taking pictures of the amazing solar display a couple of months ago, in fact, our adversaries were getting closer and closer to satellites to see if they could pick up some sort of information or intelligence for them because, it turns out, solar storms are a great time to say, hey, it’s not us. The radio transmissions cause a breakup, it’s not us. It’s the solar storm. So it’s a—Jill, it’s a great question. I think it’s something that we’re going to be talking about more and more, not just in terms of adversaries but in terms of cybersecurity.

There are very old systems in space. A lot of satellites that are really old that are working on SCADA systems, which, as people who study cybersecurity, these are very insecure systems that have been hacked here on Earth. So there’s no reason they couldn’t be hacked in space. Sorry, I became a panelist momentarily. (Laughter.)

Q: Tom Kahn, American University.

Thank you very much for this fascinating program. I wonder if our guests could talk about the role of Russia in our election right now, and in particular their plans post-election, where I understand—I have read that they’re planning an aggressive campaign of misinformation.

BERGMANN: Yeah, I guess I’ll say a couple things. I mean, there’s been an FBI indictment of Russia providing, I think, roughly $10 million to essentially a far-right media outfit in Tennessee. You know, I think that sort of level of Russian influence probably had more impact in 2016 than I think it would today in 2024, in part because I don’t think you sort of need Russians to provide money to sort of far-right antiestablishment activity to lend it voice. I do think that, on the disinformation side, they’re going to be targeting lots of issues—or, basically, when we think about the hurricane that hit North Carolina, where there’s lots of disinformation about what is happening, I could see the Russians trying to actively play a role there.

I think in general our elections are sort of too dispersed and there’s now too many voices for them to have a real impact when it comes to the social media space. I do think that the, you know, hack and leak operations are potentially more impactful, but now the press, I think, have become more resilient when it comes to that. So I think there’s a fair degree of immunity that has been built. That said, you know, you never know with our election systems—and Adam can maybe talk about this. I mean, there’s a sense also that our election systems you’re going to hack on election day, that they’re sort of too dispersed. It would be hard to do. You can’t do it nationwide.

But, you know, that’s not how we run elections. We run elections based off of individual states. And you know exactly various localities of, you know, that’s a high—you know, Democrats need African Americans to turn out at 80 percent in that polling precinct. And if they don’t, then that’s a problem. And so there are ways that Russia could, I think, impact our elections. I don’t think that’s going to happen, but there’s a lot of unknowns about what happened in the past in 2016. So I think it’s something that—we have a committed adversary that has demonstrated in the past that they’re willing to interfere, that they have a preference for one of the candidates. And so it’s something that we need to be in guard about. And I think that this administration has an interest in ensuring the safety of our elections.

So I’m less concerned about that. Maybe quickly, I think I’m more concerned actually about European elections in various places, because in some ways, they have more rigid rules. They have, you know, campaign financing rules, which is, I think, excellent. But that means that if you have a constrained regulatory environment, and then one actor is getting funding—not that much, but a little bit on the side—that can make a big difference in elections that are actually incredibly regulated.

SEGAL: So I’ll just add two things. I think, so on the actual election infrastructure side of things, we have, I think, given a pretty clear message that we consider that a red line. That, you know, we just designated them as critical infrastructure, and that attacks on the actual voting structures or reporting would be considered something beyond election interference or information operations. Again, you know, how useful that is, not sure. But I think we’ve been pretty clear about that.

On the second point, I guess my feeling about it is that the Russians don’t introduce social tensions or cleavages that don’t already exist in American society. So there’s no doubt that after the elections, the Russian disinformation is going to question the fairness and transparency of the election, right? I mean, we already have candidates doing that, and they will just amplify that, and that’s, you know, what we can expect. So anything you already see U.S. politicians saying will just be amplified by the Russians to play up on those tensions.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Keir, do you want to talk a little bit about that?

BILES: Yeah, briefly, yes. Looking at this from not just outside the room, but outside the country, it would be astonishing if Russia were not putting maximum effort now into preparing for the election—both to influence the result and also, if the result is not the one that they would like, to try to sow maximum chaos on the back of that, as Adam was just describing. And I’m slightly less optimistic about the operating environment for Russia than Max has been up until now, because you’ve also—alongside this recognition now that social media is a cesspit and the results of that, you’ve also had the progressive dismantling within the U.S. of some of the defenses against the ways in which social media can be leveraged, and against the ways in which disinformation can actually influence political processes.

Such as the attacks on the Global Engagement Center, the attacks on counter-disinformation initiatives. All of that is steadily dismantling the defenses that were put up in place after the recognition of what happened in the 2016 election. And so, yes, I would be very surprised if there were not hack, forge, dump attacks around the time of the election to try to swing the result one way or another. And the current status of particular social media, especially Twitter—which is now recognized as a playground for Russian information operations with none of the safeguards that were previously there—does have the potential to influence voters without necessarily having to reach into election vote counting machines.

So the—I think this is a lot to play for for Russia. And we should expect to see a substantial uptick in activity, both before—immediately before, and after the election. And, sadly, the redlines that that Adam has described may not be particularly effective, because look at the stakes and the return on investment that is available for Russia in nudging the outcome of this election one way or another. It’s everything to play for. And they’d be maybe willing to suffer significant costs and risk the consequences in order to achieve that.

KENDALL-TAYLOR: I think, like, what—just, I mean, because I agree with what’s been said—that I think we would expect Russia to put in the maximum effort when they believe that they can tip the scales in their favor. And given the close margin of this election, small moves on one side or another can have an outsized impact. And so that’s going to be—I mean, there is—I would—I agree with Keir that I would expect a more significant uptick in what Russia is trying to accomplish, and especially if there’s any question about the outcome of the election, if there’s any delay, I mean, that’s going to be the kind of key period in which Russia would want to interfere and amplify and sow disinformation, with the goal, as has already been said, of undermining Americans’ perceptions in the legitimacy of our democracy, but also discrediting us as a functioning democracy on the global stage.

TEMPLE-RASTON: So we just sat down with Senator Mark Warner a couple of weeks ago. And he said his number one concern is the forty-eight hours after the election.

Do we have another virtual question?

OPERATOR: We’ll take our next question from Samuel Visner.

Q: Thank you. Sam Visner. I’m the chairman of the board of directors of the Space ISAC.

And, again, thank you, Dina Temple-Raston, for joining us a few weeks ago out in out in Colorado Springs. And this follows up, Dina, on the—on the point you raised. And certainly, I’d be grateful for a response from any member, or all members, of the panel. But the Russians have said very clearly that commercial space systems used for the national defense of Ukraine—Viasat, Starlink, and others—are now legitimate military targets. So it seems to me that norms that have existed for the protection of space systems have eroded, particularly as space and cyber systems have become conjoined and we’re no longer seeing very effective norms in cyber. (Laughs.)

The question in my mind is, what can be done to reestablish normative behavior? What can we do to say, no, they’re not legitimate targets. This is, in fact, a redline. Should we be thinking about a NATO Article Five response, or something else? We’ve not yet declared, although I hope we do, that space is a critical infrastructure sector. So that aspect of drawing a redline remains something that we’ve not yet done. I’d be grateful for some informed opinions about how we can establish norms that make it essentially illegitimate to do these things, and impose costs on illegitimate behavior. Thank you.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Max. Do you want to start? Oh, Keir, do you want to start? Sorry.

BERGMANN: Keir—please go ahead, Keir. Everyone else is making great notes, so go ahead. (Laughter.)

GILES: First of all, all of the Russia watchers in the room will have a certain amount of a wry smile when they hear Russia declare that something is a legitimate military target, because you hear that about absolutely everything that they dislike. And there is a say-do gap there. There’s a difference between this declaratory policy that Russia makes because they find it effective in some—in some instances, and what they’re actually willing to do about it. On the other hand, we know that Russia has mounted an extremely urgent counter-space program over the preceding decade, recognizing that one of their key deficiencies in terms of military capability is precisely overhead capabilities. And they want to be able to neutralize the Western advantage in case of a conflict, which is why they’ve been working so hard at looking at ways, both ground-based and orbital, of actually neutralizing not just military but also commercial satellites.

So the capability is something they’ve tried to develop, but for the time being that doesn’t necessarily mean that they are going to risk the kind of escalation that would result. But we also need to place this in context with some of the other patterns of behavior that we’ve seen across Europe. And here’s where, in response to Anders’ question, the very first one, I’m a little bit less optimistic than Max. Some of the attacks are nonsensical, like attacks on IKEA. Some of them are just to sow fear, uncertainty, and doubt. The investigation of Finnish water treatment plants appears to have been demonstrative and performative rather than actually doing anything. So it’s simply to frighten the population.

But where there is a clear pattern, it’s looking at logistics and transportation and means of moving across Europe in the case of a crisis. Look at the pattern of hacks across Poland and the Czech Republic, GPS jamming across the Baltic. It is, in effect, very close to a checklist of expected Russian actions that we put together back in 2020, what Russia would do in advance of an overt military move against a European country, a NATO country, other than Ukraine. And what’s missing so far, at least in the public domain, from that checklist is counter-space activity. But I think it is something that we would expect in the last stages before Russia was actually contemplating launching an operation of that kind, which would directly challenge NATO.

KENDALL-TAYLOR: Can I just add—so I’m not—I don’t know anything about space, actually. But I think there’s a broader point here, which is about, like, how do we uphold norms. I mean, so it’s not just in space, but now we have to uphold and reestablish a norm against territorial conquest. Russia is proliferating military technology, could potentially proliferate nuclear technology to the Iranians. So they’re breaking the norm of—you know, against proliferation. I mean, it’s all across the board. So this isn’t unique to just the setting—to the space domain.

Russia is also actively engaged, and committed, and investing in international institutions like the BRICS, and growing the BRICS, and bringing in Iranians. And now Turkey wants to apply. And they’re using a lot of these now alternative international institutions to diffuse norms. That’s what—that’s what international organizations are for. It helps countries diffuse norms. And we’ve so far kind of dismissed BRICS as ineffective. Too many divisions within it. But you just look at what Russia is doing in these institutions, and the SEO, also growing and expanding that.

So I think we—this is—the norm piece of it is—this is all to say, is really critically important. And so we do need a concerted strategy, I think, from the United States and its allies about how we uphold norms, what is our approach in international institutions? We have to show up in these standard-setting bodies, et cetera, et cetera. But so it’s obviously important on space, but it’s a broader challenge.

TEMPLE-RASTON: And does that start with the Five Eyes, and then work out, or?

BERGMANN: So—

KENDALL-TAYLOR: Go ahead.

BERGMANN: Well, I think, just to extend that, I think it’s also, you know, you look at the non-proliferation regime. I mean, Russia was a pillar of that, and then they sort of just decided to just control-alt-delete fifty years of Russian foreign policy goals of controlling the spread of nuclear weapons, providing—and now engaging with North Korea, engaging with Iran. And I think the way maybe to think about it is sort of the early period of the Cold War, where we didn’t really have redlines. We didn’t quite know where the limits were. We didn’t quite know where the boundaries were in our engagement and competition with the Soviet Union. And those norms that we now look back on, you know, had to be—had to be really built during oftentimes the Cold War period with an adversary.

But we are, like, very—we’re a long way from that. And I think where we are right now is we need to establish firm redlines. And what Adam outlined, I think, on the cyber interference, particularly with our election systems, is a good one. But Russia is going to test those boundaries. And so it’s a very, I think, tense period in how we’re going back and forth and saying, you cannot—you know, like, you don’t do that. And the Russians are going to test that. And so we’re—it’s, I think, going to be a very dangerous decade ahead.

TEMPLE-RASTON: If we can take one more question from the audience, right—from members, sorry.

Q: Hi. Mary Beth Long. Free floating electron, but sometimes at the Wilson Center.

Thank you all for a lot of really concrete ideas. I want to sort of step back for a second and talk about a conversation I had with Turkish leadership lately. And Erdogan, as we all know, at the beginning of the conflict, was one of the few leaders that had a good relationship with Putin. And his observation, I think, of the West is that we talk about Russia as if it were a rational national player, and almost never mentioned that this is really about Putin having put a lot on the line, having lost ground at the beginning for something he thought was manageable, now having backed himself into an—from his point of view—an existential problem, where he can’t stop the war and keep his authority in Russia, because domestic politics would probably not allow it, on the one hand. On the other hand, he’s sucked into war that he can’t seem to control the way he thought.

I’d point out that our oil sanctions aren’t working. If you go to Moscow—actually, I’ve been—they don’t appear to be working. There’s very little pressure on Russia internally to change its mind or to act in the way that we’re trying to force them to act. The institutions certainly are counter incentivized. And we’ve put almost no pressure on Putin, almost by design the Turks will say, because they’re exporting oil through the Emirates and other places and we’re ignoring it. At the end of the day, how do we solve the problem with Putin? And is the real answer, as the Turks would argue, you got to give them a face-saving way out?

TEMPLE-RASTON: We have all of two minutes for you to solve the Putin problem. (Laughter.) Shall we start with Keir, and we’ll just do a quick lightning round here?

GILES: Certainly. OK. We could speak for several hours about whether we have a Putin problem or a Russia problem, as we—

TEMPLE-RASTON: This could have been the topic, yeah. (Laughter.)

GILES: —we always have done in the past.

The face-saving way out, I still believe, along with many other European people watching this problem, would be the disastrous way out, because it is providing the reward for aggression that Russia craves. And, of course, it provides Russia with the opportunity to cement its gains and prepare for the next round, which—about which Putin has made his intent very clear. I think the answer to the problem is instead, as we’ve heard suggested several times over the course of the last hour, to actually look for ways in which the leverage which the Western coalition of nations does have in reserve can actually be applied. And that is primarily a case of applying political will, and having leadership among that coalition, and bringing together the countries that are willing to actually impose consequences on Russia in order to bring about a solution to this challenge.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Max.

BERGMANN: So I would say the main thing is that we just ran a grand experiment of what happens when the U.S. does not provide—or stops—or turns the tap off in terms of providing aid to Ukraine. And what happened was that Russia doubled down on its maximalist war aims. So I think the notion that we can somehow pull aid back and that will bring Russia to the table has already been disproven. I think the only way to end the war on sort of positive terms for Ukraine is that if Ukraine is as strong as possible and taking the war to Russia, and that Putin wants the war to stop. And so that requires more military, I think, assistance to Ukraine is absolutely required. And it’s a long-term proposition.

I do think on the energy side we have been very reluctant to really go after Russia’s energy sector, in part because we’ve been very gas price sensitive because, you know, we have elections. I think post November I hope that reticence sort of dissipates and that we see a much stronger effort, not on the oil price cap but maybe to go at that in a much more significant way, the way we would do vis-à-vis Iran or Venezuela.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Quickly, Andrea, and then—

KENDALL-TAYLOR: Really quickly, I would argue that even if the war ends, Putin requires confrontation with the West in order to maintain power. So he has basically reoriented all of Russian society—the society, the economy, and Russian foreign policy around this idea of confrontation. It’s the full justification for him and his regime, and the things that it does. So even if you gave him a face-saving way out, he has to continue the confrontation through other methods. And so—and then the one thing we haven’t really talked about is, like, Russia will reconstitute its military and will pose a major conventional threat to Europe within two to ten years. And so those are—like, it’s no face-saving way out. It’s just pushing back using the leverage, recognizing that this is a long-term confrontation regard—you know, I think regardless of how the war in Ukraine ends.

TEMPLE-RASTON: And Adam.

SEGAL: I’m a China specialist by training. So I’m going to defer to my Russia experts and go with the continued pressure. (Laughter.)

BERGMANN: Good answer.

TEMPLE-RASTON: We could have an entire other panel on whether Xi Jinping is the problem versus China. But it’s 2:00. And please join me in thanking Andrew, Max, Adam, and Keir for this great discussion today. (Applause.) And thank you very much for those of you who joined us in today’s meeting. Please note that the video and the transcript of this session will be posted on CFR’s website.

(END)

This is an uncorrected transcript.