Russia-US relations have been tense and mutually hostile ever since the early 2010s, and this trend has only especially with the rise of Russia as a great power and its influence in the former Soviet bloc. Russian President Vladimir Putin has been masterminding strategies to undermine the U.S. through a tactic colloquially understood as “salami-slicing”, or committing minor transgressions bit-by-bit as to not invoke a major, organised response by NATO and the rest of the West. With this gameplan in mind, Russia has in the past decade seized and annexed the Crimean Peninsula, supported pro-Russian rebels in the Donbass conflict in Ukraine, and backed murderous dictators and organisations in Syria and Afghanistan.
Vladimir Putin, who has been President of Russia since 1999
Yet one of the most insidious ways in which Russia attempts to expand its sphere of influence is not through the usage of military strength or proxy forces armed with Russian-made weapons at all. Instead, Russian agencies have used another often overlooked and yet incredibly vital pipeline: the Internet. Russian groups such as Fancy Bear or Sandworm have launched attacks against countries like Germany, France, or Ukraine, where attempts have been made to disable military coordination, steal government documents, or delay election processing. As the so-called “leader of the free world”, the United States has also become one such victim of these attacks.
The 2016 US presidential election is often remembered as one of the most contentious and polarising general elections in modern US history, with scathing insults and attack campaigns carried out by many prospective candidates against one another. Political scientists have numerous leading theories on the nature of increasing hostility between different political factions in the US, but one possible explanation may have its origins abroad: in the Kremlin.
Whilst the anger of many Americans is certainly genuine, some of it, especially when expressed online, has and was produced by the Russian Internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg at the direct orders of Putin with the goals of both supporting the candidacy of Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton as well as spurring on factionalism and political conflict amongst the American electorate. This operation, codenamed Project Lakhta, worked like this: The IRA, colloquially known as the “Trolls from Olgino”, would create tens of thousands of fake social media accounts and unleash them onto popular networks like Facebook or Twitter. While these accounts would on the surface level look and speak like actual American voters, they would in reality all be run by a few powerful computers in Russia. The things that these accounts would post were often highly inflammatory as well as fervently pro-Trump in order to create more division and animosity on political spaces online.
An office of the St. Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency, a pro-Putin company that uses fake accounts in order to promote Russian interests in foreign social networking sites
The US response to these actions was mixed. From 2017 - 2019, a US investigative council headed by former FBI Director Robert Mueller demonstrated through a report that members of the Trump campaign were knowingly aided by Russian officials, consequently leading to indictmentments against 34 individuals, many of whom were Russian citizens. Despite this, the report was unable to bring about any direct charges against Trump campaign officials, and high ranking members of the Trump administration, including former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and former Vice President Mike Pence, continued to deny any impact that the interference may have had on the election. The US response also included ejecting hundreds of Russian diplomats and diplomatic staff in the country as well as applying new sanctions against Russia as a whole, spiraling tensions further. Despite these retaliations, however, Russian interference on US media platforms still continues in much more recent times such as in the 2020 US general election, though the degree to which it occurs has been reduced.