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1. Estonia as an Area of Russian Influence: Analysis and Synthesis of the Kremlin’s Methodology of Exerting Influence on Tallinn’s Political and Social Stability

Author:
Jacek Bil
Publication Date:
03-2022
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Polish Political Science Yearbook
Institution:
Polish Political Science Association (PPSA)
Abstract:
Russia's hostile actions against the Estonian state structures take the form of soft power, which can be observed in such areas as the activities of the Russian-speaking minority, media coverage, or through the use of coercion when it comes to fuel sales. This article presents qualitative methods of measuring Russian influence on Estonia. An observable trend in international relations is replacing hard power with soft power, commonly used against states within the sphere of interest of certain geopolitical entities. It is more difficult to identify the latter and prove it results from an aggressor's deliberate actions. Information warfare, including disinformation and propaganda, is one of the means Russia uses to exert political influence. By accepting the offer of a political and military alliance with the Western world, the Baltic States have become a threat to the Kremlin's imperialist aspirations. Russia's direct military actions against Estonia and the other Baltic states would have provoked a strong reaction and could even have led to military confrontation. However, the Russian government wishes to avoid it and, for the time being, limits itself to soft power measures.
Topic:
Hegemony, Regionalism, Strategic Stability, Foreign Interference, and Influence
Political Geography:
Russia, Europe, Eastern Europe, and Estonia

2. Russian Relations with Central Asia and Afghanistan after U.S. Withdrawal

Publication Date:
10-2021
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
The Harriman Institute
Abstract:
Join us for a meeting of the New York-Russia Public Policy Series, co-hosted by the Harriman Institute at Columbia University and the New York University Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia. In this second event of the academic year, our panelists will discuss the status of Russian relations with Central Asia and Afghanistan after the U.S. withdrawal. Moderated by Joshua Tucker (NYU Jordan Center) and Alexander Cooley (Harriman Institute). The withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan and the dramatic collapse of the U.S.-backed government in Kabul has ushered in another period of Taliban rule. Regional powers and neighbors have been anticipating the U.S. exit for some time: Russia remains a critical player in the region and, even before the U.S. withdrawal, had demonstrated a pragmatic approach to engaging with the Taliban. What is Moscow’s plan for dealing with the new Afghan government and what are its overall priorities in the region? How will this affect Russia’s relations with the Central Asian states and China? And are there any prospects for renewed cooperation between Moscow and Washington on counterterrorism issues in this period of uncertainty and potential instability? Please join this distinguished group of academic experts who will explore the new complex dynamics of a post-American Afghanistan and Central Asia. This event is supported by a grant from Carnegie Corporation of New York. Speakers Ivan Safranchuk, Director of the Center of Euro-Asian Research and Senior Fellow with the Institute for International Studies, MGIMO Nargis Kassenova, Senior Fellow and Director of the Program on Central Asia, Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Harvard University Artemy Kalinovsky, Professor of Russian, Soviet, and post-Soviet Studies, Temple University Ekaterina Stepanova, Director, Peace and Conflict Studies Unit, National Research Institute of the World Economy & International Relations (IMEMO), Moderated by: Alexander Cooley, Director of the Harriman Institute, Columbia University Joshua Tucker, Director of the Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia, New York University
Topic:
International Relations, Military Strategy, Governance, and Foreign Interference
Political Geography:
Afghanistan, Russia, Europe, Asia, North America, and United States of America

3. Protocooperation as a Model for the Russia-UAE Partnership

Author:
Andrzej Jacuch
Publication Date:
01-2021
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Polish Political Science Yearbook
Institution:
Polish Political Science Association (PPSA)
Abstract:
Russia’s intervention in Syria in 2015 marked the Russian Federation (RF) return as a key player in the Middle East and North Africa. In this context, the relations between Russia and the UAE are of utmost importance for both entities, for the region, and globally. This article seeks to fill a gap in scholarly knowledge by answering questions about the nature of the emerging cooperation between Russia and the UAE. How Russia seeks to use the UAE to expand its sphere of influence in the MENA region and how the UAE uses this cooperation to achieve its foreign policy goals. The article applies protocooperation (an analogy to the ecological relationship) as a model for the Russia-UAE partnership. The RF is strengthening its position in the MENA regarding the UAE as a key partner for regaining its political, economic, and military influence in the MENA region. Russia-UAE’s partnership aims at achieving conjunctural geopolitical interests benefiting from diminished Western, mainly the US, presence in the region.
Topic:
Security, Diplomacy, International Cooperation, Military Strategy, and Foreign Interference
Political Geography:
Russia, Europe, Gulf Nations, and UAE

4. Defending 2020: What Worked, What Didn’t, and What’s Next

Author:
Jessica Brandt and Bradley Hanlon
Publication Date:
03-2021
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
German Marshall Fund of the United States (GMFUS)
Abstract:
The 2016 presidential election served as a wakeup call to the threat of authoritarian interference, and in the years since, many segments of American society—from the federal government to private companies and civil society groups—have taken valuable steps to prepare for and counter it. Congress and the Executive Branch stood up a new government agency and multiple coordinating bodies to protect election infrastructure, while social media platforms have instituted policies to restrict the manipulation of advertisements, label misleading and false content, and slow the spread of disinformation. Working together, civil society instituted new cross-sector coordination mechanisms for election security. Yet longstanding vulnerabilities—including crippling political polarization and underfunded election jurisdictions—persist. A series of high-profile failures to prosecute the solicitation of foreign interference in U.S. elections further threaten to solidify a dangerous new norm. Meanwhile, the threat landscape is growing more dynamic. New actors, including China and Iran, have taken an interest in adopting elements of Russia’s information manipulation playbook. And that playbook is itself evolving. In 2020, Russia and Iran took active steps to influence U.S. voters, engaging in information operations—at times augmented by cyberattacks—to denigrate candidates, sow chaos and division, and reduce trust in democratic institutions.1 New players, including Cuba, Venezuela, and other, non-state actors also took steps to influence voters and attack election infrastructure.
Topic:
Infrastructure, Authoritarianism, Elections, Disinformation, and Foreign Interference
Political Geography:
Russia, China, Iran, and United States of America

5. Russia in Africa: Soviet Legacies, Current Objectives, Local Responses

Publication Date:
12-2021
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
The Harriman Institute
Abstract:
In recent years, Russia has stepped up its engagement in Africa, forging military and security agreements as well as business relationships with leaders in several states. What lies behind Russia’s “return” to Africa? During the Cold War, Africa constituted a major site of Soviet geopolitical competition with the U.S. Does this history, as well as the legacy of Soviet antiracism, inform Russia’s current goals and actions on the continent? Panelists will explore this issue, as well as the impact of Russia’s presence on security and humanitarian crises within Africa. What has been the reaction of various local actors to Russia’s presence? Panelists will also discuss the policy response: how should the international community and the West respond to Russian engagement in Africa?
Topic:
Military Strategy, Hegemony, Foreign Interference, Strategic Interests, and Influence
Political Geography:
Africa, Russia, and Europe

6. The Election Official’s Handbook: Six steps local officials can take to safeguard America’s election systems

Author:
David Levine
Publication Date:
02-2020
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
German Marshall Fund of the United States (GMFUS)
Abstract:
Intelligence and law enforcement agencies warn that Russia, China, Iran, and other foreign actors will seek to interfere in the 2020 presidential election.1 Foreign actors are increasingly sophisticated at using cyber tools and social media to probe and penetrate electoral infrastructure, manipulate public opinion, and cast doubt on the integrity of the election process. On one hand, the United States is better prepared to address these threats now than during the 2016 presidential election. For example, after the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) designated election systems as critical infrastructure in 2017, it established the Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center, which enabled states and localities to more easily share information about threats to elections. This mechanism has had the additional benefit of making DHS better at helping states manage risks, as well as distributing information from the federal government to the states about possible threats.2 On the other hand, in many states there are still vulnerabilities in election infrastructure that foreign actors can exploit. These vulnerabilities exist at almost every step of the election administration process, including registering voters, verifying their registration at polling places, securing the devices that capture and tally the vote, transmitting that data to a central location on election night, and executing an accurate recount.3 While states usually make decisions about the rules of elections (policymaking),4 localities are typically responsible for the “nuts and bolts” of running an election — such as finding polling places and recruiting poll workers.5 Local election officials also help preserve the integrity of America’s elections by protecting against hacks into voter rolls and local election websites and working closely with federal and state officials to ensure the security of their voting systems.6 As the February 3, 2020 Iowa Democratic caucuses demonstrated, such vulnerabilities are not merely theoretical. During the caucuses — which were administered by political party officials, not election officials — the new app that the Iowa Democratic Party planned to use to report its caucus results did not work. Many of the nearly 1,700 precinct chairs who were responsible for transmitting the results did not receive training on how to use the app, and a large number appear to have been unable to successfully download it.7 Revisions and updates to the app were made as late as two days before the caucuses, making it nearly impossible to vet and test adequately.8 Although the federal government recently agreed to allocate an additional $425 million in election administration and security funds to state election offices,9 federal resources will likely be insufficient to address all outstanding vulnerabilities before the 2020 presidential election. It is also unclear how much of this funding will be distributed to local elections officials in time for the 2020 presidential election. This handbook, therefore, provides a list of steps that local election officials can implement at relatively little cost to fortify their elections systems before the 2020 presidential election.
Topic:
Politics, Elections, and Foreign Interference
Political Geography:
Russia, China, Iran, North America, and United States of America

7. Conceptualizing Foreign Interference in Europe

Author:
Kristine Berzina and Etienne Soula
Publication Date:
03-2020
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
German Marshall Fund of the United States (GMFUS)
Abstract:
Europe has been at the forefront of confronting asymmetric attacks from foreign adversaries. Disinformation campaigns have been used against the European public since the Soviet era, and with the advent of social media platforms, they have become a regular phenomenon across the continent. Cyber-attacks have become a frequent occurrence too, particularly since 2007, when Russia conducted a campaign of cyber-attacks on Estonia.1 Even so, it was the 2016 U.S. presidential election that accelerated European measures against interference in democracies. National governments across Europe have launched holistic efforts to counter interference. In 2018, France announced the Paris Call for Trust and Security in Cyberspace, which calls for cooperation to “prevent malign interference by foreign actors.”2 Over one thousand national and local governments, civil society, and industry groups have signed on, and multi-stakeholder communities have formed to advance the principles laid out in the Paris Call. Sweden is applying the concept of “total defense” to educate and protect its population. Sweden’s Civil Contingencies Agency sent a booklet to all households in 2018 with guidelines on how citizens should protect themselves from false information and cyber-attacks as well as many other threats.3 Finland and Latvia are applying the same “total defense” strategy in their own political systems. Increasingly, European Union institutions are also turning their attention to interference. The newly elected European Parliament passed a resolution in October denouncing foreign electoral interference and disinformation in national and European democratic processes.4 And European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has given her commissioners a mandate to protect democratic systems and institutions from “external interference.”5 Amid this burgeoning activity, however, one thing is missing. There is little consensus on what exactly “interference” is, and how the term “interference” is similar or different from other related concepts, such as “influence.” The lack of a common framing of “interference” across Europe can delay or complicate lawmakers’ initiatives and muddy civil society’s efforts to build awareness and rally opposition against incursions into democratic processes. Defining interference comes with risk. Policymakers can create a definition that is either too broad,6 which could inhibit the freedom of expression or put undue burdens on political participation, or one that is too narrow to cover certain forms of malign behavior in a quickly evolving field, inhibiting democracies from protecting themselves because an attack does not “fit” within said definition. Establishing a definition that merely catalogues commonly-used tactics (for example: cyber-attacks, disinformation, economic coercion, and malign finance) would also prove inadequate because any definition of interference should be flexible enough to capture new technologies and approaches. Moreover, a list of tactics fails to explain the underlying factors driving interference activities. To contribute to the definition-setting debate, this paper addresses why a definition could be helpful for countering interference, lays out the state of play in the EU on defining interference, provides a review of existing government and academic definitions related to interference, and discusses the concept of legality and interference. Finally, this paper suggests two core criteria to assist in the determination of whether any given activity constitutes interference: (i) intent (including the factors of timing, coordination of behavior, and scale of effects), and (ii) transparency. An act does not need to match both criteria to constitute interference, but they are certainly mutually reinforcing.
Topic:
European Union, Foreign Interference, and Cyberspace
Political Geography:
Russia, Europe, and United States of America

8. Covert Foreign Money: Financial Loopholes Exploited by Authoritarians to Fund Political Interference in Democracies

Author:
Josh Rudolph and Thomas Morley
Publication Date:
08-2020
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
German Marshall Fund of the United States (GMFUS)
Abstract:
In addition to more widely studied tools like cyberattacks and disinformation, authoritarian regimes such as Russia and China have spent more than $300 million interfering in democratic processes more than 100 times spanning 33 countries over the past decade. The frequency of these financial attacks has accelerated aggressively from two or three annually before 2014 to 15 to 30 in each year since 2016. We call this tool of foreign interference “malign finance,” defined as “the funding of foreign political parties, candidates, campaigns, well-connected elites, or politically influential groups, often through non-transparent structures designed to obfuscate ties to a nation state or its proxies.” A typical case involves a regime-connected operative funneling $1 million to a favored political party, although buying influence in a major national election costs more like $3 million to $15 million. Rather than start our analysis by focusing on any given policy area, we review open-source reporting in 16 languages to identify malign finance cases credibly attributed to foreign governments. Finding that approximately 83 percent of the activity was enabled by legal loopholes, we catalogue the resulting caseload into the seven most exploited policy gaps. Broader than just money flowing through straw donors, shell companies, non-profits, and other conduits, malign finance includes a range of support mechanisms innovated by authoritarian regimes to interfere in democracies, from intangible gifts to media assistance. As such, policy strategies to address these vulnerabilities are not limited to campaign finance reforms, but also include greater transparency requirements around media funding, corporate ownership, campaign contacts with foreign powers, and other issues. In addition to identifying loopholes, our case study informs the scope of our recommended policy solutions, which are meant close off channels for foreign financial interference without infringing upon the speech rights of domestic political spenders or jeopardizing bipartisan support. Each of our recommendations balances these trade-offs differently based on empirical, legal, political, and administrative considerations vetted in consultation with more than 90 current and former executive branch officials, Congressional staffers from both parties, constitutional law scholars, and civil society experts. This report is organized around each of the seven U.S. legal loopholes that need to be closed, starting with the most urgent priorities, plus an eighth chapter on the need for stronger governmental coordination.
Topic:
Authoritarianism, Democracy, Finance, Foreign Interference, and Dark Money
Political Geography:
Russia, China, Europe, and United States of America

9. Leaks, Lies, and Altered Tape: Russia’s Maturing Information Manipulation Playbook

Author:
Jessica Brandt and Amber Frankland
Publication Date:
10-2020
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
German Marshall Fund of the United States (GMFUS)
Abstract:
In 2016 the Russian government and its proxies interfered in the U.S. presidential election in a “sweeping and systematic” fashion. Thanks to multiple bipartisan investigations and the work of researchers and journalists, rich detail about that operation—and the tools Russia’s disinformation agents used to execute it—are available to the public. In 2020 Americans are again preparing to elect a president. As the U.S. intelligence community assessed, and FBI Director Christopher Wray confirmed in recent testimony before Congress, Russia is conducting a “very active” interference campaign. Since 2016, Russia’s interference activity in the United States, and elsewhere around the world, has not abated. That’s because elections are a flashpoint for Russian information operations, but not the start or endpoint of this activity, which targets a broad range of polarizing or contentious political events. Over the past four years, the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) the Russian government and its proxies use to manipulate information and carry out deceptive campaigns have matured. These include: Co-opting authentic domestic voices and institutions, often by co-locating trolls within a target population, renting social media accounts of local actors, entrapping local leaders in “interviews” with purported journalists, recruiting real activists to foment protests, or mimicking or appropriating the names of local groups; Exploiting the anticipation of manipulation to claim that manipulation has occurred, often through false flag operations, or the amplification of homegrown conspiracy theories; Practicing tailored influence, by working through micro-influencers and in closed groups; Exploiting the full information ecosystem to launder a narrative, by seeding it with authentic domestic actors, deploying quasi-transparent Russian-supported media properties, and exploiting data voids. Broadly speaking, we are witnessing a marked shift toward harder to detect, more targeted information operations that cover greater swaths of the information ecosystem, likely carried out by Russian military intelligence. That is a very different challenge than the one policymakers faced in 2016, when the threat was not yet fully comprehended, and in 2018, when the threat appeared to be largely driven by Internet Research Agency (IRA) trolls. While it is important to glean lessons from those experiences, it is also important that policymakers not overlearn them, and in doing so, miss the consequential changes to Russia’s information manipulation strategy that are now underway. These changes are occurring partly to evade increasingly sophisticated detection capabilities and policies on the part of social media platforms. But they are also occurring for a more fundamental reason: the Russian government and its proxies do not need to rely on large quantities of troll farm content to upend U.S. domestic politics with corrosive narratives that undermine trust in democratic institutions and belief in the existence of truth itself. The fire is already raging—it needs only a nudge here or there to be redirected to good effect. This paper is not meant to be a taxonomy of Russian TTPs generally, but to highlight evolving trends with relevance to policymakers. It is an effort to help stakeholders of all types—journalists, regulators, and researchers—look beyond individual campaigns to see the full picture of Russian activity as it is changing and to anticipate what might be to come.
Topic:
Elections, Disinformation, Foreign Interference, and Leaks
Political Geography:
Russia and Eurasia

10. The parliamentary election in Moldova: The end of European illusions

Author:
Ryhor Nizhnikau
Publication Date:
02-2019
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Finnish Institute of International Affairs (FIIA)
Abstract:
The Moldovan parliamentary election is not about geopolitical or societal choices; it is about a power grab by oligarch Vladimir Plahotniuc, and the erosion of pluralism, freedoms and European aspirations under the EU’s watch.
Topic:
Elections, European Union, Geopolitics, Election watch, and Foreign Interference
Political Geography:
Russia, Europe, and Moldavia