Russia interfered in France’s recent presidential elections, supporting far-right candidate Marine Le Pen, and is likely to meddle in Germany’s upcoming federal elections in September. Beyond these countries, there is speculation that Russia has close ties with the far-right UK Independence Party (UKIP) and also maintains ties with some of Italy’s political elite. The Cipher Brief’s Kaitlin Lavinder digs into Russian influence in European countries that are not part of the former Soviet bloc with the Center for Strategic and International Studies Deputy Director of the Russia and Eurasia Program, Jeffrey Mankoff.
The Cipher Brief: Beyond the eastern flank, is there Russian influence anywhere else in Europe? If so, where?
Jeffrey Mankoff: Sure, there’s Russian influence all over the place. It’s not all nefarious. There are Russian diasporas in London, in Berlin, in a number of European countries. There’s trade, tourism, and political connections. Russia’s a big country. It’s a relatively influential country, including in Europe.
The real question is, where is there nefarious Russian influence? Where are there Russian state-sponsored attempts to affect political outcomes? In that case, we’ve seen the employment of tools like cyber hacking, selective dissemination of information, and political party funding going to entities in France, where far-right leader Marine Le Pen’s party received financial assistance from Russia. There was a coordinated cyber effort to derail the campaign of French centrist leader Emmanuel Macron, which, of course, did not succeed. Similar efforts are underway in Germany, ahead of the election in that country. In the UK, there are still questions being raised about the potential ties between the (more or less defunct at this point) UKIP and Russian entities.
There are also various kinds of Russian tools and levers of influence at work in Central or Eastern Europe, including more traditional and more direct types of influence.
TCB: You mentioned France, Germany, and the UK – why these countries? Why, for example, do we not hear about Russian attempts to influence elections in any of the Scandinavian countries?
Mankoff: Because within the EU and NATO, the three most important countries, besides the United States in NATO, are France, Germany, and the UK. With Brexit, who knows what will happen. But until that occurs, these are the three political and economic heavyweights and the most consequential countries. So that is where the emphasis has been—and of course Russian influence in Britain tended to go toward UKIP and others supporting Brexit, which will have the result of weakening British influence in Europe and generally creating chaos within Britain over the short to medium term.
It’s not restricted to those countries. There’s other stuff going on in Europe. There are things going on in Scandinavia. When Sweden or Finland have talked about deeper defense cooperation or integration with NATO, there’s been coordinated Russian pushback against that, including military threats. But the most effort and the most resources have gone into the UK, France, and Germany just because those are the most consequential European countries right now.
TCB: The broader, overarching strategy on the Russian side is what exactly? Is it this historic idea of destabilizing NATO and the EU?
Mankoff: That’s a substantial part of it. It’s undermining transatlantic and intra-European solidarity because Russia is more capable of interacting from a position of strength with individual European countries than it is with Europe as a collective or the transatlantic community as a collective. To the extent that it can disrupt those collective identities and collective institutions, that reinforces Russia’s strength. Russia is also interested in weakening the normative aspect of the EU and liberal democracy more generally; so to the extent that it can call into question the commitments, especially in the leading European countries, to those institutions and those norms, the more effective its campaign of calling into question the normative value of liberal democracy becomes.
TCB: It seems that Russia, over the past year, has become more aggressive and successful in its attempts to influence European elections and affairs. Is that an accurate assessment? Or is it just that the tools have changed, like Russia’s cyber capabilities?
Mankoff: It’s both. These activities were quite common during the Cold War, obviously using different tools. But with the end of the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the shift toward a less confrontational relationship between the Western countries and Russia, the employment of those disruptive tools was apparently rolled back, at least outside of the borders of the former Soviet Union, where they did continue to be employed.
Within the last several years, as the relationship between the U.S. and the EU on the one hand and Russia on the other has deteriorated, there’s been a resurgence of those disruptive efforts. In contrast to the latter part of the Cold War, there hasn’t, until quite recently, been much of an awareness in those Western countries about the nature and scope of Russian activities. We have been rediscovering them more recently.
The techniques are not all that new, but the tools are. The ability to purloin large amounts of information through compromising networks and to selectively disseminate it through social media is not something that the security services in the West had prepared for and didn't really have tools in their toolbox to counteract. That’s beginning to change. But we’ve already seen a number of these disruptive campaigns play out.
TCB: What other efforts are European countries undertaking – or should they undertake – in order to respond to this Russian intervention?
Mankoff: Russia’s playing on fissures within European and American societies. It’s not creating those fissures; it’s playing on them – whether they’re ethnic or cultural or class-based. First and foremost, the Western countries, including the United States, have to get a better handle on their own internal sources of fragility and make sure that all their populations feel a stake in the maintenance of open, liberal democratic political systems. That means addressing ethnic divisions, and it means promoting economic development and basic economic and cultural fairness so that as wide a swathe of the population as possible is invested in the status quo. Since the financial crisis began in 2008, a number of Western countries have not done a particularly good job at that. That’s the larger answer.
The smaller, or more tactical, answers have to do with being aware of Russian objectives and Russian techniques of disruption and pushing back against them. The French election provides some good lessons for others in how to do this, which is to say, recognize the threat for what it is, push back and unmask the attempts of the Russian state and Russian-affiliated groups to sow disruption, expose them for what they are, attempt to disrupt the disrupters, and if you’re a large country or a member of the EU or NATO, hold out the threat of consequences against Russia itself, whether that’s economic sanctions or counter cyber disruptions or attacks of various kinds. Essentially, recognize that Russia has its own vulnerabilities in a worsening relationship environment and that the West is able and willing to play on those vulnerabilities in Russia.
TCB: Do you have any final thoughts on this topic?
Mankoff: It’s a dereliction of duty for Western leaders to not accept the consensus of well-informed observers and analysts that this activity is happening, that it’s directed at the disruption of transatlantic and intra-European ties, and that it’s a threat to the stability and prosperity of the West writ large. The leaders in all of those countries are remiss to the extent that they fail to encompass the significance of the challenge and to push back against it.
