Considered opinionWhat is Vladimir Putin really up to? Carnegie scholars aim to find out

By Carol Morello

The Trump administration’s national security team – of not the president himself – is increasingly concerned that Russia is expanding its influence around the world at a time when the United States and leading Western powers in Europe are focused on their own domestic problems.

The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace is about to launch a two-year project, called “The Return of Global Russia: A Reassessment of the Kremlin’s International Agenda,” aiming to examine and analyze Russia’s activist foreign and military policies. Carol Morello writes in the Washington Post that the project will focus on the ways in which the Kremlin’s influence has spread far beyond Russia’s immediate neighbors, and the growing role Russia is playing in countries throughout Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

“Obviously, the Russian role in the U.S. election and what Rex Tillerson referred to as the use of hybrid warfare has generated much attention in the wake of Ukraine and the events around the election,” Andrew Weiss, who oversees Carnegie’s research on Russia and Eurasia, told Morello. “What needs to be assessed is seeing the broader level of Russian foreign policy ventures. It’s our ambition to see what patterns emerge, and how it’s likely to evolve.”

According to Weiss and Paul Stronski, a fellow in Carnegie’s Russian and Eurasia Program, Moscow is trying to systematically undermine democracies such as the United States and alliances like the European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. It has set about making deals and offering financial aid to friendly governments and interfering in countries that it perceives as adversaries.

In the last year alone, Russia, among other things, has:

· Provided debt relief and food to Venezuela and Nicaragua

· Sent the Russian military to support the regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria; forged a partnership with a warlord in Libya; conducted joint military exercises with Egypt; and just signed a $25 billion agreement to build nuclear reactors in Egypt

· Signed deals to build nuclear power plants in Ghana and Nigeria (and trying to salvage a similar deal in South Africa, which has been criticized by the South African opposition)

Morello continues:

Meanwhile, Russian interference is suspected not only in the United States, but also in several countries across Europe, including France, Germany, Britain and Spain. In many cases, the primary tools are social media and state-run Russian news outlets, such as RT and Sputnik, that push pro-Kremlin views.

Recently, questions have been raised about whether Russia is preparing to spread disinformation in advance of the 2018 elections in Mexico…

“Some of it may be obnoxious behavior just to wag their finger at the United States and amplify anti-American sentiment in the Mexican body politic,” Weiss said. “But at the same time, as seen in the U.S. election, a small investment can have a big impact and take on a life of its own.”

….

The project aims to analyze how Russia’s tactics are evolving, identify which operations may be more annoyance than menace and examine which pose major threats to the West.

“We will try to determine where this matters to our interests and where it doesn’t,” Stronski said. “We pose a lot of questions that we don’t have clear answers to yet. Over a two-year period, we want to get a better sense of the economic, security, political and economic threats Russia may pose and come up with policy guidance. We need to not just look backwards, but at how they’re adapting.”

Read the complete article: Carol Morello, “What is Vladimir Putin really up to? Carnegie scholars aim to find out,” Washington Post (13 December 2017)