Samuel Charap
Samuel Charap is Senior Fellow for
Russia and Eurasia at the International Institute for Strategic Studies.
He is the co-author of Everyone Loses: The Ukraine Crisis and the Ruinous Contest for Post-Soviet Eurasia.
WASHINGTON,
DC – Donald Trump has officially been inaugurated as US president, but
questions about Russia’s interference in the election will not go away.
Yet one key question is often lost in the fray: Why did Russian
President Vladimir Putin do it?
Of course, it is not
difficult to guess why Putin preferred Trump to his opponent, former
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. But there is a difference between
hoping for an outcome and going to great lengths – and incurring great
risks – to help bring it about. In our view, the US intelligence
agencies’ conclusion
that, by helping Trump, the Kremlin was advancing its “longstanding
desire to undermine the US-led liberal democratic order” is not entirely
convincing.
Russia’s meddling in
the US election was unprecedented. Just three years ago, it would have
been unimaginable: though the West’s relationship with Russia was far
from ideal, and featured plenty of competition, it was also
characterized by cooperation. As recently as June 2013, Putin and US
President Barack Obama issued a statement
that reaffirmed “their readiness to intensify bilateral cooperation
based on the principles of mutual respect, equality, and genuine respect
for each other’s interests.”
Everything changed in
February 2014, when Ukraine’s Maidan Revolution culminated in the
ousting of the Kremlin-friendly President Viktor Yanukovych. That
development – and Putin’s response to it – fundamentally transformed the
West’s relationship with Russia.
Almost as soon as
power changed hands in Kiev, the Kremlin’s foreign-policy posture became
much more bellicose. Russia invaded and annexed Crimea, and then began
supporting a grinding separatist insurgency in Ukraine’s Donbas region.
The US and the European Union countered with increasingly harsh and
sophisticated sanctions and a broader campaign to “isolate” Russia
diplomatically.
Russia took its
assertive behavior to the skies, leading to a number of close encounters
between Russian warplanes and Western jets (both civilian and
military), and to the sea, boosting its submarine activity in the North
Atlantic to Cold War-era levels. According to the Obama administration, there was a spike in harassment of US diplomatic personnel in Russia.
On the political
front, the Kremlin began supporting Euroskeptic and anti-EU forces. And
it has gone out of its way to thwart Western efforts to address major
international challenges, most prominently the Syrian civil war.
Longstanding US-Russia agreements on nuclear security and
non-proliferation have been angrily renounced. All of this culminated in
Russia’s alleged leak of hacked emails aimed at discrediting the
Clinton campaign.
While Russia’s efforts
to interfere in the US presidential election fit the broader pattern of
escalation that began after 2014, they still represent quite a step
change. Russia probably hacked the Democratic and Republican campaigns
in the 2012 US presidential election, too, given its formidable cyber
capabilities. But its intelligence agencies quietly analyzed the
information, in order to improve their understanding of a potential
adversary’s future leaders – hardly shocking behavior by a government.
The election meddling
also represented a significant risk for Russia. While the extent to
which the leaked emails affected the vote is unknown, the Kremlin has
certainly paid a price for its actions, alienating most of the American public, along with nearly the entire US political elite.
The Kremlin’s
determination to have its way in Ukraine drove it to take such a risk.
As its behavior since 2014 suggests, the Russian government considers
the post-revolutionary status quo in Ukraine – in particular, the
country’s headlong rush toward the West – a direct threat to Russian
national security. By annexing Crimea, supporting the Donbas
separatists, and lashing out at the West directly, Russia wants to make
clear that it will do whatever it takes to have its interests taken into
account.
But the West hasn’t
cooperated. Despite the Kremlin’s escalation, the US and the EU have
refused to acquiesce to the negotiation Russia wants, and continue to
support Ukraine’s integration with the EU and NATO. And, though a formal
offer of membership in either organization is at best a distant
possibility, it has not been ruled out.
Once it became clear
that Western policymakers were not going to blink, the Kremlin
apparently decided to try to replace them. In light of Russia’s
unbending commitment to maintaining its influence in Ukraine, an
inclusive settlement there may well be necessary to prevent the Kremlin
from pursuing ever more aggressive options for asserting its position.
Awareness of this
uncomfortable reality should not lead the West to capitulate to Russia.
Instead, it should strengthen the case for open dialogue and tough
negotiation – precisely what has long been lacking in Western policy on
the Ukraine crisis and toward the entirety of the post-Soviet Eurasian
region. We have arrived at this point precisely because both Russia and
the West have spent over a decade seeking unilateral advantages and
eschewing negotiated compromises.
Holding talks in the
current atmosphere of mistrust, mutual recrimination, and fearmongering
will require a substantial investment of political capital for a
sustained period. Moving beyond current adversarial approaches to find
common ground will take time. A quick deal won’t be possible.
As Russia’s meddling
in the US election amply demonstrates, the consequences of allowing the
Ukraine crisis to continue extend far beyond that country’s borders. In
order to find a new stable equilibrium in relations between Russia and
the West, all parties must urgently make a good-faith effort to resolve
it
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