Assets and enemies

The Russian Federation interfered in the 2016 American presidential election, in part through social-media “troll farms” in St. Petersburg that tried, with uncertain success, to inflame America’s fiercest political fights. The U.S. Justice Department appointed Robert Mueller, who’d run the Federal Bureau of Investigation for 12 years, as a special counsel to investigate the business—along with alleged links between Russia and Donald Trump’s campaign. Over the next two years, Mueller charged 25 Russians over the interference. He also charged a number of Trump’s campaign aides with other crimes, like lying to investigators and fraud—but didn’t find enough evidence to show that anyone on the campaign had conspired with Russia. Americans have continued accusing Russia of interfering in their politics ever since.

Europe has its own cases. In 2014, Marine Le Pen’s French hard-right party, now the National Rally, borrowed €9.4 million from a Czech-Russian bank. A Moscow aircraft-parts firm later took over the debt. In 2023, ahead of the elections to the European Parliament, the party paid off the last €6.1 million, hoping to shake off accusations that it was too close to the Kremlin. In October, Britain’s prime minister, Andy Burnham, said it was “clear” Russia had meddled in the 2016 “Brexit” referendum on the U.K. leaving the European Union. His Foreign Office minister, Stephen Doughty, went on the BBC and said Russia was spending £1.5 billion this year alone on disinformation and propaganda. In the same interview, Doughty conceded there was no evidence that Russia had swayed the result. Nigel Farage, who’d campaigned for Brexit, called Burnham a “liar.”

What’s in any of this for the Kremlin?

Vlad Vexler is a London-based political theorist and analyst, and the host of his own YouTube channel. Vexler says Moscow wants to sway Western elections where it can, but that’s not the main point of interfering in them; the main point is to start fights about the interference itself. The more time people in democracies spend on that, the better it works. And so the smart thing, he says, is to call it out but—and this is currently the difficult part—keep a cool head.

The regime of Russia’s President Vladimir Putin’s, Vexler says, does this not just for practical but ideological reasons. It’s a basic tenet of Putin’s worldview that human life is a lawless competition that only the strong survive—an idea he picked up, Vexler says, in the criminal circles he ran in, in St. Petersburg during the 1990s. You can’t make sense of what Russia is doing in the West, in other words, without making sense of what the Kremlin believes …

This feature is open-access, courtesy of the Marlborough House Foundation.

Gustav Jönsson: What’s Russia up to?

Vlad Vexler: Since 2014, it’s been the Kremlin’s position to interfere in the democracies that sanctioned Russia over Ukraine, and that position has only hardened. You’ve got to distinguish three things. First, why they’re doing it. Second, what is the extent of the interference? And third, what is the efficacy of the interference? One of the biggest problems is that people either deny there’s any Russian interference or confuse its extent with its efficacy. That’s incredibly dangerous, because the main functional point of Russian interference is to generate toxic conflict about the interference itself.

Let’s take an example. Imagine I’m an alt-right, ex-conservative politician in France, Germany, or the U.K.—someone like Marine Le Pen or Nigel Farage. I have a track record of taking money from Russia, or of saying positive things about it, but beyond that my position on Russia and Ukraine is murky. My opponents call me a “Russian asset” or a “Russian sympathizer.” But I have a big wave of popular support behind me: citizens who, as far as they’re concerned, are taking an honest look at what the hell is wrong with their politics and trying to fix it by voting for me. So if the center-left and the centrists call me a Russian asset, I’m going to call them enemies of the people.

That’s a direct consequence of the Russians objectively interfering in our democracy. But it’s also a consequence of us getting carried away with toxic conflict about the extent and efficacy of that interference—and about who’s acting as its accomplice.

Jönsson: How does the Kremlin gin up those conflicts?

Vexler: One way is flooding the internet with bot accounts. If you and I are arguing about healthcare policy, the Russians will put up two bots that are an extreme version of you and two that are an extreme version of me, to make the conflict between us more toxic. My sense is that the efficacy of that is relatively low.

A second is hybrid warfare. Some people think that hybrid war is war. Some people think that hybrid war is not war. If Russia fires a rocket that lands in Sweden, that feels like war. If Russia hires a Ukrainian, who hires a Bulgarian, to set fire to a warehouse in Sweden, what is that? Whatever you call it, the aim is the same as with other kinds of interference: Yes, we’re going to burn down the warehouse; yes, we’re going to scare a few people; but beyond that, we’re going to trigger a debate about whether we’re at war. And some people will say, “The Russians did it.” Others will say, “Well, there’s no evidence, and let’s not freak out about it.” That generates conflict.

Hybrid war progressively undermines a democracy’s capacity to judge whether it’s being attacked or not. The more hybrid war you wage on a democracy, at least that’s how the Russian logic goes, the worse placed that democracy is to tell whether somebody is waging war on it or not. So there’s a self-perpetuating effect.

A third way: The Russians take advantage of the ex-conservative international—the kind of people who’ve paid social visits to Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, people from alt-right circles in France, the United States, and the United Kingdom. The Russians want to get onto their email chains and get friendly with them, and they fund their parties by various direct and indirect means. Russia hopes to manipulate these people because it wants to undermine the status quo in Western democracies—and so do they. There’s a shared agenda. Maybe Putin thinks he shares 20 percent of the agenda of Germany’s right-wing AfD.

But then there’s a genuine ideological allegiance. These people seem to have a monarchist worldview. They think elections are great, but that elections exist to establish a magical link between the leader and the people, beyond institutions. They also practice a kind of “might is right” politics. And though very few would call themselves fascist, their ideology overlaps with fascism in various ways. One is the idea that if you say something very firmly, it becomes true. Another is the idea that if you act in a very virile way, you don’t need a strategy, because action justifies itself.

If I were to generalize about what the Russians are up to, I’d say they’re trying to help us undermine ourselves more effectively, rather than deliver any kind of killer blow themselves.

Jönsson: You mention ideology. But presumably the Kremlin wants practical things too—to fracture the European Union, say. Or maybe messing with the other guy is just part of the culture at Russia’s security service, the FSB. Which matters most?

Vexler: A conception of ideology—but not the only valid such conception—says that ideology is a mental map of politics that is barely consciously available to you. It’s the set of beliefs, but also images and pictures, that you apply as you negotiate the world. On that conception, the Putin regime has a map of politics, and everything falls into it. There isn’t one bit of their view that’s ideological and another bit that isn’t. It’s simply how they map the political world. That’s not to say there aren’t other, non-ideological explanations. It’s to say that ideology will shape every explanation you give of the Kremlin’s motivations.

Let me give you an example. One of the things Putin wants is to stay in power. Most experts who write about Russia believe regime security is a central motive for Putin’s war in Ukraine. He thinks the war is a good thing—or at least he did when he launched it—because he thought it would improve his chances of staying in power. You can’t separate that from a monarchist conception of political legitimacy, or from a picture in Putin’s mind that says, “I have a special bond with the Russian people, beyond institutions. I have these elections because I’m a plebiscitary monarch. I have a special set of electoral rituals that prove to the people that the people are with me, prove to my enemies that the people are with me, and prove to my own inner circle that the people are with me—because if they turn on me, they’re turning on Mother Russia itself.”

Jönsson: What’s Putin’s ideology, then?

Vexler: The central component of Putinism is that it’s a monarchist ideology.

But another component is exclusively Russian: a kind of mysticism. Let me give you an illustration of that. One mystical idea is that losers win. The best place to be before historical success is the back row of nations, from which you’re propelled, in a rapid zigzag, to the front row within a decade. Another idea you’ll find in the Kremlin is that self-annihilation can somehow be constructive—that acting in a very destructive way can be the genesis of a new world. There’s also the view that conceptions of historical progress are false, but history still has a destiny. The world isn’t getting better, and Russia isn’t necessarily out to make it better, but Russia has a kind of scripted historical destiny. We don’t know what it is, but by taking dramatic political action, we might bring it closer.

Jönsson: Do they really believe that?

Vexler: Nobody seriously believes it to the point they’ll put it on a piece of paper, but these are beliefs that have a slight bit of traction in Russian culture, and a low-to-medium degree of traction in the Kremlin.

Another element is a “might is right” politics, which says that “might is right” isn’t simply the reality of the world but a version of normal. Under certain historical circumstances, neoliberalism, which puts a kind of magical primacy on the market, can lead to something close to its opposite, what I call “hyper-neoliberalism.” That goes beyond market competition. It’s an unstructured, lawless competition of all against all, in which the strongest win. I believe it arose out of the radical anarcho-capitalist ideology of early-1990s Russia.

Another element of Putinism still is fascism, and it’s the smallest. That’s why, if you ask me whether the Putin regime is fascist, the answer is both yes and no. It borrows a lot from fascist ideology, but it isn’t primarily a fascist political project.

Jönsson: You mentioned 2014. If you drew up a timeline of Russian meddling, what would be on it?

Vexler: In a sense, it never stopped over the whole of the last century. The Soviet Union was doing it. But we shouldn’t conflate the behavior of the Soviet project with the behavior of Putinism. We tend to overestimate the continuity between the two, and we tend to overestimate how much Putin is a product of the KGB.

Jönsson: Why do you say that?

Vexler: Because of the ideological components we’ve just talked about. To build on them, we’d probably talk about Putin’s early childhood trauma and his time in St. Petersburg’s criminal circles. Putin is much more a gangsterish wheeler-dealer than a KGB bureaucrat. Psychologically, he’s more a member of a dodgy, mafia-like business community than of a Soviet-style bureaucracy.

There was a lull from Mikhail Gorbachev through to early Putin. In his first term, Putin practiced politics he didn’t agree with, because he was continuing things his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, had set in motion. He was still getting warmed up.

The next important turning point in Russia’s reconception of the West as the enemy came in 2012, with Putin coming back to replace Dmitry Medvedev as president. At that point, Putin took a kind of missionary-imperialist turn. Don’t forget, when Putin first came to power, he’d have found the idea of annexing Crimea ludicrous. He’s on record dismissing it, and I believe him. There were ideologues around Putin who wanted to regather the Soviet lands, and he thought they were eccentrics—until he started becoming one of them. And that began to happen as he realized something was very broken about Medvedev’s presidency, insofar as Medvedev was in charge at all.

Then there was Crimea in 2014. Then there was the famous interference in the American election in 2016. Then there was the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. And then there was the 2024 American election, where Putin took a different position to the one he took in 2016. You’ll find that the actions of Russia’s intelligence agencies map onto this trajectory of ideological radicalization and escalation that I’m sketching.

In 2016, Putin expected Hillary Clinton to win; he thought Trump couldn’t. He’d have wanted Trump to win if he’d thought Trump could, but the Kremlin’s analysis of American democracy was too shallow to contemplate a Trump victory. But in 2024 they positively wanted Trump to win.