Key point in this excellent thread by Moscow-based @AlexGabuev: Putin had ample warning from within his own govt that meddling in the 2016 election would be easily traceable and create unpredictable blowback for the Kremlin 1/
Why did Putin blaze such a reckless path? Partly it's because the lesson of the war in Ukraine was that risky undertakings can really pay off--esp if Russia's adversaries are afraid of escalation 2/
It also reflected Putin's conviction that US-EU policy during this period (2014-2016) aimed at nothing less than actively seeking the overthrow of his regime. Kremlin fears of color revolution run deep 3/
That fear (and sense of vulnerability) fed the Kremlin's embrace of assymetrical tools like information/cyber ops and old-fashioned subversion to push back. 4/
Indeed, the totality of Russia's post-Crimea foreign policy has often resembled one long series of covert actions--with these kinds of tools at the forefront 5/
It's worth recalling that a key hallmark of active measures, subversion, and covert action in the Soviet period was the fact the Kremlin was never ever embarrassed when it was caught or called out 6/
I wrote about the revival of this KGB playbook and Russian shamelessness in Feb17 wsj.com/articles/vladi… 7/
Still, all of this begs the question of whether the Kremlin's cyber warriors and intelligence operatives (with all of the lousy opsec chronicled in Friday's #Mueller indictment) way, way, way outperformed in the 2016 election (cf al-Qaeda on 9/11) 8/
I assume that Putin's primary goal was to discredit the US democratic process and to handicap the effectiveness of an expected Clinton-led administration that would have posed a serious threat to his regime. 9/
Unfortunately for the Kremlin, Trump's surprise victory and the resulting furor over Russia's undisguised support for his candidacy threw a spotlight on the Kremlin's handiwork in ways that could (in theory) make it less potent in the future 10/
Sadly, the jury is still out about that. The Kremlin's risk appetite remains elevated, and Trump has been completely relentless about disrupting the cohesiveness of the West's post-2014 response to a more assertive Russia END/
