Putin’s campaign of personal revenge against the United States

2017/6/7 14:10:51

Putin denounced the Panama Papers as a deliberate effort by America to embarrass him. “Officials and state agencies in the United States are behind all this,” he charged in April 2016. 

 


By David Ignatius, opinion writer for the Washington Post, June 6, 2017

 

MOSCOW

 

At a cafe a few blocks from the old KGB headquarters at Lubyanka Square, investigative journalist Andrei Soldatov tries to explain the murky world of Russian intelligence that’s now the focus of a U.S. criminal investigation into the hacking of the 2016 campaign.

 

Big events in today’s Russia often aren’t the product of broad strategy, argues Soldatov, but rather are “tactical moves” that reflect the personal interests of Vladimir Putin and his all-powerful “presidential administration.”

 

Soldatov thinks the Putin factor is crucial in understanding issues in the hacking investigation. Putin has a personal dislike of Hillary Clinton, and Russian intelligence had been gathering information about her since late summer 2015. But what may have pushed the Russian operation into a higher gear was the April 2016 publication of the so-called Panama Papers, which revealed secret bank accounts of some of Putin’s close friends and associates.

 

“It was a personal attack,” says Soldatov. “You cannot write about Putin’s family or personal friends.” He speculates that the Russian leader “wanted to do something about it, to teach a lesson.”

 

[…]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinion ... b-fddbd8359dee_story.html

Printer Friendly Page Send this Story to a Friend Create a PDF from the article