Objective: Damage Hillary Clinton & Obama
If Possible, See Her Lose the Election
Putin would have a clear motive to push for Trump to be the vessel to attack their mutual enemy: Hillary Clinton, and by extension, President Barack Obama’s policies. Trump’s spy General Flynn himself noted how he perceived that Putin does not respect American leadership and apparently changed his policy to suit that disdain. It would be well within Putin’s interest to take advantage of his now well-honed political and information warfare apparatus to show his preference and steer Trump to do his bidding.
Applying the Russian global media and information warfare structure to attack the critics of his campaign would be the first step, and there is no greater threat to Putin’s policies than Hillary Clinton. The objectives of LUCKY-7 would be to focus all efforts of the Russian cyberwarfare information operations directorates to damage her election by stealing as much internal information as possible and smacking her with a full scale Kompromat operation. If the materials existed, they would be judiciously released. If not, then the forgery masters of the FSB would be able to produce whatever dirt would be necessary.
The deep personal animosity between Clinton and Putin is long and sordid, but a few events between them are noteworthy. In March 2014, former Secretary Clinton gave a speech at the Boys and Girls Club annual fundraiser where she compared Putin’s actions seizing Crimea to the actions of Hitler and the Nazi party:
Now if this sounds familiar, it’s what Hitler did back in the ’30s… All the Germans that were… the ethnic Germans, the Germans by ancestry who were in places like Czechoslovakia and Romania and other places, Hitler kept saying they’re not being treated right. I must go and protect my people and that’s what’s gotten everybody so nervous.1
Putin responded to these comments to French TV March 4, 2014, dripping with sexism and disdain he claimed her comments was not befitting a woman.
It’s better not to argue with women… But Ms. Clinton has never been too graceful in her statements. Still, we always met afterwards and had cordial conversations at various international events. I think even in this case we could reach an agreement. When people push boundaries too far, it’s not because they are strong but because they are weak. But maybe weakness is not the worst quality for a woman.2
Clinton was having none of it. She apparently had Putin’s number and understood what CNN Masha Gessen noted when she said “[Putin] sees himself as someone who doesn’t mince words and who gets into verbal fights, as well as knife fights. And in fact Russians see him like that.”3
So Clinton gave him a knife fight but using a verbal putdown that even Russian women could understand.
“He is very difficult to read personally,” she said. “He is always looking for advantage. So he will try to put you ill at ease. He will even throw an insult your way. He will look bored and dismissive. He’ll do all of that.”
“I have a lot of experience with people acting like that,” she said. “Go back to elementary school. I’ve seen all of that, so I’m not impressed by it.”4
Objective: Candidate Should Damage NATO Alliance and Push for its Realignment
Leon Arron, writing in Foreign Affairs, believes that the Putin Doctrine is to reestablish the Soviet state with modern Russian norms instead of communist doctrine.5 Aron believes that the Russian state after Putin’s election in 2000 has accepted the overarching goal of remaining a global superpower that will harness all aspects of military, political, and economic power to maintain hegemony and dominance in Eastern Europe.
Every six years Russia creates a strategy document to assess and guide its strategic policy. At the end of 2015 they submitted the National Security Strategy of the Russian Federation until 2020. This document is multidimensional in that it reflects not only the risks Russia faces in defense, foreign affairs, and geopolitical challenges but also internal security, cultural, and economic risks. The first major takeaway was that above all, Russia views the United States and NATO as a threat to their global position.6
The security of Putin’s Russia is not just a matter of military prowess, it reflects on Putin himself and the position he sought to carve out in the post-Soviet world. Putin views Russia as a nation that must acquire and maintain a newfound respect from its opponents. National prestige and deep pride in the new Russian nation has been a consistent theme since he became President. Anything that challenges this is a security threat, be it loss of economic status, the impression that its defenses are weak, or that Russia is not in control of its own destiny.
If one watches how Putin has ruled since 2000, almost every move has been to gain international status and to impress Russia’s rising dominance upon the world. Anything that can be done to bolster that prestige is quickly adopted. Putin sought aggressiveness in foreign policy, economic negotiations, and military affairs, particularly if it helped the Russian public see Putin as steering the ship of state to its destined greatness.
When Russia flies relatively obsolete Tu-22m BACKFIRE jet bombers from its military base at Engels in Southern Russia to drop unguided gravity bombs indiscriminately on Aleppo, it meets the strategic goals of impressing its allies, adversaries, and the Russian people. Even if militarily such a strike mission has little to no effect on the war effort except killing innocent civilians, it looks good on Russia Television.
The nationalistic Russia-goes-it-alone fever wasn’t always a cornerstone of their defense policy. Until the invasion of Georgia in 2004, Russia was integrating its national defense goals into NATO via various sub-organizations. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) established in April 1949, is a military alliance between twenty-eight states to create a system of collective defense for member nations.-125 Russia leaned towards the alliance when it joined the North Atlantic Cooperation Council in 1991, and the Partnership for Peace program in 1994. This culminated in the 1997 NATO-Russia Founding Act, providing a formal basis for relations. In 2002, the NATO-Russia Council (NRC) emerged as consultation on security issues, leading to more direct cooperation. Formal NRC meetings and cooperation in a few areas were suspended because of Russia’s military action in Georgia in August 2008.-132 Talk show host Charlie Rose summed it up this way:
I think Vladimir Putin, because of all of his experiences, has a real fear about being—about NATO being on his borders. He’s always had that. They had that with respect to Georgia and with respect to Ukraine. I think he probably worries that if a government in Ukraine was… leaning to the West—it might one more time entertain the idea of NATO membership, which he really, really—that’s probably the thing that he dislikes the most.7
Anna Vassilieva noted that Russia under Putin was fundamentally changing. “Russians feel that they have the right to an equivalent of the Monroe doctrine and the right of foreign political noninterference in their domestic politics.”8 At the St. Petersburg international Economic Forum in 2015, Putin blamed NATO for the crisis in Crimea, and by extension Georgia and Ukraine, due to its insistence on expanding into territory he views as his domain. Putin said,