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Russian General Denies He’s Behind the U.S. Election Plot
Russian General Denies He’s Behind the U.S. Election Plot
The former head of the RISS says he never signed off on supposed plans to subvert American democracy. But that doesn’t make him any less a Cold Warrior.
Photo Illustration by Sarah Rogers/The Daily Beast
MOSCOW—The Russian Institute for Strategic Studies (RISS) is the Kremlin’s think tank. Managed by former officials of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), it draws up guidelines for President Vladimir Putin’s foreign policy, and last year it was watching the American elections very closely.
Indeed, according to
a Reuters report in April, during the 2016 campaign that took Donald Trump to the White House the RISS produced and distributed around the Russian government two documents: one a framework advising Putin how to swing the 2016 U.S. presidential vote in Trump’s favor, and the other a strategy to discredit the elections if Trump failed.
This week in an exclusive interview The Daily Beast spoke with Lt. Gen. Leonid Reshetnikov, who was in charge of RISS until January 2017—which is to say during the entire period in question last year. He denied the allegations in the Reuters report and gave his own interpretation of what led Russia and the United States to their current state of conflict.
“The American intelligence services are a machine that is always working, constantly making up anti-Russian cases,” Reshetnikov told The Daily Beast.
The general perception is that Moscow is defending itself against U.S. aggression, a view strengthened after brief encounters between Putin and Trump at an Asian economic summit in Vietnam. Those produced an accord about
fighting the so-called Islamic State in Syria by largely accepting Russia's strategy and dominance there, but there was no relief from past sanctions against Russia and against Putin’s inner circle, or new ones that are due to kick in.
In August,
Trump reluctantly signed a bill that was passed overwhelmingly by Congress imposing heavy sanctions on Iran and North Korea as well as Russia. It effectively ties Trump’s hands, preventing him from waiving any of the measures against Putin without Congressional approval.
“The American intelligence services are a machine that is always working, constantly making up anti-Russian cases”
— Lt. Gen. Leonid Reshetnikov
Some in Moscow argue that Putin’s advisers in the secret services and the ministry of foreign affairs have grown too “old-fashioned,” perhaps too genteel. (One thinks of suave
Sergei Lavrov, the foreign minister.) Others see the failure of Russia’s diplomatic push as simply one more example of the U.S. demonizing Russia for all kinds of ulterior motives.
RISS expert Anna Glazova says that relations between the two countries are worse than during the Cold War between the Soviets and the United States. The RISS expert says that U.S. accusations leveled against Russia are cover for economic competition, which is the real reason to implement sanctions "against our country," as Glazova put it on the RISS website this week.
In 2014, after Russia annexed Crimea, a strategic peninsula that had been part of Ukraine, the Group of 7 economic powers, led by the United States, decided to implement three stages of economic sanctions. The goal was to stop Russia from funding, arming, and supplying weapons to Ukrainian rebels in the east of the country. The first stage limited cooperation with Russia, the second was meant to stop any help with technologies for Russia, and the third, the worst part, was to limit the development of certain sectors of the Russian economy.
Then additional sanctions were imposed by the Obama administration last year to punish Russia for its interference in the American elections. Previously, in 2012, the U.S. imposed sanctions targeting members of Putin’s inner circle believed responsible for massive corruption and, specifically,
the death in prison of whistleblowing accountant Sergei Magnitsky.
The RISS analyst, Glazova, did not mention any of the reasons behind the U.S. economic sanctions. Instead, she insisted they are “an attempt to push our energy companies off the world’s market.” And since Russia’s greatest source of income is the sale of oil and natural gas, that would be disastrous, but low energy prices already have been at least as hurtful to Russian prosperity as the sanctions.
It is important to understand this line of defensive thinking at RISS, one of the key institutions advising the Kremlin.
“It is a very influential center,” Sergei Markov, a member of the Public Chamber of Russia’s parliament and an adviser to the presidential administration, told The Daily Beast. “I once passed a recommendation on an important issue to the country’s leadership through RISS and all my suggestions were heard and implemented.”
The Reuters report in April said the RISS gave recommendations to the Kremlin—a game plan—on how to affect the U.S. presidential elections. If true, those policy papers could be a key element for the investigations related to Russian meddling in the U.S. elections that are being conducted by Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team and committees of the U.S. Congress.
“Curiously, President Trump has been the main voice in the United States casting doubt.”
It should be noted that those investigations are focused on the question of Trump campaign team complicity or conspiracy with Russian operatives, not the question of whether there was Russian interference. Of that there seems to be little doubt. The U.S. intelligence community concluded last year that Russians carried out a massive effort to affect the outcome and credibility of the American elections, and that this was done on Putin’s orders. Those findings were made public in January.
Curiously, President Trump has been the main voice in the United States casting doubt on these conclusions, although it is often difficult to determine what he actually means. As
the New York Times reported Saturday, after Trump’s brief meetings with Putin he called accusations of Russian meddling a politically motivated “hit job” that interfered with important cooperation between Moscow and Washington on life-or-death issues.
“Every time [Putin] sees me he says, ‘I didn’t do that,’ and I really believe that when he tells me that, he means it,” Trump said. “I think he is very insulted by it, which is not a good thing for our country.”
The leaders of the intelligence agencies that came to the conclusions about Russian meddling published in January were “political hacks,” he said.
But, as much as Trump might want the core conclusions about Russian efforts to subvert American democracy to have changed, they have not. This, even as
evidence mounts that some of his campaign advisors and his relatives, including
son Donald Trump Jr. and son-in-law Jared Kushner, were in direct contact with Russian agents or proxies.
On Sunday, pressed for a clarification, Trump said he backed the conclusions of the U.S. intelligence agencies “as currently led, by fine people.” As to whether he believed Putin’s claim there was no Russian interference in the elections, Trump said, “What he believes, he believes.”
The Reuters report in April about the RISS policy papers was not based on the documents themselves, but on interviews with “three current and four former U.S. officials.”
According to the report, the U.S. intelligence services had obtained two documents prepared by the RISS. One of them was “a strategy paper written last June [2016] that circulated at the highest levels of the Russian government but was not addressed to any specific individuals,” according to the report. It advised the Russian leadership to launch a massive propaganda campaign on social media and in the Kremlin-controlled mass media to encourage Americans to vote for Trump, considered a candidate who would be friendlier to Russia than Barack Obama had been or Hillary Clinton would be.
“As President Putin said, is ‘the dog’s barking but the caravan’s walking.’”
— Lt. Gen. Leonid Reshetnikov
The second document drafted in October 2016 warned that Hillary Clinton was most likely going to win the election, so the focus should shift to discrediting Clinton’s legitimacy, raising questions of voter fraud that would undermine her presidency.
Lt. Gen. Reshetnikov, the former head of RISS, dismissed the Reuters report when he talked to The Daily Beast on Monday of this week.
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