Russia has motive, capability and form for US email hack

The Kremlin says it had zero involvement in the hacking of Democratic Party emails while US. officials say the hack originated in Russia. We may never know who is right, but one thing is for sure - Russia had motive, capability and form.

Seen through Kremlin eyes, Moscow would only be doing what it feels the United States has been doing to it for years anyway - interfering in a geopolitical rival’s domestic politics in an attempt to destabilise and shape events.

President Vladimir Putin said in February he had seen specific intelligence suggesting Russia’s foreign enemies - code for Washington - were preparing to meddle in Russian parliamentary elections later this year.

And in 2011, Putin accused the US. State Department and Hillary Clinton, its then head, of stirring up street protests against his rule.

“We need to head off any external attempts to interfere in the elections, in our domestic political life,” Putin, who is facing re-election in 2018, told officers from Russia’s FSB security service in February.

“You know that certain kinds of (political) technologies exist and have already been used in many countries.”

That was shorthand for Ukraine, Libya, Egypt and Syria, which Putin thinks Washington irresponsibly destabilized. People who have studied him for years say he believes the United States is trying to foment the same kind of unrest to oust him.

His credo, set out when talking about Islamic State last year, is to strike first “if a fight is inevitable” and, as Russia has shown in its reaction to what it sees as NATO’s aggressive build-up near its borders, to respond in kind.

“Clearly the Kremlin feels it should and can insert itself into domestic politics in other countries in much the same way it believes the United States and Europe insert themselves into Russian politics,” Samuel Greene, the director of the Russia Institute at London’s King’s College, told Reuters.

“In their view it is fair play. They have seen the West involving itself in politics in Ukraine and other former parts of the Soviet space and feel they should be able to pretty much do the same thing.”

He said such disruptive behaviour was driven by a calculation: to stir up trouble in other countries so they have less bandwidth to focus on Russia.

Mark Galeotti, senior research fellow at the Institute of International Relations Prague, said he believed another motive for the hack - if Russia was behind it - would be to portray US democracy as venal and chaotic and so take the sting out of Western accusations that Russian elections are corrupt.

Kremlin-backed media has tilted its coverage in favour of Trump over Clinton, and Putin has praised the Republican candidate as “very talented”.