begin quote from:
Russia’s
unprecedented intervention in the United States election came amid more
than United States-Russia tension and Donald J. Trump’s praise of
Vladimir V. Putin, the Russian president. It also coincided with a
growing …
Russia’s
unprecedented intervention in the United States election came amid more
than United States-Russia tension and Donald J. Trump’s praise of Vladimir V. Putin, the Russian president. It also coincided with a growing belief, in Moscow, that Russia faced an imminent threat in Hillary Clinton’s candidacy.
Mrs.
Clinton is viewed in Moscow as innately hostile to Russia. Widely held
conspiracy theories portray her as seeking to foment unrest that will
return Russia to the chaos and depression of the 1990s. Even many
government technocrats view her with suspicion that at times verges on
paranoia.
She
referred to these views at an event on Thursday, telling donors that
Mr. Putin’s “personal beef” with her had driven Russia’s intervention in
the American election.
Mark
Galeotti, a Russia expert at the Institute of International Relations,
based in Prague, said the Kremlin was consumed by something more urgent
than petty revenge: self-preservation.
“It’s
not just they didn’t like Clinton, but they actually thought that she
represented a threat,” he said, describing Russia’s actions as a matter
of “policy, not pique.”
No
one factor can fully explain Russia’s decision to hack and pass on
Democratic emails, analysts say, and intelligence agencies appear
divided on assessing Russian motives. But, in Moscow, fear of Mrs.
Clinton has loomed as large or larger than any warmth for Mr. Trump.
Mr. Putin accused Mrs. Clinton of instigating protests against him in late 2011.
“She
set the tone for some actors in our country and gave them a signal,” he
said, reflecting a widespread view in Moscow that Mrs. Clinton, then
secretary of state, had sought to topple Russia’s government.
Mr.
Putin returned to the presidency a few months later, appearing to
believe that the United States had engineered the Middle East’s descent
into chaos and was targeting his country to be next. He put Mrs. Clinton
at the center of these plots.
Mrs.
Clinton is indeed more hawkish than other Democrats, including toward
Russia. In 2008, while a senator, she mocked President George W. Bush’s
claim that he had looked into Mr. Putin’s soul.
“I could have told him — he was a K.G.B. agent. By definition, he doesn’t have a soul,” Mrs. Clinton joked. The line is still remembered in Moscow.
But
the Kremlin’s views of Mrs. Clinton go beyond defining her as hawkish.
They are also layered with a pre-existing Russian belief that promoting
American democracy is a ploy to unseat unfriendly governments, that the
United States remains bent on Russia’s destabilization or even
destruction, and that there is an American hand behind nearly every
Russian misfortune.
These
suspicions go back decades. But, since Mrs. Clinton’s tenure as
secretary of state, popular telling has cast her as the culprit
responsible for America’s misdeeds and, therefore, Russia’s setbacks.
In
the summer of 2015, when Russian hacking groups first infiltrated
Democratic National Committee servers, I happened to be reporting in
Moscow. The American name on everyone’s lips was not Mr. Trump’s, who
was already praising Mr. Putin, but rather Mrs. Clinton’s.
Fyodor Lukyanov,
a prominent Russian foreign policy commentator, told me at the time
that there was a widespread view in his country’s government that Mrs.
Clinton, as president, would take “a very hostile approach” toward
Russia.
Consensus
in Moscow, Mr. Lukyanov said, was that “Hillary is the worst option of
any president, maybe worse than any Republican.”
It
was conventional wisdom, he added, that Mrs. Clinton considered her
husband’s efforts to reform Russia in the 1990s an unfinished project,
and that she would seek to finish it by encouraging grass-roots efforts
that would culminate with regime change.
This summer, when Russian hacking groups began releasing Democratic emails through third parties such as WikiLeaks, many Americans suspected an effort to help Mr. Trump, who had promised to realign the United States with Russia.
But
Mr. Galeotti, the Russian expert, said that, in all his time in Moscow,
“I didn’t speak to anyone who thought a Trump presidency was possible.”
Rather,
conversation there followed the same polls that dominated the
discussion in America, and which all projected a landslide for Mrs.
Clinton.
Even
as Mr. Putin deemed Mr. Trump “colorful” and suggested they might get
along, officials in Moscow “were absolutely working from the assumption
that Clinton was going to get it,” Mr. Galeotti said.
This
belief may have informed Russia’s actions during the campaign, which a
number of analysts still suspect were aimed at weakening, rather then
preventing, Mrs. Clinton’s presumedly imminent presidency.
But
if Moscow does gain an ally in Mr. Trump, it will lose a foil in Mrs.
Clinton — something that has been politically useful for Mr. Putin as
his country’s economy has sank and its isolation deepened.
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