Joel Gehrke is foreign affairs reporter for the Washington Examiner, with an emphasis on U.S. competition with China and Russia, Middle East policy following the U.S. withdrawal from the Iran nuclear agreement, and the crisis in Venezuela. Previously, he covered domestic politics for National Review Online.
Russia is waging a campaign to “undermine democratic processes globally,” according to U.S. intelligence and State Department officials who have urged allies to expel Russian spies involved in the effort.
“Russia is focused on carrying out operations to degrade public confidence in election integrity,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s team wrote in a cable to scores of U.S. embassies around the world. “This is a global phenomenon. Our information indicates that senior Russian government officials, including in the Kremlin, see value in this type of influence operation and perceive it to be effective.
“It is critical not to overestimate these Russian efforts, which are continuously evolving and still maturing,” Blinken’s team wrote. “The U.S. intelligence community found that, at present, Russian operations to undermine public confidence in elections almost always rely upon — and then amplify — preexisting narratives generated by members of the targeted country’s domestic population.
Still, U.S. officials have begun to brief U.S.-allied democracies and other governments on the details of their findings and recommended a series of “mitigation steps,” including a recommendation that governments “expel and refuse to accredit Russian intelligence officers involved with operations to degrade public confidence in democratic elections.”U.S.
“We’ve provided as much of bespoke lead information to them, as permitted pursuant to intelligence-sharing guidelines,” a senior State Department official told reporters, emphasizing that they provided the governments with “policy options that they could exercise under their own authorities.”
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