Trump is Selling Off American Security to Russia
The United States has stopped offensive cyber operations and information operations against Russia handing the Kremlin an important victory.
by Julie Roginsky
It’s not just Ukraine. It’s not just NATO. Donald Trump, for reasons we can only speculate about, is selling off American security to Russia one piece at a time.
Lost in the myriad other daily outrages this president is foisting on the nation was Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s announcement that the United States has stopped offensive cyber operations and information operations against Russia. Hegseth’s order came in late February — notably days before Volodymyr Zelensky’s disastrous visit to the White House on March 1.
If today’s wars are fought in cyberspace even more than they are fought on the battlefield, count this as the United States actively joining the Russian side. In the last several years, the Kremlin has stepped up cyberattacks against Ukraine and our NATO allies, according to the Microsoft Digital Defense Report released late last year. It also launched an aggressive effort to interfere in last year’s presidential election.
According to Microsoft, “Approximately 75% of [Russian cyberattack] targets were in Ukraine or a NATO member state, as Moscow seeks to collect intelligence on the West’s policies on the war.” But the efforts went much further, focusing on data destruction, data theft for profit, disruption, election influence, espionage, influence operations and ransomware/ extortion. While the vast majority of Russia’s efforts were geared towards Europe and Central Asia, a full 20% targeted the United States.
This is the state of the Kremlin’s offensive cyber operations towards the United States and our NATO allies. To be clear, Russian President Vladimir Putin sees these efforts as an important front in both his hot war against Ukraine and his cold war against the West.
That is why Russia insisted that the United States release Russian cybercriminal kingpin Alexander Vinnik for American Paul Fogel just weeks after Trump’s inauguration. Prosecutors accused Vinnick’s crypto exchange of being one of the “primary ways by which cyber criminals around the world transferred, laundered, and stored the criminal proceeds of their illegal activities.” Some of those proceeds likely funded the Kremlin’s own cyber criminality against Ukraine, the United States and our NATO allies.
All of these pieces are interconnected. Putin’s agenda is not particularly difficult to discern because it is the same agenda that the Soviet Union had for seventy years: to expand its footprint and win a war — both ideological and territorial — with the West. The Soviet Union may be no more, Putin may no longer be a communist, and the ideology may be slightly different, but the goal is the same.
Twenty years ago, the Russian president called the collapse of the Soviet Union the “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century,” one that he has been trying to remedy for the past two decades. Whether it it quashing separatist movements within Russia, annexing land in Georgia and the Crimean Peninsula or, now, launching a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Putin has behaved very much like the Soviet leaders who forged his thinking.
What has stopped him has been the greatest alliance in world history. NATO is much more than just a military pact; it is also a political coalition that has kept the peace in Europe while creating socioeconomic ties separate from the European Union for decades. Russia, on the other hand, is a petrostate whose influence would have continued to wane with the rise of renewable energy and whose gross national product is dwarfed by Italy’s — had Trump not thrown it a lifeline.
Until January 20th, Putin was not just losing the war in Ukraine, which was beginning to resemble the same boondoggle as the Soviet Afghanistan war that had put the final nail in the communist regime’s coffin. The Russian economy was tanking and, with it, any assurances he could have had long-term about a compliant populace. As the Tsar and the communists learned before him, Russians have a high threshold for oppression but the one thing they have a hard time tolerating is a leader who promises military glory but fails to deliver it. The only lifeline Putin had was to foment so much political discontent abroad that some Western leader, somewhere, would bail him out before his own people eventually bailed on him.
Putin’s initial notable attempts to sway Western politics his way were by funding the far-right French National Rally party in 2014 and by backing Brexit, which Russian intelligence funded through cyber disinformation campaigns in 2016. Brexit was a dress rehearsal for the 2016 American election, in which Russia interfered by hacking private emails and pursued another aggressive disinformation campaign in service of American regime change. Putin’s efforts were successful beyond his wildest dreams.
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Whatever Trump and Putin discussed privately throughout the president’s first term will remain a mystery for now. But what is obviously apparent is that Trump is now the apotheosis of Putin’s life’s work. The president of the United States, the most powerful man on earth, has become a tool of Russia’s expansionist goals, both ideological and military.
Hegseth’s decision to end offensive cyber operations and information operations against Russia is akin to scrapping our nuclear arsenal while allowing Russia to maintain and grow its own. It means that we will have a much less clear view of what Putin is up to, on the battlefield, domestically and internationally. It means that we are signaling to the Kremlin that we are willfully disinterested in knowing what the most dangerous man on earth is doing. It means that Trump’s plea to have the Russian’s hack Hillary Clinton’s server in 2016 has been reciprocated by Trump’s refusal to hack Russian servers.
Trump’s excuse for all this, when he has felt like providing one, is that he is taking a soft approach to Russia in pursuit of “peace” — a peace that neither the Russians nor the Ukrainians want on Trump’s terms. Fresh off hijacking Ukraine for its rare earth minerals, even as the country is fighting for its very survival, Trump has floated a peace deal that would effectively allow Russia to keep all the Ukrainian territory it has illegally snatched since 2014. The thousands of Ukrainian civilians and servicemen and women who have died in three years of fighting would have died for nothing if Trump has his way.
But even this is not enough for Putin — nor should it be. With a willing accomplice in the White House, he is aiming for more, including regime change in Kiev. In his worldview, and probably in Trump’s, Volodymyr Zelensky will not be replaced by a Ukrainian who wants to align with the West but with a Russian stooge. In short order, Ukraine would hold a “referendum” that would bring it closer to the Russian Federation, until the Anschluss was complete and it, along with a willing Belarus, would unify with Russia. In this way, Putin would begin reversing the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the 20th century.
A strong United States, committed to democracy, in alliance with its Western democratic partners, has prevented this from happening since the dawn of the century. No more. The most powerful nation on earth, with the largest GDP on earth and the strongest military on earth, is unilaterally disarming before a failing authoritarian petrostate. It will take a generation to make America great again after Trump is done with it.
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NEGOTIATE OR AID & ABET
Trump says stopping military aid to Ukraine is a negotiation tactic. Now he’s stopping intelligence sharing w/Ukraine and calls that a negotiation tactic. BS! Trump’s aiding & abetting Putin’s attacks on Ukraine’s citizens. TREASON!
My guess this is our give back in exchange for Russia and Saudi Arabia increasing their oil output. Probably agreed to during the meetings in Saudi Arabia.