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Old 05-15-19, 08:22 AM   #15
ikalugin
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Join Date: Aug 2014
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We don't have a unified plan. Under the faceless and monolythic hood of the Russian state there are groups and actors working without much coordination with each other.

A good example of this would be FSB officers protecting hackers who would leak Medvedev's (when he was the president) private correspondence amongst other things. Incidentally this wasn't the reason why they were eventually sacked. Another would be the emergent strategy used in Syria (I would recommend reading Kofman).

The so called "troll factory" (internet research center) is one of many such organisations. Overall while such actors do operate in the west (and western actors operate and complete with those in Russia and elsewhere) I strongly believe that they do not have the resources to significantly affect much of anything. But yes, there is an element of the so called political warfare and measures below the threshhold of war due to the strong mutual nuclear and conventional deterrence.


The issue is that much like the Reichstag fire this is being used by those with the real institutional power to gain more power and limit the liberties of common citizens.
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