![]() Russian BMP-2 of the 58th Army of the North Caucasus Military District in South Ossetia during the 2008 South Ossetia War. It has meant invading Georgia in 2008 to frustrate that country’s bid to join the more prosperous Euro-Atlantic community of countries. It has meant that the Kremlin now redirects, often by the crudest possible means, Russia’s decades-old Orwellian machinery of internal disinformation toward international audiences. In his lifetime, he bore witness to its rise, so he sees its dissolution as a tragedy reversing this catastrophe has required dramatic methods. Putin’s efforts are fuelled, ultimately, by his halcyon view of the Soviet Union. His inspiration is similarly easy to understand: Mr. ![]() By taking issues that have historically made democracies strong and turning them against those very societies, the Kremlin seeks to promote confusion and chaos. ![]() By making elections seem like pointless contests of extremes in which moderate views are trampled, he seeks to bolster dictatorship as an alternative. In our era, no country has embraced this kind of trespass – warfare, really – with greater abandon than Vladimir Putin’s Russia. But there has always been interest in luring democracies, powered by the will of the people, to bend to the will of those who trample on democratic rights in their own states. Certainly, new developments have made the challenge even more daunting: Social-media platforms, buttressed by TV propaganda and old-fashioned corruption, have given today’s malefactors impunity with global reach. For roughly as long as there have been democratic elections, there has been the threat and practice of foreign interference.
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