How did the issue of election interference change the dynamics within the Russia-Ukraine-United States triangle?
Although the actual effect of Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election remains unclear and Donald Trump's possible collusion with the Russian authorities hotly debated, the fact of the Russian state's interference is well established.
Numerous US agencies confirmed the existence of a well-coordinated disinformation campaign involving coverage in the Russian state media, opinions promoted on social media by Russian-based troll factories, and hacker attacks with subsequent releases of the hacked information. The US intelligence agencies believed that a coherent campaign on this scale was likely approved personally by President Putin.What is not so widely known is that some of these methods were originally tried during the Ukrainian presidential election of 2014. In 2017 Russia attempted an even more brazen intervention in the French presidential election, resulting in a stern warning from France. Russian disinformation campaigns follow a certain model and are usually calculated to support candidate(s) seen as more friendly toward Russia or to sow discord in the target countries. In the case of the 2016 presidential election in the United States, Russian efforts were clearly aimed at harming the Democratic Party and its presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton.
However, President Trump has denied all this and characterized Russian interference as a conspiracy theory contrived to explain Clinton's defeat. He attempted to use the Manafort case to argue that it was Ukraine, in fact, that interfered in the US elections in 2016 on the side of the Clinton campaign. As explained elsewhere in this book, evidence against Manafort was bound to emerge in Ukraine because of his considerable involvement with the old regime there and his numerous transgressions against Ukrainian and US laws. When it did become public, the news did not come from state agencies but from an outlier parliamentarian from the president's party, who was also a controversial investigative journalist. The next Ukrainian administration did not confirm Mr.
Trump's claims. During his visit to Ukraine, Trump's personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani failed to secure the collaboration of any significant, mainstream political figures in the quest to undermine Joe Biden's candidacy in the 2020 US elections. When an independent pro-Russian parliamentarian released the so-called Biden Tapes following Giuliani's visit, the sensation fell flat, and the new Ukrainian administration avoided getting dragged into the American political struggles. Following this incident in May 2020, seven former US ambassadors to Ukraine issued a statement against the attempts to involve Ukraine in US domestic politics as advancing “a false and toxic narrative, one with no basis in the reality of US-Ukraine relations, in order to weaken the relationship between the United States and Ukraine and sow division within our two countries.”18Regardless of such a marked difference between Russian involvement and alleged Ukrainian interference, Ukraine did acquire in certain circles in the West the reputation of a place where one could always find compromising material on any visiting Westerner. Even more troubling for Ukrainians was the perception that the Trump administration was willing to whitewash the Russian disinformation war and, instead, present Ukraine as a troublemaker. American support of Ukraine against Russian aggression was also thrown into doubt in the summer of 2019 with the withholding of US$391 million in military assistance. As Ukraine enters the seventh year of the war in the Donbas, uncertainty about the positions and motives of its most important Western partner threatens to undermine security both regionally and globally.