Michael Novakhov: Cold War 2: The newly adaptive STRATEGY on the part of the Russian Security Services. Comments to the article | How to cooperate With Russia's Security Agencies when you can't tell the cops from the robbers? - By Andrei Soldatov - The Moscow Times
Cold War 2: The newly adaptive STRATEGY on the part of the Russian Security Services. Comments to the article
By Michael Novakhov | 9:33 AM 5/14/2021 - Post Link
The issue might be a bit deeper. The events of about past ten years , coinciding and probably resulting from the Putin's third Presidential term, are marked by the STRATEGIC change of the attitudes and interactions with the "West", returning pretty much to the previous confrontational model of relations in the Soviet times.
The causal factors of this change are not entirely clear yet, and they might have a lot to do with Putin's own personal perceptions, emotions, and decisions. At the root of this change in Putin's personal outlook may be the circumstances of the hypothetical (unproven and unpublicized, but appearing evident to me) poisoning with Dioxin in 2010 (with the KUSHCHEVSKAYA massacre as the hypothetical retaliation for it by Putin's special forces, in my opinion), which led to the change in his facial appearance (with the accompanying emotional "narcissistic injury"), multiple and stressful plastic surgeries, and possibly treatment with hemodialysis. I described these impressions of mine in the previous posts, although they went largely unnoticed, I think.
Putin blamed this poisoning on the West, with the boundless hatred and the thirst for revenge, although these issues were never addressed officially; Putin chose denial as his response, to maintain his "heroic" appearance. The more immediate culprits however, appear to be Ukraine (as the retaliation for and the "real life experiment" in the investigations of the Yushchenko poisoning), and most remarkably, the Chechen separatists, as their revenge, both general and specific: the information transpired recently that Dioxin was used for deforestation purposes in Chechen mountains during the Second Chechen War, to drive the Chechen fighters "out of their shitholes": "i v sortirakh ikh budem mochit" - "if we find them in their outdoor toilets, we will kill them there too".
Be all this as it may with regard to the root causes and their circumstances, the change of the attitudes in the Russian political circles and most importantly in their intelligence and security services was noticeable and deep enough (although it was always present below the surface) to mark the return to the patterns of the Cold War. Some observers called it "Cold War 2".
I think that the present hostilities between Russia and the West are the results of the change which was thought through (but not well enough), deliberate, as the matter of the political and military doctrines, organized, planned, and implemented as the newly adaptive STRATEGY on the part of the Russian Security Services. Another aspect of this change is the growing and ominous merger between them and Russian and international criminal underworld, with Russia becoming increasingly entrenched as the Mafia State.
The role of the New Abwehr as the behind the scenes engine is another component issue of these developments. It is opaque and obscure but is significant enough to deserve the separate studies and discussions.
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How to cooperate when you can't tell the cops from the robbers?
By Andrei Soldatov | Post Link
The cyber-attack on the Colonial Pipeline once again raised the “cursed question” many law enforcement agencies around the world are asking these days: How they are supposed to cooperate with their counterparts in countries where there isn’t a clear line between the criminal police and political police?
Russia has been the largest supplier of a highly skilled workforce of hackers for several generations, starting in the mid-1990s when thousands of engineers within the gigantic Soviet military-industrial complex, confused by the sudden loss of their social status, found themselves completely incapable of providing their smart kids with any moral guidance.
The kids, who hold a grudge against the West, put their brains and math skills to good use. They expanded the ranks of hackers and brought a new brazenness to their operations.
Many were targeting the West, a target that was always considered safer to attack than something closer to home.
The need for the Western law enforcement to cooperate with their Russian counterparts was immediately obvious.
Russian policemen, in turn, needed Western expertise. So interagency conferences were held, speeches delivered, diplomatic visits exchanged, and the official representatives of secret services attached to the embassies got involved.
The ties between Russia’s secret services, Russian private security firms and the West were established and strengthened.
The poisoning of Litvinenko in 2006 did harm that cooperation, but the harm was largely contained to the British-Russian relationship.
At some point, it looked like it might be possible to have well-functioning cooperation between law enforcement agencies outside of politics.
The Americans were especially keen to keep the cooperation alive when thousands of Americans came to the Olympic games in Sochi.
The most important moment of cooperation was reached in the summer of 2016, when in early June the Russian police arrested members of the criminal group known as Lurk. They pulled in a total of 50 people.
The Lurk group was believed to have stolen nearly three billion rubles ($45 million) from Russian and foreign banks.
The operation was a joint effort of the Russian Interior Ministry, the FSB, and the investigative unit at Kaspersky lab.
But 2016 was also the year that saw Russian cyber interference in the U.S. election, and the contact people at the FSB and Kaspersky lab were promptly locked up in jail by the FSB, which was paranoid about possible leaks to the Americans.
International cooperation in fighting criminal hackers seemed to be in ruins when the Americans responded to Russian interference by adopting a naming and shaming policy that included putting FSB officers on the FBI most-wanted list.
The officers added to the list were members of a unit that was long suspected of both prosecuting hackers and running them – and running them against Western targets. Worse yet, rumor had it that the unit used the information obtained from Western partners to locate, approach and recruit Russian hackers.
The naming and shaming policy was a strong signal, but the bold move was hardly of help against criminal hackers. Russia remained one of the largest exporters of that commodity, and it was impossible to catch them without help on the ground.
Moscow understood this perfectly well. And the FSB really began to enjoy putting its Western counterparts before a difficult choice.
A general introduced by the FSB as its top official in charge of international cooperation, including counterterrorism, was identified by the Ukrainians as being present in Kiev during the Maidan revolution. Counterterrorism cooperation is too important to be abandoned over an issue of morality; the FSB won that round. And since that worked, at Lubyanka they decided to apply the same strategy to restart cyber cooperation with the West. The security agency badly needed it to put an end to the embarrassing naming and shaming policy, and the Kremlin wanted to restart bilateral cyber talks with Western countries rather than having to face a united front.
What came in handy was that Russia kept hosting international sports competitions, and in 2018 Moscow hosted the FIFA World Cup. A few months after, the Kremlin launched a national coordination center for computer incidents, created under the auspices of the FSB.
Western law enforcement was welcome to contact the Center in the future if there were any hacking attacks.
That didn’t go well. Some information was shared, but mostly with the countries traditionally close to the Kremlin, like the regimes in Central Asia and Belarus. The West largely ignored the Center.
But once the Kremlin decided on a strategy, it stuck by it. In April, when the Germans accused Russia of being behind an attack on the computers of at least seven federal MPs and 31 lawmakers in regional parliaments, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova pointed out that the Germans had failed to contact the FSB’s center on computer incidents.
The positions on both sides became entrenched, and then the U.S. was hit by the Colonial hack.
Russian criminal hackers are still out there, at large and in large numbers, and they cannot be ignored. Most of them are on Russian soil, and if there are still Russian criminal hackers who are acting independent of the authorities, they can only be fought with local cooperation.
But what if all the doors to cooperation, both government and private, remain shut and sealed, except the door of the FSB — the very agency which is accused of carrying out repressions, poisonings, and cyber-attacks?
Is cooperation with this agency feasible? If so, to what extent and at what level?
These questions are what many people in Western law enforcement are asking themselves these days. Treating the FSB as a possible partner is again on the agenda. And that means that from now on, every major cyber-attack attributed to Russian criminal hackers will play into the hands of the Kremlin.
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