Russia's Playbook For How To Steal An Election, Part 2
Update #7 | Lessons learned from Russian election interference in Ukraine
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Update #7
This is Part 2 of Sunday’s post, “Russia’s Playbook For How To Steal An Election.”
To grasp the global importance of the 2024 U.S. election—and understand why and how it was stolen—you need to see it as part of a global pattern:
Putin is waging a “hybrid war” to destabilize the West, and he’s winning.
While the 2024 Steal and “election” of Donald Trump is by far the crowning achievement of Russia’s modern efforts, the influence operation that successfully installed him in his second term is only one of the Kremlin’s many covert operations to undermine democratic processes, influence political outcomes in foreign nations, and install pro-Russian regimes all over the world.
Moscow has weaponized democracy itself by exploiting elections and the openness of the internet—traditionally seen as strengths in the West—to destabilize its rivals. This approach is low-cost yet highly effective, allowing the Kremlin asymmetric geopolitical power with few downsides, if any. Low risk, high reward.
The Russian playbook for election interference is characterized by a multi-pronged approach that often combines disinformation campaigns, stirring up ethnic or religious division, cyberattacks, financial manipulation, and support for authoritarian or pro-Russian political candidates. In some cases, Russian operatives will even attempt to assassinate political opponents.
Since Putin’s rise in 1999–2000, Russia has targeted elections in a range of countries, seeking to weaken political opposition and advance its geopolitical interests. Each follows key elements of the Kremlin’s playbook. Outside of Russia itself (because their elections are rigged, too), perhaps the most obvious place to look for Russian election interference is Ukraine.
Although Western democracies have been slow to respond to the dangers of foreign interference, Ukraine has faced constant attacks as both a target and a testing ground for Russia's hybrid warfare strategies since 2004. It’s the perfect case study that, through careful study, can reveal Russia's operational methods.
Putin’s Russia and Election Interference in Ukraine
A former Soviet republic, Ukraine has long been trapped in the orbit of its larger neighbor, Russia. Since 2004, the nation has undergone a series of tumultuous elections rife with accusations of fraud and other manipulation. These political upheavals, and Russia’s interference, ultimately divided the Ukrainian people and created the conditions for the current Ukraine War.
Ukraine in 2004 and the Orange Revolution
The 2004 Ukrainian presidential election had many similarities with our Trump v. Harris contest this year. Russia made a concerted effort to manipulate the outcome by supporting pro-Russian candidate Viktor Yanukovych over pro-Western economist Viktor Yushchenko. (No, I didn’t write the same name twice.) Yanukovych, an authoritarian mob-connected businessman, was set to set to establish an oligarchy if he won. His opponent Yushchenko instead represented reform, democracy, and a promised reorientation of Ukraine toward the West, especially the European Union and NATO.
Russia’s influence campaign was marked by a range of covert tactics—including voter intimidation by extremist nationalist groups, media manipulation, disinformation, and financial support—designed to undermine the opposition and flagrantly tilt the election in Yanukovych’s favor.
On Election Day, Yanukovych, who had trailed in polls by double digits, won by three points, sparking widespread allegations of massive vote manipulation and ballot-box stuffing. In addition to these more crude methods, his supporters had smuggled an unauthorized computer to hack into critical infrastructure in the election committee’s national headquarters.
"The implication is that these people were . . . making subtle adjustments to the vote,” said CIA cybersecurity specialist Steve Stigall in 2009. “In other words, intercepting the votes before it goes to the official computer for tabulation."
(Note: Stigall also asserted that, “the CIA got interested in electronic systems a few years ago, after concluding that foreigners might try to hack U.S. election systems.”)
Yanukovych was the beneficiary of one and a half million or more fraudulent votes, mostly from voting precincts in the Russian-speaking eastern portions of Ukraine.
A 2011 study published in Post-Soviet Affairs described the fraud:
That fraud existed in abundance in November of 2004 and that its primary beneficiary was Yanukovich is well documented not only by on-the-ground observers and official testimony, but by the numerous anomalies in official vote counts that included turnout rates in excess of 100%, peculiar relationships between turnout and Yanukovich’s vote totals, and sources of support for Yanukovich that had no prior existence (Myagkov et al 2009).
Russian President Vladimir Putin called Yanukovych to congratulate him on his victory before the results were fully counted or the opposition had conceded.
The discovery of taped cell phone conversations detailing the cover-up sparked weeks of massive protests across the country that may have been the largest in Europe since the Second World War. The widespread civil unrest became known as the “Orange Revolution” for the color that Yuschenko’s supporters wore.
The Ukrainian Supreme Court declared the election void and ordered a re-vote for late December 2004, in which Yuschenko was successfully elected. Ultimately unsuccessful, the blatant methods of cheating that were used were a tactical blunder. However, this set the stage for Russia’s next political moves in Ukraine.
Ukraine in 2010 and the Maidan Revolution
In 2005, Viktor Yanukovych hired veteran American political fixer Paul Manafort to help sanitize his image in preparation for the 2010 election. (Manafort would go on to run Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and later be found guilty by a U.S. federal court of laundering the money earned from his lobbying work in Ukraine.) In 2006, a leaked U.S. State Department cable said Manafort’s task was to give Yanukovych’s party an “extreme makeover” and "change its image from […] a haven for mobsters into that of a legitimate political party."
Under Manafort’s direction, Yanukovych’s strategy this time was simple: remind voters that Ukraine’s government is a mess, and point the finger at his opponents.
Moscow again supported Yanukovych with financial backing and even provided discounted gas deals in exchange for political loyalty. Due to political infighting and years of declining popularity for Yuschenko, pro-Western former ally Yulia Tymoshenko replaced him as Yanukovych’s leading rival. Like Yuschenko, she too was targeted by an impactful disinformation campaign.
When the vote was counted, Russian-leaning Yanukovych had secured victory with a 2.65% lead over his opponent. Tymoshenko claimed that this election, too, was rigged with over a million fraudulent votes; international observers and future studies of the election result cast doubt on her claim. In the aftermath, Tymoshenko held that she would have won if not for last minute changes to the country's election law, which had been pushed through by her political opponents.
These fraud allegations deepened political divisions, particularly between Ukraine’s pro-Western west and pro-Russian east. Yanukovych’s controversial victory only fueled opposition street protests (considerably smaller than the ones from 2004), particularly from those who saw his win as a step back from European integration.
Shortly thereafter, Tymoshenko was imprisoned and found guilty of corruption in a politically motivated trial. Both the United States and the European Union condemned Tymoshenko's trial.
This discontent erupted into the 2013-2014 Maidan Revolution, triggered by Yanukovych’s last-minute decision to ditch an E.U. association agreement in favor of closer ties with Russia. The protests, initially focused on his betrayal of the E.U., quickly escalated into a broader rebellion after student protesters were unprovokedly brutalized by riot police. After months of violent clashes, Yanukovych fled to Russia in February 2014 and Ukraine was decisively wrenched from Russia’s sphere of influence.
Ukraine in 2014 and the Annexation of Crimea
In the wake of Yanukovych's departure, Ukraine appointed an acting president and scheduled a snap presidential election for May.
As Kyiv experienced a substantial shift in the balance of power, it sparked a local conservative counter-revolution in Crimea—an Eastern region of Ukraine with a large Russian-speaking population. Russia launched a state intelligence and military operation to exploit this resistance movement, which was driven by Russian ethnic nationalists. Russia saw it as an opportunity to intervene.
By the end of February, Russian special forces soldiers—initially in unmarked uniforms and portrayed in Russian media as “polite men on vacation”—had streamed over the border into Ukraine and began seizing airports, military bases, and key Crimean government buildings.
From here, things moved quickly: The Russian parliament authorized military force in Ukraine on March 1. On the 13th, Russia launched a powerful eight-minute cyberattack on computer networks in Ukraine. It gained international attention for being 32 times larger than the previous largest distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack ever recorded (during Russia's invasion of Georgia in 2008).
A so-called “referendum” was held on the Crimean peninsula on March 16, in which pro-Russian Crimean Ukrainians illegitimately voted to join Russia. On the 18th, Russia formally annexed Crimea in violation of international law, earning condemnation from nearly the entire international community.
“[Putin] views this action in historic context of correcting the wrong of the collapse of the Soviet Union, which he [has] called the greatest geo-political tragedy of the 20th century,” said Ariel Cohen, Senior Fellow of Russian and Eurasian Studies at the Heritage Foundation.
In April, administration buildings in Donetsk and Luhansk, two more Russian-speaking regions, were occupied by more anonymous (Russian) soldiers. Russian intelligence officers orchestrated the takeovers. Despite the interim Ukrainian government launching a counter-insurgency operation, Donetsk and Luhansk both held their own “referenda” to join Russia on May 11.
Meanwhile, in Western Ukraine, the nation’s geared up for its May 25 presidential election. This was regarded as the most significant election since the country gained independence and a crucial step in Ukraine's more European-oriented future.
While Ukrainians turned out in large numbers to vote, millions of citizens in the conflict-ridden east did not cast ballots, either due to separatist sympathies, fear of intimidation by pro-Russian militias, or the absence of polling stations.
Petro Poroshenko, a pro-Western billionaire and former foreign minister, secured a clear mandate to lead Ukraine through its political and economic crisis, winning the election with over 50% of the vote in the first round (and thus another round wasn’t needed).
But this election nearly wasn’t. A coordinated, three-pronged Russian cyberattack aimed at disrupting the country's presidential election—including an effort to manipulate vote totals—was narrowly thwarted by Ukrainian cybersecurity experts just 40 minutes before disaster.
The cyber intrusions were detailed by journalist Mike Clayton:
The still little-known hacks, which surfaced May 22-26, appear to be among the most dangerous cyber-attacks yet deployed to sabotage a national election—and a warning shot for future elections in the U.S. and abroad, political scientists and cyber experts say.
CyberBerkut, a GRU-linked pro-Russia hacking group, claimed responsibility for the multi-day attack. They first breached Ukraine's central election systems and crippled the vote-counting software. When those were restored from backups, they installed malware on Central Election Commission computers.
The malicious software was designed to edit the election results right when they were set to be announced live on television. The falsified data would have shown ultra-nationalist Right Sector leader Dmytro Yarosh as the winner (with 37 percent rather than with the 1 percent of the vote he actually received).
Coincidentally enough, Russian Channel One broadcasted a report that evening claiming Yarosh had won with 37 percent, rather than legitimate winner Poroshenko. This was even though that erroneous data had not been publicly released by Ukrainian officials.
The faked results were meant to feed into Russian lies that neo-Nazis had toppled Ukraine in a fascist coup, galvanizing unrest in the ethnic-Russian regions of the country and paving the way for Russian military action.
While the immediate threat was neutralized, it highlighted the growing threat of cyberwarfare in modern conflicts, especially from Russian state-sponsored hacking groups. The Western world regarded it as a wake-up call that elections all over the globe could be targeted. It also highlighted Ukraine’s vulnerabilities.
In the end, Russia’s interference in the 2014 election came to be widely seen as a precursor to Russian interference in future U.S. elections.
Ukraine in 2019 and the Russo-Ukraine War
Ukraine's 2019 presidential election was again a significant battleground in the ongoing conflict between Ukraine and Russia. Moscow used its coordinated combination of cyberattacks, disinformation campaigns, and political manipulation to sow division and undermine confidence in the election's integrity.
Leading up to the election, pro-Kremlin outlets amplified false narratives to weaken Ukrainian unity, undermine pro-Western candidates, and exacerbate political and social divisions within Ukraine.
The threat of cyberattacks remained high. To its credit, Ukraine ramped up efforts to strengthen its cybersecurity following the 2014 attack. With its cybersecurity teams working in close coordination with NATO partners, Ukraine experienced no major breaches impacting the 2019 election’s integrity.
Russian operatives did leverage cyber tactics to disrupt the electoral process and support favored candidates, but their impacts were relatively minor.
The presidential election itself was a dramatic turning point for Ukraine, marked by a political outsider, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, defeating incumbent Petro Poroshenko in a landslide. Zelenskyy, a popular comedian and former TV star, promised a fresh, anti-corruption agenda.
International observers reported consistent patterns of state resources being misused to support Poroshenko. There were also widespread allegations of vote-buying, particularly linked to the campaigns of Poroshenko and former prime minister Yuliya Tymoshenko. In the end, these actions didn’t help either win.
Before the election, a set of hacked and leaked emails (released by a Ukrainian hacking group) appeared to show that pro-Russian separatist groups in Donetsk had funneled Russian funding into Zelenskyy’s campaign coffers. The Ukrainian Secret Service investigated, but it didn’t lead to any substantiated claims of foreign interference in Zelenskyy’s election campaign. The election moved forward.
It is suggested that Russia supported Zelenskyy because he was a comedian, he had no prior political experience, and he preferred to speak his native Russian tongue over speaking Ukrainian. If it was Moscow’s plan to elect and then overwhelm him, it failed.
Some Western commentators believed that Zelenskyy was “dangerously pro-Russian,” despite his anti-Russian stance. This accusation hasn’t panned out in the five years since. Instead, despite his inexperience (he only played the president on TV), he’s emerged as a heroic global statesman for both Ukraine and the Western world, and a symbol of stalwart resistance against Russia.
In the years following Zelenskyy’s election, Ukraine's efforts to modernize its military, strengthen ties with NATO, and pursue closer relations with the European Union became significant sources of tension between Kyiv and Moscow. Despite Zelenskyy's attempts to engage in dialogue with Russia, Putin perceived these moves as an erosion of its sphere of influence in the post-Soviet space.
Zelenskyy’s rise became a major factor in the Kremlin’s decision to escalate the conflict and attempt to forcibly reassert control, leading to Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022.
Patterns Reveal Russia’s Tactics
The methods Russia employs to interfere in elections exhibit striking consistencies in tactics and goals, whether the election is in Ukraine, the U.S., or elsewhere. Through comparison, we can uncover key tactics that highlight both continuity and adaptation within the Kremlin’s hybrid war playbook:
1 . The Prep: Disinformation and Media Manipulation
One of the most potent and destructive tools of Russian interference in both nations is disinformation. The Kremlin manipulates the masses by controlling media narratives to align with Russian interests.
This was especially clear in Ukraine before the nation’s 2004 election, with the state-controlled pro-Russian media outlets portraying opposition leader Yushchenko as a puppet of the West and promoting the pro-Russian Yanukovych as a defender of Ukrainian sovereignty.
Immediately following the first televised debate between these candidates, a Ukrainian state-run TV channel (at the time controlled by the Russian-aligned incumbent regime) aired a one-sided "roundtable discussion" that amounted to little more than a smear campaign against Yushchenko. The U.S. doesn’t have a popular state-run news network, but Fox News—the most significant political news provider in the United States—has become an equivalent establishment and operates in the same overwhelmingly biased manner.
These tactics’ use in Ukraine became more sophisticated with the addition of Paul Manafort to Yanukovych’s team. Since then, the Kremlin has deployed these methods worldwide, gaining both experience and seizing substantial control over the West’s news and social media platforms. Russia’s robust disinformation and propaganda ecosystem has become the primary tool used in its efforts to exert global influence.
In the 2016 U.S. election and every waking minute thereafter, Russia has utilized social media platforms, fake news stories, and targeted disinformation to sow division within the American electorate, influence voter perceptions, and boost the candidacy of Donald Trump—who was seen as more favorable to Russian geopolitical ambitions. The method is the same: stoke division, create false narratives, and manipulate public opinion to weaken trust in democratic processes.
Here’s another similarity—let’s examine the messages pushed by Yanukovych’s campaign/state media:
Yanukovych is liberal and represents a "new" Ukraine
Yushchenko is an anti-Semitic fascist and controlled by the U.S.
The election campaign in Ukraine is fair and transparent (to preemptively prompt the public to dismiss claims of fraud in Yanukovych upcoming rigged election)
Of course, each is bluntly false: Yanukovych would continue Ukraine’s corruption, authoritarianism, and pro-Russian slant; Yushchenko condemned anti-Semitism, supported democracy and, while West-leaning, was not a puppet of the U.S.; and the 2004 election was riddled with fraud.
The weaknesses of the pro-Russian candidate are portrayed as faults in his opponent: it was Yushchenko and Westernization that would represent a new Ukraine, while Yanukovych was the foreign-controlled authoritarian. This is the exact same method that Donald Trump and his allies use to slander his rivals.
We can see similarly constructed messages used in the 2024 U.S. presidential election, with right-wing media falsely characterizing Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic candidate, as having many of the same weaknesses as Trump. She was portrayed as being stupid, mentally impaired, a poor speaker, avoidant of the media, unqualified or unfit to be president, having an unhappy marriage, having no platform, extreme in ideology, sexually immoral, a “puppet” of corrupt people looking to use her, and many other labels.
All of these labels are more accurately and truthfully directed at Trump, but through repeated use and preemptive strikes, they are instead pinned on his opponent. When Harris or her supporters point out that Trump exhibits any of these traits, it is dismissed by his fans as disingenuous whataboutism (while, of course, Trump and Putin both employ whataboutism as a state ideology).
The Center for Strategic & International Studies describes Russian disinfo this way:
Russian disinformation efforts have been so influential because they seek to form an early narrative, repeat the narrative, and employ a wide range of outlets, channels, and users to parrot this narrative. Because these Kremlin-engineered narratives are often the first of their kind (although some sources are indigenous in the target country, which the Kremlin then amplifies), the target audience has no frame in place to counter or challenge this new information. Likewise, the narratives are repeated and echoed by numerous actors, giving them the appearance of credible information. Indeed, from the public’s perspective, multiple actors with different perspectives reaching the same conclusion gives a narrative the veneer of truth. With Russian troll farms operating 24 hours a day, it is easy to see how these campaigns author new narratives and disseminate them widely and frequently. This approach essentially overwhelms the social media user with the amount of repetition and leads them to either accept the disinformation as fact or to fall back on their own baseline biases.
Russian troll bots from one troll farm tweeted nearly 3 million messages from almost 3,000 accounts between February 2012 to May 2018. And that was before Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter and staff cuts left Russian trolls unchecked. It was also before Musk personally became the number one spreader of disinformation on his own platform.
Russia’s influence campaign has grown up (and in size) since Trump’s first election. Gone are 2016’s crude, fake news posts and obvious bot networks. It’s a slicker, much more ambitious operation now, including laundering Russian messages through (witting?) American influencers and podcasts.
Just like the Russian influence operations that preyed upon social, cultural, religious, and ethnic differences to widen the divide between Ukraine’s Eastern, pro-Russian oblasts and the rest of the nation, similar patterns have emerged in the U.S.
During Trump’s first presidency, Russia amplified racial strife, leading to unrest in multiple cities and the Black Lives Matter movement. Russia also made inroads with Christian nationalists in the U.S., and fearmongered about hoaxes and conspiracy theories. One in four Americans now support their state succeeding from the union. MAGA-aligned politicians have openly advocated for succession.
It’s no surprise, then, that America is more divided than at any other time since the Civil War, with 81% of Americans believing that the U.S. is experiencing great and increasing division. Before the election, more than a quarter of U.S. citizens feared (and for good reason!) that we could be headed to a Civil War depending on the results of Election Day.
This is the enduring impact of endless streams of Russian propaganda meant to polarize and divide. Lies spread faster and further than the fact-checked truth, and no part of our society is safe from it. Russian psyops affect you more than you think.
These disinformation campaigns deserve a series of posts all their own, but the important thing to know is this: the Kremlin really mastered the craft between 2004 and its operation to interfere with Ukraine’s 2014 election, then deployed it in the U.S. in 2016. It’s become a critical concern for every American election since. Especially 2024.
2 . The Blatant: Voter Suppression, Election Fraud, and Tampering
The second major component of Russia’s election interference involves a direct, physical challenge to the institution of voting itself.
In the second round of Ukraine’s 2004 election, this was done through nationwide tampering with ballots or election infrastructure. Criminal groups interfered with the voting process, destroying ballot boxes and disrupting polling stations. Eyewitnesses reported seeing buses transporting voters between different locations to cast multiple ballots. At many polling stations in Russia-leaning Eastern Ukraine, boxes of counterfeit absentee ballots were handed out openly, allowing people to vote more than once. The fakes were easily identifiable as they used a different typeface than the official ones.
Russia’s decentralized operations don’t rely on any one single type of attack, but instead flood the zone with multiple independent efforts. In many cases, they don’t intend for these things to happen secretly. Instead, they’re performed loudly in a way that publicly undermines the election’s integrity.
Trump, with the help of his propagandists, has pushed similar narratives to his followers. While 2020’s Election Day only saw scattered incidents of violence and voter intimidation, the Republican election fraud story was only just starting.
Primarily promoted by supporters of then-President Trump, the “Stop the Steal” movement falsely claimed that the election was rigged or stolen from Trump due to baseless claims of widespread voter fraud. This led to protests—some turning violent—at vote counting centers and election offices. In some places, the protesters were armed.
The movement culminated in the January 6, 2021, Capitol Insurrection, when a violent mob of Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol, attempting to overturn the certification of the election results.
This year’s was the first presidential election since the Insurrection. The same Republicans who spread election denial messages in 2020 were at it again in 2024, laying the groundwork for more unrest if he lost.
The 2024 election also saw numerous instances of voter intimidation and suppression. On Election Day, at least 67 Russian-linked bomb threats overwhelmingly targeted Democratic or minority areas in the swing states of Georgia, Michigan, Arizona, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. These threats continued in the next days, expanding to also hit California and other states still counting the vote.
Arsonists set ballot boxes ablaze in Oregon, Washington, and Arizona. Also in Arizona, a man repeatedly shot into a Democratic National Committee office in three different incidents. Voters in multiple states brawled with election workers after being asked to remove their MAGA hats.
In Florida, a man drove around an early voting site to yell antisemitic and racist slurs at people outside. It was also a Florida teen who intimidated Democrats with a machete at a polling station. A female Trump supporter was arrested in Pennsylvania for harassing those in line to vote. A different Pennsylvania county reported receiving 2,500 fraudulent voter registration forms. In Indiana, a former Republican legislative candidate was arrested for stealing election ballots during a voting machine test.
There was no shortage of incidents across the country, this election.
The election was also undermined by “legal” voter suppression, with Republican-controlled states performing voter purges to disenfranchise millions of potential would-be voters. Trump-aligned “election investigators” have organized campaigns to file large numbers of voter registration challenges, with some targeting groups of 1,000 or more voters in areas that are poor, have many students, vote Democratic, or are predominantly black.
Alone, any one of these attempts to impact the election wouldn’t have much of an effect. But layered atop each other, the many different efforts to suppress or intimidate voters can cast a substantial chill over voter behavior and turnout.
3 . Digital: Cyberattacks on Election Infrastructure
Russian cyberattacks have also been a key force in both Ukraine's and America’s elections.
Ukraine experienced significant cyberattacks on its election infrastructure in 2004 and 2014. In 2004, a sole Russian-aligned hacker was able to gain direct access to election infrastructure and connect to it to attack to affect vote tallies.
The 2014 Ukraine election hack was a much larger, more advanced operation. Russian aligned CyberBerkut breached Ukraine’s Central Election Systems, deleted critical software, and was able to directly tamper with election data. They also deployed malware that would have disrupted election reporting.
Pamela Smith, president of the Verified Voting Foundation, said, “The Ukraine attack story demonstrates there is no shortage of methods which a determined adversary will make use of to sabotage an election.” The Verified Voting Foundation is a U.S. group that has researched U.S. election systems security.
Moscow’s efforts to hack elections shifted to the U.S. after that.
Donald Trump didn’t just steal the election, he stole America’s future. And it will stay that way unless we do something about it.
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With democracy at stake, isn’t this election worth double-checking?
According to a U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee report released in 2019, Russian hackers targeted election systems in all 50 states in a 2014–2017 operation that remained mostly undetected at the time. Officials concluded it was “an unprecedented level of activity against state election infrastructure” intended to identify vulnerabilities in election security “for use at a later date.” The U.S. confirmed hackers successfully got into position to manipulate voter data in the Illinois voter database, but stopped short of making edits. Russians had also successfully penetrated systems in some Florida counties.
Russian hackers compromised the Democrats’ email servers in 2016, later leaking to WikiLeaks tranches of sensitive emails stolen from Hillary Clinton’s campaign, the Democratic National Committee, and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. This hack-and-leak attack was launched the same day that Trump publicly called for Russia to target Clinton’s emails. The emails were used for disinformation campaigns, including the infamous Pizzagate hoax.
That year, Russian officials made a concerning request to the U.S. State Department to send election observers to American polling stations, mirroring the U.S. practice of sending observers to elections in countries like Russia. The U.S. Intelligence community was alarmed by this, as they had concluded that the most effective way to manipulate votes would be through physical access to voting machines.
More minor breaches have been discovered since, including a phishing campaign that targeted a Florida election technology company in August 2016. This attack may have provided hackers access to some counties during the Florida state primary and North Carolina electronic pollbooks during the general election.
Russian hackers have continued these operations to this day, including spear-fishing aimed at swing state election officials in and around the 2020 election.
What we can learn from this is simple: Russia will do what it can, whenever it can, to probe election equipment for vulnerabilities. When it does identify a weakness, it will exploit it ruthlessly.
The goal isn’t just disruption, it’s dominance—hacking into systems, sowing chaos, and undermining trust in the democratic process. By overestimating our security and underestimating their resolve, we only made it easier for them to strike again.
We were not vigilant. And the cost of that complacency is our future.
Conclusion
These commonalities, while grounded in specific geopolitical contexts, underscore the broader goals of Russian interference: to undermine democratic institutions, destabilize political systems, and ultimately advance Russia’s strategic interests by propping up pro-Russian or authoritarian-aligned leaders like Donald Trump. Whether or not they succeed is beside the point—if the plot is discovered, it still creates chaos.
The methods used in Russia’s hybrid war are continuously evolving, but its endgame remains unchanged. The Kremlin will continue to exploit every available tool—including disinformation, cyberattacks, and undermining elections—to sow discord, erode democratic trust, and weaken American hegemony.
Russian interference is a long-term, sustained effort. It doesn’t begin with the start of an election campaign, nor does it end after the votes are cast—if it ever ends at all. It certainly won’t as long as Vladimir Putin remains in power.
The E.U.’s Stratcom Task Force warned in a March 2019 report:
The Kremlin has long used Ukraine as a testing ground for its (dis)information and hybrid operations, refining techniques that it would later apply in Europe and the United States. Its election interference efforts are no exception.
In this context, it’s clear that the United States as a whole, and specifically its election infrastructure, has been continuously targeted by a foreign influence operation since 2014.
In a statement, Sen. Richard Burr, (R-NC) chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, characterized the cyberattacks surrounding the 2016 election as an instance in which the U.S. was caught off guard:
In 2016, the U.S. was unprepared at all levels of government for a concerted attack from a determined foreign adversary on our election infrastructure. Since then, we have learned much more about the nature of Russia’s cyberactivities and better understand the real and urgent threat they pose.
(Despite the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report clearly detailing how vulnerable the U.S. was to election hacks, Republican majority leader Sen. Mitch McConnell blocked election security legislation put forward by Democrats.)
And yet this year, Cait Conley, a senior advisor to the Director of Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), said the agency was "not aware" of any foreign influence operations going on during the election. She said the agency was not tracking any "national level significant incidents" on Election Day 2024.
How is that possible? Prior to the election, the U.S. intelligence community had issued a steady stream of dire warnings about the potential for foreign interference, including one on Election Eve.
CISA was clearly asleep at the wheel.
As in Ukraine, the consequence of underestimating or failing to counter these tactics will be devastating. Even if our elected officials take notice of the issue and act immediately to correct course, the 2024 election hack will chip away at America’s already strained electoral integrity.
Ukraine’s experience over the past two decades should have been a wake up call. We knew we were in the crosshairs, but we failed to safeguard democracy when it mattered.
We're at war, and Russia is on the cusp of a decisive victory.
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