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The upcoming U.S. presidential election will be the first since Russia’s extensive and systematic attack on the 2016 cycle. Unfortunately, the interference campaign did not end on November 8, 2016. Multiple law enforcement filings, intelligence warnings, private sector alarms, and watchdog group reports prove that Russia’s attacks continued throughout the 2018 midterm elections—and continue to this day.

Every indicator suggests that Russia will continue to be actively engaged in disrupting U.S. democratic processes throughout the 2020 election cycle. Compared with midterms, presidential elections are more tempting because the potential return on investment is much greater. Foreign policy tends to play a larger role in debates, as presidents have a much larger executive say in foreign policy decisions than domestic policy. And in 2020, President Donald Trump, a politician for whom the Russian government has a preference and on whose behalf the Kremlin is willing to intervene, will mostly likely be on the ticket again.

To further complicate the matter, the threat of foreign interference goes beyond Russia. Countries such as China, as well as Iran and other Gulf states, are advancing their foreign interference capabilities.¹ And the lack of any substantive response to Russia’s interference in 2016 has sent the signal to these countries—in particular, to China—that there are no consequences for interfering with American elections.² In fact, in an interview with ABC News, President Trump said he would accept information from a foreign state, creating a perverse incentive for foreign intelligence services to engage in such activity.³

Russian attempts to sow discord in the United States are ongoing, as Russian President Vladimir Putin continuously seeks to weaken and undermine Western democracies. Some lines of effort, such as disinformation, are perpetually active, even between election cycles. In fact, Project Lahkta, which was the code name given to the Russian disinformation campaign targeting the 2016 election, began in 2014 and ran through the 2018 midterm elections, and there is no reason to believe that it has ceased.⁴ Others, such as a WikiLeaks-style hack and release campaign, can be specifically deployed during crucial campaign moments, but these can be months, even years, in the planning.⁵ Furthermore, Russia is consistently shifting and updating its interference tactics, making it even harder to protect future elections. Prior to the 2016 election, for example, candidates had little understanding of how troll farms could be used to influence voters, which made it difficult to defend against this new type of interference.

An election year presents a tempting target, then, a situation in which Russia can ramp up its ongoing interference attacks and launch brand-new ones for maximum impact. Therefore, it is matter of when and how—not if—Russia intervenes in the 2020 election. As Dan Coats, the former director of national intelligence, said, “The warning lights are blinking red.”⁶ Unfortunately, the Trump administration appears either unable or unwilling to put up a meaningful defense against foreign interference. The White House has refused even to recognize Russia’s ongoing interference efforts and has prevented other government offices from raising the issue. In fact, the White House has reportedly told former Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen not to raise election security with other Cabinet members.⁷ The administration also dramatically downsized two offices at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security that were established to combat this issue—one on election security and the other on foreign interference.⁸

While the Trump administration itself appears unlikely to fight foreign interference, there are multiple stakeholders who have agency and can either contribute to, or curb, the impact of a foreign influence operation. These include voters; the press; political parties and candidates; and law enforcement and career government officials.

America is also not the only target for Russian influence operations; democracies in Europe and around the world are combating Russian election interference. Some of these countries have dealt with this interference better than others, and there are important lessons to be derived from these experiences. With these factors in mind, this report outlines Russian election influence operations and evaluates the responses from stakeholders. It determines the lessons the United States can learn from these democracies, including what works and what does not when confronting Russian interference.

There is no single formula for protecting democratic processes, nor is there a way to provide 100 percent guaranteed protection. However, based on this report’s review of how other democracies have confronted Russian interference, it is clear that any successful strategy must be multifaceted and include a combination of a forceful government response, an alert and educated public, a trusted media, paper ballots, and efforts to monitor and combat illicit financial flows.

In understanding Russia’s approach to election interference, and therefore what methods the country is likely to employ or amplify during the 2020 election and beyond, it is helpful to take a step back and understand how such interference fits into Russia’s broader geopolitical strategy. It should be noted that this report uses “Russia” as an umbrella term to describe efforts that are connected—often loosely—to the Kremlin. This may encompass military or intelligence services acting on direct orders, or oligarchs and friends of President Putin simply trying win his favor, though usually with explicit or implicit direction from the Kremlin.

Following Russia’s 2016 interference campaign, analysts and journalists have spent a great deal of time dissecting Russian strategy, arguing that Putin has developed a new way of war.⁹ Terms such as “hybrid war” and the “Gerasimov Doctrine” have become commonplace.¹⁰ But in reality, Russia’s interference campaign is a renewal of Soviet-era intelligence operations, dating back to the earliest days of the Soviet Union.¹¹ George Kennan, the American diplomat and architect of America’s Cold War containment strategy, referred to this approach as “political war.”¹² In a classified 1948 memo to the National Security Council, Kennan described what the Soviets were doing:

Political warfare is the logical application of Clausewitz’s doctrine in time of peace. In broadest definition, political warfare is the employment of all the means at a nation’s command, short of war, to achieve its national objectives. Such operations are both overt and covert. They range from such overt actions as political alliances, economic measures (as ERP—the Marshall Plan), and ‘white’ propaganda to such covert operations as clandestine support of ‘friendly’ foreign elements, ‘black’ psychological warfare and even encouragement of underground resistance in hostile states.¹³

The Soviets themselves had a different term: active measures. This effort was considered the heart and soul of Soviet intelligence and run by a special branch of the KGB’s foreign intelligence directorate, Service A.¹⁴ KGB Major General Oleg Kalugin described active measures, saying it is:

not intelligence collection, but subversion: active measures to weaken the west, to drive wedges in the western community alliances of all sorts, particularly Nato, to sow discord among allies, to weaken the United States in the eyes of the people of Europe, Asia, Africa, Latin America, and thus to prepare ground in case the war really occurs.¹⁵

While influence operations are not new, and information warfare is as old as warfare itself, there has recently been an important development that has allowed these operations to be much more potent: advancements in information technology. The proliferation of social media has created a new venue to disseminate disinformation, fake news, and propaganda. Modern reliance on digital communications has created a new vulnerability for candidates and challenges to campaigns’ operational security, as campaigns maintain a trove of information that state-supported hackers can steal and use how they see fit, including releasing to the public or to rival campaigns.

Information—both legitimate and fabricated—spread quickly in the digital age compared with successful efforts in the past, such as Operation Infektion, a Russian effort to undermine America’s credibility in nonaligned countries. This 1990s conspiracy theory claimed that the U.S. military created HIV as a biological weapon. But it took three years for this planted scheme to make its way from a KGB-founded newspaper in India to outlets across developing nations.¹⁶ It was one of the most successful disinformation campaigns in history—in spite of the years it took to spread—thanks to the KGB helping it along the way. Russia promoted it through overt propaganda outlets, had assets write pseudo-academic papers and present them at conferences, and employed allied intelligence agencies.¹⁷ Compare this with the @TEN_GOP Twitter handle, a Russian troll farm account posing as the Tennessee Republican Party.¹⁸ In a matter of a few weeks, the handle was retweeted by prominent figures close to President Trump, including Roger Stone, Eric Trump, Donald Trump Jr., and Kellyanne Conway, with more than a million followers among them.¹⁹ This account peddled in racist and Islamophobic material, but it also advanced more specific policy decisions that played to the advantage of Russian intelligence, including advocating for firing former FBI Director James Comey and against prosecuting WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.²⁰

Putin’s strategy is also not confined to American targets. Across Europe, Putin has been providing support in one way or another to movements and parties whose political platforms align with the Kremlin’s objectives. There is evidence of Russian support for the Brexit vote in the United Kingdom; Marine Le Pen and the National Rally, formerly the National Front, in France; Alternative for Germany (AfD) in Germany; and the 5-Star Movement in Italy, just to name a few.²¹ This type of support falls under Kennan’s framework discussed above, as it uses a wide range of methods, either overt or covert, to achieve Russia’s objectives. Whether Putin is supporting specifically anti-democratic parties or just parties whose victory would have a destabilizing effect, this support has a cumulative effect that amounts to a political assault. Each of these political assaults has helped to further three overarching goals:

1. To sow political and social discord in the target countries
2. To undermine and challenge the Western democratic system, especially in the eyes of transitioning democracies
3. To shift policies in target countries to undermine the trans-Atlantic alliance and the European project

To achieve these goals, Russia has deployed a multifaceted strategy, which has included a social media campaign, fueled by automated bots and online operatives or trolls, that drives disinformation and promotes divisive voices. This tactic was on display during the Catalonia independence referendum, where Russian bots and trolls were actively supporting the pro-secessionist movement.²²

Another common method is funneling money to candidates aligned with the Kremlin’s goals, often through elaborate schemes. This was exposed most recently in Italy, where a Russian-linked energy giant allegedly hatched a plan to funnel money to Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini’s Lega party ahead of the European Parliament election this past spring.²³ Another common method is the hack and release tactic of stealing information from individuals, either the candidates or those close to them, and publicly releasing the information in a way that benefits the candidate of choice. This was on display with different levels of success in both the 2016 American presidential election and the 2017 French presidential election.²⁴

Most often, however, Russia deploys a combination of these tools, depending on the unique nature of the particular country’s political culture and fault lines. While the political dynamics in each country are unique, each country’s response to Russian election interference has yielded helpful lessons for other democracies. This report contains a review of recent elections where evidence of Russian interference has been a factor, an analysis of how different stakeholders responded, and what lessons can be learned moving forward.

The issue of foreign political interference is immense and continually expansive. This report focuses specifically on election interference perpetrated by foreign actors—actions specifically meant to influence the results of elections taking place in democracies. Many of the countries discussed below, as well as others not included in this report, have been very successful in countering disinformation, ensuring access to multilingual news sources so that no ethnic group is dependent on any single source, and advancing civic education to curb foreign influence for generations to come, among other strategies. However, this report focuses on the more immediate and direct impact that foreign interference can have on elections. The goal is a better understanding of the threat environment ahead of the 2020 election as well as what responses and mitigation practices have worked best. 

To gain better insight into how democracies in Europe have responded to Russian interference, this report analyzes some of the most high-profile examples that have taken place since the 2016 election. This list is not comprehensive and does not focus on cases from before the 2016 American election.

2017 French presidential election

Perhaps the most important case study of Russian interference abroad was France’s 2017 presidential election. This was in many ways a major test for the trans-Atlantic democratic community following the 2016 American election. The May 7 runoff election between the top two candidates offered a stark choice. Emmanuel Macron’s En Marche! presented a new and rejuvenated vision of a pro-EU, moderate platform. On the other hand, Marine Le Pen’s National Front ran on an anti-NATO, anti-EU, anti-immigrant, and pro-Russian platform. Le Pen and her party also had deep ties to Russia. When the party was in financial trouble, it was an obscure Russian bank, the First Czech-Russian Bank, that came to its rescue with a 9.4 million-euro, or $12.2 million, loan.²⁵ Le Pen even flew to Moscow just a few weeks ahead of the election to meet with President Putin. After the meeting, Le Pen said, “A new world has emerged in these past years. It’s the world of Vladimir Putin, it’s the world of Donald Trump in the US. I share with these great nations a vision of cooperation, not of submission.”²⁶

This was clearly a tempting target for Russia. And it acted.

Russia launched a coordinated attempt to undermine Macron’s candidacy. Much like Russian interference in the 2016 American presidential campaign, the political assault was multifaceted, consisting of a disinformation campaign that included rumors, fake news, and the planting of forged documents; a cyberintrusion of the campaign staff and advisers; and a leak of stolen data timed to influence the election, just ahead of a media blackout. Just as in the U.S. case, the disinformation and stolen material were spread through an advanced network of bots and an army of trolls. It is also worth noting that real-life alt-right activists not using fake personas played a major role. For example, the first person to use the hashtag #MacronLeaks—eventually adopted as the moniker for the entire series of events—was not a Russian troll or bot, but the American alt-right activist Jack Posobiec.²⁷

In the end, the political assault on France was not successful enough to sway voters. Macron won the runoff election against Le Pen with 66.1 percent of the vote.²⁸ This makes France an important case study for two reasons. First, it was perhaps the most expansive foreign interference campaign Russia launched since the 2016 American election. But perhaps more importantly, it did not work. There was clearly a preferred Russian candidate in Le Pen, and yet Macron won a resounding victory despite Russian interference efforts.

Several factors limited the impact of Russian interference.

Like many countries in the post-2016 threat environment, the French government took Russian interference very seriously. The country’s National Cybersecurity Agency (ANSSI), which is responsible for protecting government and key industries from cyberattacks, provided cybersecurity awareness-raising seminars for political parties, which all parties except Le Pen’s National Front accepted. Similarly, the National Commission for the Control of the Electoral Campaign for the Presidential Election (CNCCEP) was a special body set up in the months preceding the election to serve as a campaign watchdog. The ANSSI and the CNCCEP both frequently alerted the media, political parties, and the public to the risk of cyberattacks and disinformation during the presidential campaign. Then-President François Hollande even ordered a “mobilization of all the means necessary” to face down cyberattacks.²⁹

In addition to alerting the public to the threat, the French government issued warnings to Russia at multiple levels of government and in both public and private settings. The French foreign minister pledged before Parliament that France would not tolerate Russian interference.³⁰ President Hollande also warned President Putin in private. The French government’s response was distinctly nonpartisan. These warnings came from the outgoing administration, even though the attacks targeted a different candidate. This was not treated as a partisan issue but rather as one of national security.

To help combat disinformation, trusted well-established newspapers such as Le Monde created platforms to verify the reliability of a piece of information’s sourcing. Google also partnered with more than 30 media outlets, including mainstream newspapers and television stations, to build the CrossCheck fact-checking platform.³¹

Additionally, the French government engaged in the fight against disinformation when and where appropriate. For example, Russian state-run media outlet Sputnik ran a story during the first round of the election saying that François Fillon, the former French prime minister and supporter of improving ties with Russia, was leading the race. The story, which cited a Moscow-based analytics firm, was counter to every mainstream French poll, which showed Fallon in third place. The timing of the story was also notable: It was published when Macron was rising in the polls. In response to this event, the French polling commission issued a strong warning against polls deemed illegitimate under French law, making clear that the Sputnik story was not reliable.³²

France also benefits from some preexisting structural advantages to countering disinformation. According to a Center for Strategic and International Studies study, the French media environment consists mainly of mainstream and trusted media sources: The “tabloid-style outlets and ‘alternative’ websites that are common in the United States and United Kingdom” are just not as common or prominent in France’s media culture.³³ This provides a certain level of inoculation from the conspiracy theories and fake news phenomenon.³⁴ In fact, among EU countries, France ranks second to last in the consumption of online news, and its population consumes it with a healthy degree of skepticism.³⁵

The Macron campaign, which was the primary target of the Russian influence effort, took action itself and benefited from several of the preexisting advantages. Throughout the campaign, En Marche!—the movement and later political party backing Macron—communicated openly and extensively about its being targeted by hackers and about the hacking itself once it took place. The group also publicized the hacking attempts against it, which, in turn, generated awareness among the population and the authorities. French election laws require a blackout period that prevents the media from quoting presidential candidates or their supporters within 44 hours of the vote, and the electoral commission issued warnings that anyone who published stolen material obtained in the hacking attack against Macron’s campaign would be prosecuted. The blackout period and the prosecution threat appear to have been effective and were observed, and, as a result, most French voters did not see the material stolen from the Macron campaign.³⁶ In fact, when the #MacronLeaks documents were released, the campaign reacted quickly, issuing a press release just ahead of the mandated media blackout making clear that “the movement had been the victim of a massive and coordinated hacking operation.”³⁷

En Marche! also employed some creative tactics to mitigate the impact of a cyberattack. For example, assuming that it would be hacked, the campaign deliberately planted forged documents and fake emails intermingled with real ones. Doing this, and telling the press what they had done, confused hackers and created a situation where the whole population questioned the authenticity of any leaked material, blunting the impact of any potentially damaging real information.³⁸

2019 European Parliament election

This past May, the European Parliament held an election across the regional bloc, in what was quite possibly the most closely watched European Parliament election in history.³⁹ With voters out in record numbers, the election was pivotal for the future of Europe.⁴⁰ As the Center for American Progress’ Max Bergmann explained, it showed that “Europe’s political center of gravity is shifting from national capitals to Brussels and the European Union.”⁴¹ At the core of this newfound enthusiasm for the pan-European election was a debate about the European Union’s future, with far-right, anti-EU nationalists pitted against the pro-European political groups. Given these fundamental dynamics at stake, fears of Russian interference were high. In the end, the much-feared far-right, Euro-skeptic wave turned out to make less of a splash than anticipated. The traditional center-right and center-left parties that have dominated European politics lost seats to smaller parties such as the European Greens and a variety of populist groups. Over all, populists and Euro-skeptic parties increased their percentage of seats from around 20 percent up to 25 percent.⁴²

While a full-scale Russian interference attack was not detected during the election, the European Commission did detect significant disinformation campaigns aimed at the election, finding that Russian-linked actors used disinformation tactics to undermine the European Union’s credibility and drive down voter turnout.⁴³ These campaigns used, among other approaches, bots and fake accounts to spread divisive messages.⁴⁴ The findings stopped short of attributing these efforts to the Kremlin, which denied any election interference, and did not assess the efficacy of these disinformation tactics.⁴⁵

European leaders attributed the absence of a more serious Russian attack to their intense preparation. A joint statement issued in the month following the election stated, “Our actions, including the setting-up of election networks at [a] national and European level, helped in protecting our democracy from attempts at manipulation. We are confident that our efforts have contributed to limit[ing] the impact of disinformation operations, including from foreign actors, through closer coordination between the EU and Member States.”⁴⁶

The European Union’s defensive actions ahead of the election focused on several areas of improvement.⁴⁷ It established its Rapid Alert System (RAS) in March 2019 to improve cooperation and coordination among member states around issues of disinformation.⁴⁸ The platform sought to link all EU member states, allowing them to “share information and spot trends.”⁴⁹ Only one-third of the states contributed to the system prior to the election, however, and serious concerns have been raised about the standards in place for the alert system.⁵⁰ The New York Times reported that the RAS had questionable success, noting one particular instance where it appears an overabundance of caution and unclear reporting standards led analysts to make a decision to not send an alert about Twitter accounts spreading disinformation regarding Austrian politics.⁵¹ European officials interviewed by The New York Times<