Russian Foreign Election Interventions Since 1991

(PONARS Policy Memo) Russian interference in the 2016 election in the United States is part of a long pattern of interference dating back to the early 1990s. What did Russia seek to achieve and what were the impacts? Utilizing a range of publicly available sources, we compiled an original dataset of all 27 instances of Russian interference in foreign elections since 1991. We describe the nature of the interferences and whether the results of the elections were in line with the apparent Russian intentions. We include an admittedly subjective assessment of the degree to which Russian actions had a decisive impact on the results.

We identify two waves of Russian efforts to influence regime outcomes beyond its borders. The first wave targeted only post-Soviet countries and relied on a relatively conventional set of strategies. A second, dramatically expanded wave began in 2015 that targeted a range of established democracies in the West and involved a variety of new and sophisticated strategies. Despite the frequency of Russian meddling, we find that Russia’s activities have so far had a limited impact. The first wave of Russian interference sought to promote pro-Russian candidates but not autocracy per se, and in some cases actually fostered greater political pluralism. Furthermore, these interventions often did more to undermine than to bolster Russia’s geopolitical interests. In contrast, the second wave is clearly aimed at undermining democratic governance in the West. At the same time, there is little evidence that Russia has had much of on an impact on Western democracies.

Overall, Russian information warfare is often a drop in the bucket in Western democracies that have high levels of political competition and dynamic medias. In most of these cases, there already exist many sources of misinformation and support for populist positions. At the same time, the potential for Russia to compromise key Western politicians and disrupt the voting process itself presents a potentially serious threat to democracy.

The First Wave, 1991-2014: Former Soviet States

Shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia began interfering in the domestic politics of countries in its “near abroad” (see Table 1). These early interventions relied on relatively conventional financial and diplomatic efforts to shape events and often reflected a somewhat crude understanding of the dynamics of public opinion in the target countries. For example, the Russian government provided assistance to pro-Russian politicians in the presidential elections in Belarus and Ukraine in 1994. Moscow provided cheap energy supplies to support the campaign of incumbent Viacheslav Kebich in Belarus, and positive media coverage to the opposition leader Leonid Kuchma in Ukraine.

Many observers argue that the first wave of Russian interference was the result of a desire to promote authoritarianism. While it is almost certainly the case that President Vladimir Putin, as Mark Kramer of the Harvard Davis Center says, “has been most comfortable dealing with authoritarian leaders who will support Russian interests,” the Russian government gave little priority to promoting autocracy as such. In fact, the Kremlin’s goal was to support pro-Russian candidates rather than autocracy. Indeed, in a few cases such as Ukraine in 1994 and Moldova in 2005, Russian intervention inadvertently bolstered pluralism by attempting to undermine anti-Russian autocrats.

Many of Russia’s interventions failed. Despite Moscow’s geopolitical dominance in the post-Soviet region, only four out of eleven cases of interference in the first wave turned out in Russia’s favor. For example, the three elections that are widely seen as clear examples of Russian interference in post-Soviet elections—Ukraine in 2002 and 2004, and Moldova in 2005—were all elections that saw victories by anti-Russian forces. Only once, in Ukraine in 1994, is there plausible evidence that Russian intervention was decisive. In this case, Russian television blanketing Ukraine gave the pro-Russian candidate Leonid Kuchma media exposure he otherwise lacked due to President Leonid Kravchuk’s control over Ukrainian television stations.

The Second Wave, 2015-Today: Western Democracies

Beginning in 2015, Russian interference expanded dramatically in scope (see Table 1). Russian interventions began to target consolidated Western democracies for the first time since the Cold War. Over the last three years, Moscow intervened in elections in the United States, Germany, France, and Britain, among others. Russia has given money to far right parties such as the National Front in France (including loaning it millions in 2014) and the neo-fascist Northern League in Italy. Russian strategies have varied widely, including the likely sponsoring of a failed October 2016 coup attempt in Montenegro to prevent its NATO ascension and waging disinformation campaigns in other Western democracies. In the 2016 U.S. election, the disinformation campaign included the creation of fake Facebook accounts that may have reached 126 million Americans (similar tactics were apparently used in France, Germany, and the United Kingdom), organizing anti-refugee protests, disseminating leaked emails and fake documents to WikiLeaks, and engaging in cyberattacks against state voter registration systems. Finally, in France, Germany, and Norway, political parties have been the victim of phishing attacks.

Have Second Wave Interventions Had Any Impact?

While much has been written about recent Russian interventions, few have examined whether such activities have actually influenced the politics of targeted countries. At first glance, Russia would seem to have had an enormous impact. Indeed, 10 of the 16 cases of interference since 2015 turned out at least partially the way that Russia apparently hoped. For example, the Brexit referendum, which was the target of Russian intervention, threw the EU into disarray. Similarly, the Czech elections in 2017 saw the victory of the populist Eurosceptic Prime Minister Andrej Babiš. The remaining seven cases of Russian intervention brought mixed results. For example, in the United States in 2016, Russia got a Trump victory but failed to secure an end to sanctions. Similarly, in France in 2017, the National Front did better than in the past but it still lost by a large margin to the pro-EU Emmanuel Macron.

Most importantly, upon closer examination, it is far from clear that the Kremlin’s efforts were decisive in accounting for these outcomes. First and foremost, a variety of other factors contemporaneous with Russian interference likely affected these elections and referenda, such as a wave of migration into Europe and an increasing distrust in mainstream parties. Of the nine cases that turned out in Russia’s favor, just three—Bulgaria, the Netherlands, and the United States in 2016—can plausibly be tied to Russian intervention. However, a closer look at these three cases shows little clear evidence of Russian influence.

First, Russian meddling in Bulgaria has been long running, and Sofia is highly dependent on Moscow for energy imports. Russia was accused of bankrolling protests in 2012 and 2013, and has backed the far right, anti-EU Ataka party since the mid-2000s. Ultimately, Rumen Radev and his Eurosceptic, pro-Moscow platform defeated Prime Minister Boyko Borisov’s Citizens for European Development of Bulgaria (GERB) candidate Tsetska Tsacheva. However, since taking office, Radev has offered “expressions of strong support for NATO and the EU [which] indicate an intention to maintain the status quo with these institutions.” Moreover, Borisov’s party won a plurality in the March 2017 elections and he returned as prime minister.

Next, Dutch voters in April 2016 resoundingly rejected an EU-Ukraine Association Agreement that had been the target of a Russian disinformation campaign. However, the turnout was very low (32 percent) and many voters said “they were opposing not only the treaty but wider European policymaking on matters ranging from the migrant crisis to economics.” As such, it is difficult to separate the specific role played by Russian disinformation relative to general anti-establishment protest voting. Moreover, as the referendum was nonbinding, the Dutch parliament ignored the results and backed the Association Agreement, which came into force on September 1, 2017.

Finally, the 2016 U.S. election represents the most successful Russian undertaking in this second wave. Many commentators, including well-versed researchers like Ezra Klein at Vox and Harry Enten at FiveThirtyEight, believe that Russian intervention played a key role in the election. In fact, the sheer breadth and extent of the Russian interference—hacked emails, fake Twitter and Facebook accounts, attacks on the voting system— makes it is hard to believe that such actions did not have some kind of impact. Nonetheless, there is little direct evidence that Russian interference was critical to Trump’s victory. At worst, the role of Russian influence is equivalent to the impact of pneumonia in killing those afflicted with AIDS: it only has influence because the body politic is already in deep crisis.

Above all, American politics was extremely polarized long before Russian forces began distributing provocative posts in social media. Furthermore, domestic and other sources of polarizing rhetoric and fake news dwarf the scale of the Russian activities. Indeed, homegrown misinformation was “vastly more prevalent” than Russian misinformation in the run up to the 2016 election.

There is insufficient proof that the hacked emails had any impact on the election. The two biggest releases of emails occurred in late July with the release of the DNC emails and in early October with the publication of the “John Podesta” emails. If the release of these emails had a major impact on Clinton’s approval, we would expect her support in polls to fall when their content became widely known. Indeed, in the week after FBI Director James Comey’s announcement that he had found new evidence related to the Clinton email scandal, Clinton’s poll numbers plummeted just before the election. By contrast, the evidence of Russia’s impact is far less clear. While Clinton’s support noticeably declined in the week following the release of the DNC emails in July, her support quickly rebounded during the Democratic Convention. And following the release of the “Podesta emails” in October, support for Clinton increased—largely as a result of the release the Access Hollywood video of Trump confessing to sexual assault. Thus, whatever impact the hacked emails had, their influence was swamped by other campaign events.

None of this shows that Russia had no influence on the outcome. It is possible that the hacked emails reduced Clinton’s bounce in the polls after the Democratic Convention and the release of the Access Hollywood tape. Furthermore, the release of the DNC emails (that were incorrectly interpreted as evidence that the DNC “rigged” the primaries in favor of Clinton) may have hardened Bernie Sanders’ supporters’ opposition to Clinton. But as of yet, we simply do not know.

One of the reasons why these various arguments warrant attention is that the close margin of the election means that virtually any factor, no matter how small, can be argued to have tipped the election. This close margin, however, had nothing to do with Russia. Polarization in American politics existed decades before either Trump or Putin entered the scene. Finally, it is worth pointing out that Russia clearly failed to achieve its main strategic goal of its interference in U.S. politics. Even if Russia did tip the election in Trump’s favor, this result has done little to ease U.S. sanctions (although Trump has arguably been effective at hindering new sanctions).

Conclusion

While the 2016 election is surely the most successful example of Russian second wave interference, there is very little clear evidence that such meddling had a decisive impact on the outcomes. The fact that Russian influence is even an issue stems much more from the long-term crisis of American democracy than anything Russia has done. Russia is much more of a symptom than a cause of this crisis.

But all of this does not mean we should ignore Russian interference. While Russian information warfare is unlikely to have much of an impact in open democracies with independent media sources, Russian interference can still undermine elections in other ways. In particular, the hacking of an election count, attempted by Russia in Ukraine in 2014 and in the United States in 2016, could potentially throw into doubt electoral results. If successful, such a measure would create a serious and unprecedented crisis. Furthermore, even if Russian actions do not affect electoral results, the Russian government can still compromise democratically elected decisionmakers. Thus, a central question right now is whether Trump’s policies toward Russia are affected by blackmail material (such as evidence of money laundering by Trump) or Russian financing of Trump owned businesses. While Russia may not be able to alter the results of elections, it can still damage democracy in other ways.

Table 1. Russian Interference in Foreign Elections Since 1991

Notes: 

Our dataset appears to be the only one to cover the whole post-Soviet period and includes all types of electoral interference but excludes interventions not focused on elections or electoral processes. 

There have been several attempts by analysts to compile all cases of Russian interference abroad. Laura Rosenberger and Jamie Fly of the Alliance for Securing Democracy identify Russian interference (including non-electoral interventions) in 27 countries since 2004. The EU East StratCom Task Force has a running list of all known cases of Russian disinformation, and the German Marshall Fund runs the Hamilton 68 dashboard which tracks Russian influence campaigns on Twitter. Finally, Senator Benjamin L. Cardin’s staff has recently provided a non-exhaustive overview of the variety of forms of Russian interference abroad.

Lucan Ahmad Way is Professor and Adam Casey is Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto.

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