“Someone advised Putin to conduct information war directly on the territory of the US,” much as it has for decades in the Third World and Europe. “Why is a senseless question,” she continues, for which there is no clearer answer than to one about why “Jack the Ripper killed prostitutes.” It is a question for psychologists. But part of the reason lies in Russia’s fundamental weakness relative to the West and Putin’s desire to obscure this and even turn things upside down. Russia’s economy today is “smaller than the economy of [the US state of] California.” And anyone who travels even 50 kilometers outside of Moscow will see a backward world in which no one would want to live. However, by its very brazenness, the Kremlin “has achieved a miracle: a consensus between Republicans and Democrats about Russia” as a danger to the world and a widespread feeling among the American people -- if not the occupant of the White House -- that Russia today has attacked the US in ways analogous to Osama bin Laden’s attacks on 9/11.At the Kremlin’s direction, Russia “has tried to rape the very fabric of social life of the US,” interfering not only in the elections but in race relations and any other place where Moscow felt it could exploit divisions within American society to weaken its adversary, even as it continued to call for “business as usual” between Moscow and Washington.
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