Inside the 'irregular warfare' campaign Putin is conducting against America

Trump says that the guilty verdict against him — by a jury of his peers that his own attorneys vetted — is an illegitimate, politically motivated show trial.

Trying to help Trump destroy Americans’ faith in our democracy and its justice system, Russian president Vladimir Putin’s spokesman today said of Trump’s trial:

“If we speak about Trump, the fact that there is simply the elimination, in effect, of political rivals by all possible means, legal and illegal, is obvious.”

Hungary’s dictator Viktor Orbán and Italy’s neofascist Deputy Prime Minister, Matteo Salvini, both also argued that Trump is the victim of political persecution. Right wing media commentators and Republicans in Congress have leaped at the opportunity to echo Putin and Orbán.

This sort of propaganda is called “irregular warfare” (IW) — warfare by means outside of troops, bombs, navies, etc. — and the U.S. used to be an expert at it. Typically, irregular warfare involves the use of propaganda, proxies, or people willing to betray their own country.

Irregular warfare is part of how the U.S. and western Europe brought down the Soviet Union (although that system also disintegrated from within under the weight of its own corruption and rot), with propaganda systems like the Voice of America, Radio Liberty, and Radio Free Europe.

A keen observer of this process was an irregular warfare leader based in East Germany at the time. Lieutenant Colonel Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin supervised spying and propaganda operations within East Germany until the fall of the Berlin Wall, when he moved to Moscow where, in 1999, he became the head of the Russian government and is now the longest-serving Russian leader since Stalin.

Having been on the receiving end of U.S. and western European propaganda efforts, Putin dedicated himself to turning the tables on the U.S., since the democratic example of America (and other western nations) is a thorn in his autocratic side. And he’s had considerable success (if the U.S. intelligence community is to be believed, despite Trump's claims to the contrary), including helping Trump win the White House.

Trump, wittingly or not, has abetted Russia's efforts in irregular warfare. Shortly after his inauguration, Trump handed over highly classified information to Putin’s Foreign Minister Lavrov in a secret Oval Office meeting during his first month in office.

Two months later, CNN reported that US intelligence had to pull another spy out of Russia because they had evidence Trump had given his name to Putin as well.

Trump took considerable effort to keep his conversations with Putin private, raising further questions of what they might have discussed. According to the Washington Post, "Trump [went] to extraordinary lengths to conceal details of his conversations with Russian President Vladi­mir Putin, including on at least one occasion taking possession of the notes of his own interpreter and instructing the linguist not to discuss what had transpired with other administration officials." (Trump subsequently denied making efforts to conceal the details of his conversations.)

When the international press reported that Putin was paying the Taliban bounties to kill American service members in Afghanistan (and 4 had died as a result), Trump refused to demand the practice stop.

As The New York Times noted at the time:

“Mr. Trump defended himself by denying the Times report that he had been briefed on the intelligence... But leading congressional Democrats and some Republicans demanded a response to Russia that, according to officials, the administration has yet to authorize.”

Instead of stopping Putin from offering the bounties, Trump shut down every US airbase in Afghanistan except one (there were about a dozen), crippling incoming President Biden’s ability to extract US assets from that country in an orderly fashion.

Today, Republicans — particularly House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul (R-TX) and committee members Cory Mills (R-FL) and Michael Lawler (R-NY) — have used the resulting chaos and associated American and Afghan deaths as a political club to beat up President Biden.

Trump also took an axe to the Voice of America, appointing a friend of his onetime conservative advisor Steve Bannon to run the organization, who promptly fired the heads of Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty and Radio Free Asia and shifted their coverage away from defense of democracies. According to The Washington Post:

“He ousted the diplomats and media professionals on oversight boards and replaced them with low-level Trumpists from other government agencies. …

“Having driven off the American media professionals at VOA, Pack went after the more than 70 foreign journalists who work for the organization, refusing to support the renewal of their U.S. visas as they came up. He claimed to be acting for security reasons and insinuated, on no evidence, that some of the staff were spies. … Now, they are being forced to repatriate, in some cases at personal risk. A VOA report in late August said 15 were returning home and another 20 had visas that will expire by the end of the year.

“They weren’t Pack’s only targets. He attempted to fire the board and cut off the funding of the Open Technology Fund, an organization that supports Internet freedom initiatives, such as tools to circumvent firewalls. A court blocked the firings, but the fund was forced to suspend 49 of its 60 projects. Among those affected were journalists and activists resisting government crackdowns in Hong Kong and in Belarus.”

The damage to the Voice of America continues to this day as most of Trump’s people are still there. Three months ago, The Hill ran a commentary piece titled, “Putin’s influencers? Why is taxpayer-funded VOA spreading his propaganda?”

But Putin’s efforts at irregular warfare against the United States have also extended far beyond his apparent effort to betray spies and kneecap American propaganda programs.

In 2021, the US Department of Defense created the Irregular Warfare Center at Congress' behest. In their January 23, 2024 report, “Russian Information Warfare Strategy: New IWC Translation Gives Insights into Vulnerabilities,” they show how Putin’s efforts have had considerable success recruiting average Americans within the US. For example, they note that in the year of Trump’s election:

“On 21 May 2016, two protest groups faced off in Houston near an Islamic cultural center to demonstrate competing opinions on Texas’ future. Both groups, one which was protesting the perceived Islamization of Texas, and the other in support of the Islamic community, had been organized on Facebook pages. At first glance, this seemed like a normal and innocuous part of the U.S. political process.

“Unbeknownst to most participants, however, both Facebook pages had been created by Russian actors seeking to exacerbate political discord in the United States. This event was not an isolated case; it was a part of a coordinated effort by Russia to meddle in the U.S. elections, both in the social media space and in the physical domain.”

Another example, they report, was the promotion of Putin’s assertion the month before he invaded Ukraine in February, 2022 that the US and Ukraine were running bioweapon labs in that besieged nation. As NBC News reported in March 2022, as the invasion was moving ahead:

“Boosted by far-right influencers on the day of the invasion, an anonymous QAnon Twitter account titled @WarClandestine pushed the “biolabs” theory to new heights…

“Much of the false information [about the alleged biolabs] is flourishing in Russian social media, far-right online spaces and U.S. conservative media, including Tucker Carlson’s show on Fox News.”

When viewed in context, Putin’s successes at irregular warfare against the United States have been breathtaking.

Russia is now moving their efforts to encourage civil strife in the U.S. away from online actors posing as Americans, now using instead US-citizens and congressional influencers.

These include media commentators, average citizens active on social media, and even members of Congress who’ve bought into Russian propaganda from issues around Ukraine to vaccines to the alleged theft of the 2020 election (and “planned theft” of 2024). As the Irregular Warfare Center notes:

“[F]uture Russian foreign-targeted OIEs [Operations in the Information Environment] appear to be shifting toward proxy operations, including semi-independent and strategically-chosen influencers on social media, rather than using a directly-controlled team of professionals, as was the case in 2016 with Yevgeny Prigozhin’s “troll factory” that worked to interfere in the U.S. elections.”

This possibility of Trump retaking control of US intelligence agencies should he be elected worries former senior U.S. intelligence officials.

In June, more than a dozen former intelligence officers, foreign allies and members of Congress expressed concern for Trump's public attacks on intelligence services, his mishandling of classified materials, his campaign promises to seek vengeance against his enemies and the "Project 2025" blueprint for staffing the federal government with loyalists, reported NBC News.

The simple reality is that Russia has been using IW techniques in Putin’s war against America for over a decade and those efforts are now being amplified on a daily basis by members of Congress, media outlets, and some of our largest social media companies.