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99 Foreign Aff. 140 (2020)
The Kremlin's Plot against Democracy: How Russia Updated Its 2016 Playbook for 2020

handle is hein.journals/fora99 and id is 970 raw text is: The Kremlin's Plot Against Democracy How Russia Updated Its 2016 Playbook for 2020 Alina Polyakova A the United States gets ready for the 2020 presidential elec- tion, there is reason to think that this time, the country might be spared the massive interference campaign that Russia car- ried out in 2016. Back then, Moscow had a clear opportunity. The cost of running the Internet Research Agency (iRA), the St. Petersburg- based troll farm set up by the Kremlin to spread disinformation dur- ing the U.S. election, was about $1.25 million a month. That was a small price to pay for a remarkable foreign policy coup: a seemingly pro-Russian U.S. president in Donald Trump, a humiliating defeat for Hillary Clinton (whom Russian President Vladimir Putin had long disliked), and, above all, a chance to expose U.S. democracy as dysfunctional. Unprepared and seemingly unaware of the planned Russian operation, the United States was low-hanging fruit. Four years on, Moscow's calculus is less straightforward. The pan- demic and the ensuing crash in oil prices hit the country hard, and Putin's approval ratings have taken a nosedive. In the past, the Rus- sian president has used foreign policy wins, such as the 2014 inva- sion of Crimea and Russia's years-long intervention in Syria, to maintain his support at home. The unspoken contract behind this strategy-that making Russia great again on the world stage was worth some economic sacrifices by its citizens-had grown fragile even before the pandemic. Now, with the Russian economy on a ALINA POLYAKOVA is President and CEO of the Center for European Policy Analysis and Adjunct Professor of European Studies at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. This article is part of a project of the Library of Congress's John W. Kluge Center, supported by the Carnegie Corporation of New York. 140 FOREIGN AFFAIRS

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