NYT on the situation, part five

[Mark Kohut]

Those concerns show how difficult it is for any democracy to go toe-to-toe
with an autocratic state, like Russia. Unconstrained by truth, the Kremlin
is simply better at such unconventional warfare.

“Remember, Vladimir Putin is a K.G.B. guy. He doesn’t think like Biden
does,” said Daniel Hoffman, a former Moscow station chief for the C.I.A.
“Putin comes from Mars and Biden’s from Venus. Vladimir Putin is playing
his own game and his chess games may be a little different than ours.”

During many of his recent military forays, Mr. Putin has used
disinformation to create doubt about what he is doing. Such tactics have
slowed international responses and allowed Mr. Putin to more easily achieve
his aims. When masked men began taking over government buildings in Crimea
in February 2014, Moscow said they were part of a locally led pro-Russian
uprising. Only after Crimea was taken over was it clear the “little green
men” were Russian military forces.

Showing its ease with information warfare, Moscow responded quickly after
Biden administration officials warned lawmakers this month about the
enormous possible human costs if Mr. Putin launched a full invasion.
“Madness and scaremongering continues,” Russia’s deputy ambassador to the
United Nations, Dmitry Polyanskiy, wrote last Saturday on Twitter
<https://twitter.com/Dpol_un/status/1490153915811340288?s=20&t=Vv_qihz81GE6hQha0pGjkg>.
“What if we would say that US could seize London in a week and cause 300K
civilian deaths? All this based on our intelligence sources that we won’t
disclose.”

After Mr. Sullivan’s remarks on Friday, Russia’s Foreign Ministry
<https://mid.ru/ru/press_service/publikacii-i-oproverzenia/oproverzenia1/nedostovernie-publikacii/1798160/>
accused
the United States of conducting a “coordinated information attack” that it
said was “aimed at undermining and discrediting Russia’s fair demands for
security guarantees, as well as at justifying Western geopolitical
aspirations and military absorption of Ukraine’s territory.”