Intelligence Archive

Editor’s Note: Guest columnist Justin Sherman is filling in for Candace Rondeaux this week. The long-awaited fifth and final report by the Senate Intelligence Committee on its investigation of Russia’s interference in the 2016 U.S. election, which was released earlier this week, is full of disturbing details. The heavily redacted, 966-page report includes revelations about even closer links between Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and Russian intelligence operatives than Robert Mueller found in his special counsel investigation. It also concludes that Russia’s interference operations are still active today, less than three months before Election Day. But it didn’t take long before […]

Which dictator is more trustworthy, Russia’s Vladimir Putin or Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus? In the end, it doesn’t really matter, because the governments of both Russia and Belarus are probably lying about the arrest last week in Minsk of 33 Russian men identified by Belarusian authorities as mercenaries affiliated with the so-called Wagner Group, a network of private military security contractors linked to U.S.-sanctioned Kremlin insider Yevgeny Prigozhin. For more than a week, speculation has run rife about the arrests and their possible connection to alleged Russian interference in Belarus’ upcoming presidential election on Aug. 9. The mystery surrounding the […]