after Vladimir Putin’s ascension to the presidency in 2000, Russia would find itself adopting tactics that, if anything, were closest to what veteran scholar-diplomat George Kennan, architect of American strategy in the early Cold War, called ‘political warfare’: … the employment of all the means at a nation’s command, short of war, to achieve its national objectives. Such operations are both overt and covert. They range from such overt actions as political alliances, economic measures (as ERP—the Marshall Plan), and ‘white’ propaganda to such covert operations as clandestine support of
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