Those surprised at Russia's annexation of Crimea during their Sochi Olympics shouldn't have been - in 2008 with the world focused the Olympics in Beijing, Russia launched a land, air & sea invasion of Georgia, 

The Olympics themselves since Soviet times have always been a Russian showcase - extended to Eastern Bloc countries during the Cold War. And some habits die hard, what with 111 Russian athletes banned from the Rio Olympics for doping (originally the whole team), and the announcement yesterday of 1000 athletes implicated in doping.

Sports is the best window we have on the Russian government's ethics, as everything else is met with a variety of disinformation - even the shooting down of the Malaysian 171 airliner over Donbas, a variety of he said-she said no matter how outrageous the claims (Ukrainian air force plane trying to shoot down Putin's plane, denial of "little green men" in Ukraine...), and even if Russia finally accepts the claims after months, the final reaction is a "so what" while the rest of the world has moved on. Those Russian ex-pats who die mysteriously from radiation poisoning, or reporters shot down? Apparently no connection. Even that $1.1 billion gas company gift to Putin's son-in-law have drawn little condemnation - just looking after the kids & keeping it in the family.

The Sochi Winter Olympics were an especially illuminating window - $51 billion (about 8 times the cost of the Vancouver Olympics) to build an array of facilities in sub-tropical paradise and spread around the payola in a feeding frenzy of corruption. 

But sports is important for another reason - in political and economic matters, Russia can claim to just be holding up its interests, but sports is vanity - and good sportsmanship is supposedly one of the core principles. Russia isn't forced to dope by need to survive - it just likes to win. And these efforts at mass doping with funding and coverup come from the top - it's as close to an acknowledgement of Russia's intentional excess as we're likely to get, since it has its own PR arm, RT (Russia Today) to smooth its news abroad.

One incident a few years ago, that Putin arm-wrestling with a kid - and slammed his arm down. Putin's show hockey game in which he scored something like 19 goals is another example of overblown ostentation, cult-like displays of adoration.

But we're not here to talk about sports for sports stakes. It's recently been confirmed that Russia was hacking the elections to help throw them to Trump and away from Hillary - we should know the story behind this, which parts of the Russian hierarchy was part of the authorization and enablement, how to detect similar operations going forward.

And as interesting is Mother Jones' report on the effort to cultivate Trump - and how long that's been going on. See, back in 2009, and then in 2013, and then in 2015, and probably more, there were continued attempts by Russia to cut off gas to the European Union and extract extortionary prices not only from the Ukraine, but from other EU countries deemed able to play as well. Every few years Putin had a crisis to get his way.

Much of the controversy over the EU accession agreement tied into the huge costs for Ukraine's gas supply from Russia, with some forgiveness and concessions if Ukrainians backed the right Moscow-friendly leader. This blew up big time when Ukraine's Yanukovych backed out of a deal to bring Ukraine's economy closer to the EU's - obviously attractive to Kiev and the west of the country as much more developed and open and forward-looking than the oligarchic ways of both Russia and Ukraine itself, with the objectors being largely the the dying off old-manufacturing Russian-speaking sectors of East Ukraine.

And that's where the Donbas flareup started, which led to Russia pre-emptively occupying and annexing Crimea. And that's where it might have ended, except for 1 thing: sanctions.

Unlike 2008, the United States, meaining Obama, reacted against the annexation and the fighting in Donbas, putting heavy sanctions on Russia that greatly devalued the ruble and wiped out much of its former oil wealth and energy advantage. Rather than Sochi being the pinnacle of success, it became the last hurrah, while the promise of New Crimea quickly evolved into another sordid tale of corruption, long lines, an overpriced bridge to Russian mainland begun, and in short, a "Potemkin's Village".

The other ingredient to the story was fracking - which suddenly radically shifted the lines and economics of energy supply, though not in Europe so much as elsewhere. Energy, Russia's lifeblood and major revenue source, was suddenly cheap again.

The ensuing period has led to much less influence by Russia in its economic rivalries in leveraging blackmail from its natural gas. 

But it also saw the beginnings of a similar mass disinformation program to that which has washed over our 2016 campaign. The made up stories and "sock puppets" that turned into instant "Kiev fascist" grist in thousands and thousands of comments all over Western blogs eventually evolved to the steady stream of Hillary-as-crook-and-pizza-parlor-pedophile we've seen the last year-and-a-half.

Just as much of the anti-Hillary memes got rolling in the Democratic primaries as folks farther to the left took every centrist position as a neoliberal attack on the people, the Donbas & Crimean episodes online were primed and abetted on this side of the pond by those hating anything to do with the US' foreign activities - conflating and distorting Nuland's role, of the intents and actions of the Kiev government, twisting Putin into being the rational actor and defender of liberal democratic values everywhere, Russia as never-done-wrong and defender of true Ukraine, and other absurdities.

It's difficult to say how much of this online activity was sincere and how much was manufactured - certainly there were Russian (and other?) teams on the payroll paid to counter damaging info and stir things up, actively participating on blogs, putting out fake news reports. How much this came from moles and how much from westerners who actively believe these things is rather unsolvable.

What is known is that Russian hackers are considered at the top of their game, better than China's despite the booming Chinese economy - a certain long-term familiarity with the internet, understanding of the languages, better grasp of algorithms and much more practiced in a variety of Trojans and spyware (and more access to the internet from harder-to-trace European locations than Chinese).

The hacks and the fake news are very different kinds of operations, and there wasn't much use for hacking in contesting Ukraine (except hacking an EU official's phone call). But for a political campaign, exposing embarrassing comments (or spinning them to appear so) is pay dirt.

The ingenious part of the equation was getting Wikileaks to be the messenger of bad news. With Julian Assange having a heavy grudge against the Obama Administration (and seemingly Hillary above all), cooperation was no doubt easy. That Wikileaks had certain respectability as white hat/good guys with the left after releasing much of the Iraq abuse material and Arab Spring revelations could not be said so certainly with Russia Today. And in a campaign focused so much on the personal, any anecdotal information could be used to stir up the passions of those committed one way or the other, if not to persuade others into changing position.

Additionally, for many the Wikileaks hacking wasn't "stealing", it was "information wants to be free". The initial leaks were fueling the Bernie vs. Hillary fight, not Trump's, and for many that meant supporting the virtuous, more liberal view, not the new Darth Vader of American politics. It didn't hurt that Russia's efforts segued well not only with Sanders' anti-Wall Street message but with decades old anti-Clinton messaging and personal attacks by Roger Stone, Judicial Watch, Alex Jones, Breitbart and Matt Drudge.

The period following the election focused largely on "what one thing lost Clinton the election", rather than a more generalized "what the hell happened?" There are numerous factors that cover the gamut of Republicans disenfranchising blacks and other voters, Comey's 3 statements, the "Hillary has Parkinsons" meme with her poorly timed pneumonia collapse, the Wikileaks 4 month drip, the broad array of fake news, Anthony Weiner's sexting scandal, Obama's warming to Cuba, enormous amounts of Republican PAC money, free media attention, 3rd party candidates peeling off disillusioned voters, etc.

[Pointing to just 1 of these as the culprit is just fooling ourselves, though all the talk about how terrible a candidate Hillary was still doesn't jibe well with either her poll growth around the debates and then coming up before the election, nor her pulling in the 2nd most votes of any presidential candidate in history. Her "unlikeability" seems to have been greatly exaggerated, like so much else.]

While we've accepted that voting itself can't be "rigged", that's a pretty dumb thing to accept without auditing the machines and the process. Just as Trojans can lie dormant on servers for months before springing into action (we did this pretty cleverly with the Stuxnet virus that then went rogue, and that's years ago before good mobile viruses), a glitch or vulnerability in voting can erase all traces after execution. And considering 4 states "targeted" by Trump that were largely won by several tens of thousands of votes, the activity wouldn't have to be extensive. We need a system of audits before and after *every* major election, as that's the modern security paradigm - even "trust, but verify" is too forgiving for sec chiefs on alert.

[it's accepted that Sanders surprised Clinton in Michigan by appealing to disaffected blue collar workers, despite polls showing the opposite? But what if part of that was a "Hack the Vote" beta attempt? that worked so well it was run on 4 states in November?

Okay, Michigan uses optical scan machines, so not hackable in the way electronic voting is (I won't claim not hackable, but I believe not hooked to the internet waiting to be cracked). But still, we're so goddamned trusting - break into our own chants of "U S A!!!! U S A!!!!"]

In any case, we've inherited a new largely paranoid paradigm from Russia, Orwellian in nature, where 2+2 = 5 one day, 4 the next, something else the next, at war with Russia, then Iran, then it's Japan and Mexico over trade.... Rather than cameras focused on us as in 1984, we have Twitter feeds and Facebook and other resources monitored (maybe our mobile phones). Instead of the Russia of the 30's with its barbaric purges and night-into-day confessions by torture, we now have a 2nd oligarchic family, Kremlin West, where money = success, where power is the ultimate goal and arbiter, and blind allegiance to Dear Leader is the way forward and lack of allegiance is a quick way to doom. Like Terry Gilliam's Brazil - funnier, less atrocious, still devastating.

We're getting the worst of Wall Street combined with the KGB, along with the always corrupt building & construction industry thrown in. It's hard to say whether Putin recruited Trump or with their brazen, self-serving and rather hypnotic sales manners they're just sons of different mothers, dragging in their extended crooked families. (though acknowledging Putin as coming across as much more respectable, we've learned this year that that's secondary to outcome, that winning while losing is better than losing while winning, and Putin could relax a bit, no?). 

We've largely accepted a result foisted on us, without even knowing where it came from and whether it was "fair". The attitude is still, "well, even if it changed the outcome, Trump is still President" - how stupid and fatalistic is that?  [even if they stole my car, they're still driving it, so it's okay, ho-hum]. Are we to return to the Great Imperial Russia, the serfdom of old, with Trump Towers as the new American Kremlin? While it was bad enough having the FBI and NSA overplay its snooping and surveillance hand, it'll be 10 times as bad having a rogue internet army keeping track of everything and blackmailing those who fall outside the allowed.

There's a naïve optimism that someone's going to stand up to this - but so far, anyone who had a chance has reneged and become a fan and enabler instead. At some point it won't matter - like Archibald Cox they can all be replaced by a Robert Bork. Trump knows that - why don't we?