Started reading Putin's Playbook: Russia's Secret Plan to Defeat America by Rebekah Koffler
https://www.amazon.com/Putins-Playbo...dp/B07ZZJ8HF4/
Koffler was a DIA analyst, originally a Russian from Kazakhstan. The part I've read so far is pretty alarming. For example, she covers Russian meddling in US elections. Contrary to the CNN / DNC "Russia collusion" story, Russia did not assist Trump in any meaningful way (and FBI investigators admitted this in closed testimony to Congress). In fact, the Steel Dossier almost certainly contained intentional Russian disinformation.
What the Russians did, however, was work to undermine BOTH candidates with the intent of sowing discord and ultimately crippling whoever was/is President politically...something they are continuing today by playing both sides of any given ideological divide (pro-immigrant / anti-immigrant, BLM / anti-BLM, pro gun control, pro-2nd amendment). Basically, any ideological divide they are stoking the flames on both sides to drive Americans further apart. The biggest area where they probably have had the most success is with a decent number of conservatives either becoming ambivalent about Ukraine or downright hostile to Ukraine and supportive of Russia.
...
Politics aside, Russia has considered itself effectively at war with the US since 2010. The Russian form of warfare is "hybrid warfare", which many people in the West have taken to mean "non-kinetic", but in Russian thinking includes kinetic options (and Russia has attacked the US indirectly using proxies, although the attack on a US outpost in Syria using a Wagner mercenary battalion went very, very badly for them). Completely anecdotally, but have a former co-worker that was a helicopter crewman that used to ferry around some HSLD guys, and he told me a few years ago that he went to a funeral for one of his army buddies that was KIA in Syria and they were fighting Russians.
Then again, in all fairness, based on recent news reports, the US and the CIA has been HEAVILY invested in anti-Russian clandestine ops in Ukraine since 2014.
I really wish there was more info on what changed with US thinking between 2012 when Obama laughed off Romney's statement that Russia was the USA's biggest threat and Obama telling Medved he would have more options "after the election", and 2014 when the US apparently helped stage a coup in Ukraine and also began undermining Assad (a Russian/Iranian client).
However, it seems like the US IC has shifted from ignoring Russia to indexing strongly against Russia, and this might explain why the IC worked so feverishly to keep Trump out of office in 2016, undermine him when he was President, and again worked to keep him out of office in 2020. Not that Trump was legitimately compromised by Russia, but simply couldn't be trusted to "tow the line" with regards to treating Russia as a hostile nation, and that ultimately represented a perceived existential threat to the state.
This got me thinking that one of the more nefarious things Russia could do would be to assassinate Trump before the election. If Trump were to be assassinated, a *significant* portion of the American right would believe, without a shadow of the doubt, the Democrats, the "Deep State", and Biden/Obama were behind it, and it might kick off a wave of political violence we haven't seen since at least the late 60s, and maybe ever.