Russia President Vladimir Putin denies meddling in U.S. politics — though he sometimes suggests, with a wink, that “patriotic” Russians may have done so. But there is one point that he always insists on: that the United States does the same to others. He has charged that the U.S. government interfered “aggressively” in Russia’s 2012 presidential vote, which Putin won after a year of protests against him. He claims that Washington “gathered opposition forces and financed them.”

In addition to formal public diplomacy mouthpieces like Russia Today and Sputnik, Russia employs armies of paid trolls and botnets to generate false information that can later be circulated and legitimated as if it were true. Then, in 2016, Russian military intelligence went a step further, by hacking into the private network of the Democratic National Committee, stealing information, and releasing it online to damage Hillary Clinton’s presidential candidacy. 

Russia’s interference in the 2016 US presidential election, and its suspected hacking of French President Emmanuel Macron’s campaign servers, should surprise no one, given President Vladimir Putin’s (mis)understanding of soft power. Before his re-election in 2012, Putin told a Moscow newspaper that “soft power is a complex of tools and methods to achieve foreign policy goals without the use of force, through information and other means of influence.”

The international security agenda and the theoretical ways to study it have expanded tremendously since the end of the Cold War. Once the strict control of the global east-west military ideological rivalry lifted, various new threats and ways to analyze them emerged. These were the issues discussed in a three-day workshop organized recently by the International Relations Council of Turkey.