Russian bounty allegations shine spotlight on what Trump admin knew and when

Mark Galeotti: Well, they are pretty extraordinary. It’s hard to say. I’ll be perfectly honest,  I’m not yet convinced that it’s true, but nor would I be so precocious to say they’re definitely not. But if it is true, it represents an astonishing escalation by the Russians.

Up to now, essentially — yes, the Kremlin kills, but it kills people it regards as traitors. In other words, its own people who have turned against it. They have a very different calculus for the potential costs of going after outsiders and especially Americans. They would know there’ll be a massive political price tag on any dead Americans that could be ascribed to Russian machinations.

There’s a danger in making too much of it. It seems to be essentially one of the Russian military intelligence’s in-house group of throat slitters. They’re the guys that they turn to precisely when they have what they call “wetwork,” in other words, killings to be done. On the other hand, they are not grand planners. They are not sophisticated geopoliticians. But if you did have to take suitcases full of cash into the mountains of Afghanistan, you’d want to send tough guys to make sure it arrived in the right place, and its people from this unit are precisely the kind of tough guys you might send.

From Russia’s point of view, Afghanistan matters for all kinds of reasons. It matters because of the massive heroin trade there. Russia has the highest heroin consumption per capita in the world. And it also matters because they’re worried that if it fell into an explosion of radicalism, that could well stretch into neighboring Central Asia, and from there into Russia itself. So they need to keep tabs on what’s going on. The second thing is, Russia is trying to once again assert itself as a great power. If the United States withdraws as is meant to happen, it’s an opportunity for Russia to then reintroduce itself as some kind of power broker. 

From an intelligence point of view, you have to have pretty high confidence in an assessment if you’re actually going to make a potentially very inflammatory claim. And on the whole, intelligence agencies are conservative. This is one of the reasons why it has not come up through the formal channels but instead has been leaked. More broadly, this speaks to something that a lot of Americans and non-Americans think — looking at Washington, the American debate about Russia is not about Russia. It’s about the White House. It’s about whether or not Trump is [Vladimir] Putin’s puppet or whatever. And very quickly, this became mobilized to point the finger at Trump. And it’s certainly true —

Well, you know, did he actually sort of basically refuse to confront President Putin about this? Did he bother reading his presidential daily brief? Is he someone who, frankly, doesn’t even bother paying attention to the intelligence assessments, or is he surrounded by people who shield him? I mean, all these questions are entirely valid questions to ask, frankly. It matters to know the answer to these, whether or not you have a chief executive who really is on top of international affairs. But in some ways, the whole issue about how this is managed within the administration has actually overshadowed the more fundamental question of what is actually going on in Afghanistan.

Exactly. Of course, the Russians are involved in Afghanistan and of course, Russian military intelligence are the people whom they would put out on the ground to form their alliances and build their networks of agents. That’s understood and accepted. What we don’t know is whether that kind of relationship has gone further into actually indicating that they’re willing to pay money for American dead or similar. This is a very specific and difficult thing to trace. And at the moment, it doesn’t sound like that’s where the current main emphasis is going.