A spicy Russian intel leak

The folks at The New York Times dropped an intriguing little nugget over the weekend, reporting they’d received an internal Russian intelligence memo warning that Beijing is a) spying on Russia’s war in Ukraine, b) spying on Russia’s presence in the Arctic, and c) covertly recruiting Russian academics, journalists, researchers, arms-makers, and beyond. 

So first… where might this report have come from?

The NYT notes it came from mysterious cybercriminals known as Ares Leaks, but even that leaves us with the question whether Ares in turn got the doc from a hack, a disgruntled Russian, and/or Western spooks (who use both hacks and disgruntled folks).

The NYT says six Western intelligence agencies validated the memo, but without us knowing the source, it’s still hard to know this leak’s motive, and therefore its significance.

Think about it like this:

• Cybercriminals leak for cash

• A disgruntled insider might leak for a ticket out of Russia

• Western spooks might leak to sow distrust between two rivals (🇨🇳+🇷🇺), and

• Media outlets might publish leaks to drive clicks (plus shine a light in the dark ofc)

So each might have a motive to spice up a memo’s authenticity and significance.

For his part, President Trump has already openly flagged his intent to peel Moscow back away from Beijing: “I’m going to have to un-unite them, and I think I can do that”.

International relations nerds have gone on to describe this as pulling a ‘reverse Nixon’, echoing his ol’ Soviet-era masterstroke of playing one authoritarian off the other, but this time it’d involve: a) letting Russia bank its gains in Ukraine via a favourable ceasefire, then b) rebuilding US ties with Moscow, all so the US can c) pivot hard to counter China.

Anyway, perhaps a more meaningful way to look at all this is to examine this leaked Russian document’s plausibility against what we already know:

• Historically, Beijing-Moscow ties have long featured border clashes and betrayals

• Economically, Russia is now the sanctions-riddled, war-drained junior-burger almost entirely dependent on China’s fuel purchases and industrial capacity, and

• Ideologically, the two neighbours share an interest in wanting to push the world beyond its post-WWII US-led shape.

So against that frenemy backdrop, there’s nothing surprising about Russian spy-catchers fretting about what China might now be up to while Moscow has all its military and intelligence chips stacked 6,500km away in Ukraine.

But at this point, maybe the document’s authenticity is kinda beside the point: first, it’s unclear whether this sino-scepticism is just the view of Russia’s professionally paranoid spy-catchers focussed full-time on China, or a fear widely shared across Moscow.

But second, even that’s beside the point: wary of his Chinese counterpart or not, Putin needs Xi. It’s not that the pros outweigh the cons. Rather, Putin has no choice.