The Russian Cyberattack on America Is a Breakdown of Deterrence

By Noah Rothman

Friday, December 12, 2025

 

Recently unsealed grand jury records helpfully flagged by investigative journalist Michael Weiss implicate the Russian government in the execution of hostile cyberattacks against American civilian infrastructure.

 

 

The unredacted portions of the charging documents detail an operation that came online in March 2022, less than one month after Moscow embarked on its second invasion of Ukraine. It culminated in botnet attacks on U.S. government websites and those of its allies and partners, efforts to cripple American utilities providers and undermine the integrity of the 2024 elections, and the disruption of operations of American food distributors.

 

In its most dangerous forms, the Russian campaign took aim at American public health, sanitation, energy, and food security. Alleged Russian assets meddled with Pennsylvania landfills, risking “parasitic acid contamination.” The agents attacked Oklahoma oil fields, Colorado oil and gas companies, and public water systems in Texas. Over “two thousand pounds of meat” were despoiled by an attack that shut off the refrigeration and triggered an ammonia leak at a meat-packing facility. (In Europe, the hackers even targeted a Dutch children’s water park, “tampering with temperature and other control settings including chlorination levels.”)

 

These are hardly the first cyberattacks on U.S. civilian interests directed by assets with direct links to Russian military intelligence. Moscow has been implicated in similar attacks long before the West united in opposition to Russia following its 2022 attempt to subsume Ukraine into the Russian Federation — a detail that will frustrate efforts by Russia’s reflexive apologists to blame the targets of Russia’s hostile actions for their own torment. But this revelation presents a unique challenge to the president and those in his orbit who would answer Russian aggression with appeasement.

 

Can there be an “America First” agenda worthy of the name that dismisses an aggressive action against American civilians by a hostile foreign power? Does a movement ostensibly dedicated to “making America great again” deserve the public’s confidence if it turns a blind eye toward such naked and reckless aggression?

 

The United States has not and still does not recognize the legitimacy of territorial expansionism through force or coercion, although the administration is working hard to sacrifice that noble posture. Would the president and his movement excuse Russian aggression against the homeland merely because the U.S. observed the very policy it has maintained since the end of the Second World War, accusing Americans of inviting their own harassment only because they were properly revulsed by Vladimir Putin’s irredentism? That wouldn’t just be a politically suicidal impulse — it would be an abdication of the American president’s foremost duty to the public.

 

Russia is not America’s most powerful adversary. It’s not even our most malevolent adversary. But it is America’s most reckless enemy. That is what makes Moscow the most acute threat to the geostrategic status quo.

 

The practitioners of statecraft around the president seem to be perplexed by this, but it’s entirely unclear why. The Kremlin is heedless. It takes unnecessary risks. The strategies that are cooked up in Putin’s halls of power are inscrutable outside them, and it often seems like Russian war planners engage in regular failures of imagination. That’s an exquisitely dangerous situation.

 

Big wars can happen by virtue of inertia alone. A miscalculation on the Russians’ part could compel the West to respond — and that response could compel Moscow to engage in its own escalation. Even if that sequence of events is perfunctory, calculated, and designed to save face, it can still culminate in a cascading series of retaliations and reprisals that risk taking on a logic all their own.

 

Containing and deterring Russian aggression has never been an easy job. And yet Moscow has historically responded in predictable ways to credible threats backed by the presence of overwhelming, tangible assets tasked with executing those threats. When Russia behaves as it is behaving, it is not deterred. Until deterrence is restored, the threat to U.S. security represented by its most heedless near-peer competitor will continue to grow.