Following a series of devastating cyberattacks against U.S. and other global businesses, Russian President Vladimir Putin sharply dismissed allegations his country is carrying out those cyberattacks.
“Where is the evidence? Where is proof? It’s becoming farcical,” Putin said in an NBC interview aired Monday. “We have been accused of all kinds of things — election interference, cyberattacks and so on and so forth — and not once, not once, not one time, did they bother to produce any kind of evidence or proof, just unfounded accusations.”
Putin’s comments come two days before he is to meet President Joe Biden in Geneva. Biden has said the U.S. government believes hackers in Russia attacked metro Atlanta-based Colonial Pipeline last month, which caused fuel shortages and long lines at gas stations throughout the Southeast. The company paid more than $4 million in ransomware to the hackers, but earlier this month, federal officials announced they had recovered most of that cryptocurrency.
The May 7 cyberattack locked up the company’s computer systems. The hackers didn’t take control of pipeline operations, but the Alpharetta-based company shut it down to prevent malware from affecting industrial control systems.
In April, the United States announced the expulsion of 10 Russian diplomats and new sanctions connected to the hacking of the SolarWinds information technology company. In May, Biden said U.S. officials do not believe the Russian government was involved but said “we do have strong reason to believe that the criminals who did the attack are living in Russia.”
A similar attack only days later hit JBS, the world’s largest meat processing company, which paid the equivalent of $11 million to hackers who broke into its computer system.
JBS said most of its facilities were operational at the time it made the payment, but it decided to pay in order to avoid any unforeseen issues and ensure no data was exfiltrated.
The FBI has attributed the attack to REvil, a Russian-speaking gang that has made some of the largest ransomware demands on record in recent months. The FBI said it will work to bring the group to justice, and it urged anyone who is the victim of a cyberattack to contact the bureau immediately.
Ransomware is a type of hack in which a victim’s computer files are encrypted, rendering them unusable until a ransom is paid. Some ransomware groups steal files, too, providing another avenue for extortion. The recent ransomware attack could play a role as Congress considers Biden’s $2.3 trillion infrastructure proposal.
Biden has repeatedly taken Putin to task — and levied sanctions against Russian entities and individuals in Putin’s orbit — over allegations of Russian interference in the 2020 election and the hacking of federal agencies in what is known as the SolarWinds breach.
Michael McFaul, a former U.S. ambassador to Russia who was with Biden for the 2011 meeting with Putin, said in an interview that Biden might have a deeper skepticism and perhaps more informed view of Putin than any of his White House predecessors.
“Biden’s knowledge of the region may be better than anybody that’s held the job,” McFaul said. “Biden has spent time in Georgia. He spent a lot of time in Ukraine. I traveled with him to Moldova, and he’s spent a lot of time in the eastern parts of the NATO alliance. He has been in those places and heard firsthand about Russian aggression and Russian threat. ... It has created a unique component of his analysis of Putin that other presidents have not had.”
Indeed, as president, Biden has said he would take a far different tack in his relationship with Putin than former President Donald Trump, who showed unusual deference to Putin, and the three other past U.S. presidents, whose political lives overlapped Putin’s time in power.
During his first visit of his presidency to the State Department, in February, Biden told agency employees that the days of “rolling over” for Putin were over. Later, in an ABC News interview, Biden answered affirmatively that Putin was “a killer.”
The White House said Biden would not hold a joint news conference with Putin but would speak to media on his own after Wednesday’s meeting. Administration officials say Biden doesn’t want to elevate Putin. Asked Sunday why years of U.S. sanctions haven’t changed Putin’s behavior, Biden laughed and responded: “He’s Vladimir Putin.”
Biden has managed several complicated relationships with foreign leaders during his nearly 50 years in national politics. He’s developed a rapport with China’s Xi Jinping — spending days traveling with Xi in the U.S. and China. Biden in recent days has told aides that his relationship with Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan has remained strong despite differences over U.S. support for Kurds in northwest Syria and Biden disparaging Erdogan as an autocrat.
But Putin has left Biden with fundamentally more difficult problems that personal diplomacy can’t fix, said Rachel Ellehuus, deputy director of the Europe, Russia and Eurasia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
“With someone like Erdogan, Xi or the North Korean (Kim Jong Un), Biden has had this sense that we have something they want,” Ellehuus said. “Biden has long recognized that the only thing Putin really wants is to undermine the U.S., to divide NATO, to divide the EU. Biden knows there’s little common ground to work from with Putin.”
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