russia was kind of flat on its back. we tried to actually help it. and we had, i would say, close to friendly relations with the regime at that time under boris yeltsin. we weren't quite prepared as a government with what putin brought in in 1999. the united states also tends to feel overconfident in the world, particularly when we looked at how bad off russia was then. in truth you can trace these techniques back to the 1980s when russians were, in that period, in the soviet period, were forging embassy cables and white house documents to suggest all sorts of things, that the united states was involved in the attempted assassination of the pope, for example. so there was, prior to 2014, a lot of evidence that russians knew how to do this and they do this sort of thing. they have new tools today, but i think that "post" article is quite right in saying it was the