MOSCOW — Shifting from his previous blanket denials, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia
said on Thursday that “patriotically minded” private Russian hackers
could have been involved in cyberattacks last year to help the
presidential campaign of Donald J. Trump.
While
Mr. Putin continued to deny any state role, his comments to reporters
in St. Petersburg were a departure from the Kremlin’s previous position:
that Russia had played no role whatsoever in the hacking of the Democratic National Committee and that, after Mr. Trump’s victory, the country had become the victim of anti-Russia hysteria among crestfallen Democrats.
Raising
the possibility of attacks by what he portrayed as free-spirited
Russian patriots, Mr. Putin said that hackers “are like artists” who
choose their targets depending how they feel “when they wake up in the
morning.”
“If
they are patriotically minded, they start making their contributions —
which are right, from their point of view — to the fight against those
who say bad things about Russia,” he added.
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His
remarks echoed ones by Mr. Trump, who has dismissed accusations of
Russian meddling and said that the person responsible for the attack on
the Democratic National Committee “could be somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds.”
All
the same, Mr. Putin stuck firmly to earlier denials that Russian state
bodies or employees had been involved, an accusation leveled by United
States intelligence agencies. They concluded in January
that Mr. Putin himself had directed a Russian “influence campaign”
involving cyberattacks and disinformation intended to tilt the November
election in Mr. Trump’s favor.
“We’re not doing this on the state level,” Mr. Putin said on Thursday.
The
boundary between state and private action, however, is often blurry,
particularly in matters relating to the projection of Russian influence
abroad. Nominally private Russian citizens have fought alongside
Russian-speaking rebels in eastern Ukraine and have taken part in various campaigns to advance Moscow’s agenda in Eastern and Central Europe.
Perhaps
worried that American intelligence agencies could release evidence
linking last year’s cyberattacks to Russia, Mr. Putin also put forward a
theory that modern technology could easily be manipulated to create a
false trail back to Russia.
Graphic
Why It’s Hard to Have an Independent Russia Investigation
A special counsel does not ensure that the F.B.I.
investigation will be free from political interference.
“I
can imagine that someone is doing this purposefully — building the
chain of attacks so that the territory of the Russian Federation appears
to be the source of that attack,” Mr. Putin said. “Modern technologies
allow to do that kind of thing, it’s rather easy to do.”
In
this, Mr. Putin appeared to be repeating an argument he first made
earlier in the week in an interview with the French newspaper Le Figaro.
“I
think that he was totally right when he said it could have been someone
sitting on their bed or somebody intentionally inserted a flash drive
with the name of a Russian national, or something like that,” Mr. Putin
told Le Figaro, referring to Mr. Trump. “Anything is possible in this
virtual world. Russia never engages in activities of this kind, and we
do not need it. It makes no sense for us to do such things. What for?”
The
evolution of Russia’s position on possible meddling in the American
election is similar to the way Mr. Putin repeatedly shifted his account
of Russia’s role in the 2014 annexation of Crimea and in armed
rebellions in eastern Ukraine: He began by categorically denying that
Russian troops had taken part before acknowledging, months later, that
the Russian military was “of course” involved.
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