This story is obviously swamping the news cycle at the moment. Just a mind boggling press conference by an American Presidential candidate. This Vox article does a fair job of explaining the salient points of Trump's Russian "policy":
https://www.vox.com/2016/7/27/12271042/donald-trump-russia-putin-hack-explained
An excerpt, to describe Russian strategy and to emphasize exactly what Trump is actually encouraging the Russians to do:
"The bigger picture here is that Russia under Putin has something of a habit of using information as a weapon in foreign countries.
This is born, as the New York Times’ Max Fisher explains, from a traumatic experience Russia had in the mid-2000s. A series of pro-Kremlin strongmen in former Eastern Bloc states were toppled by the so-called “Color Revolutions.” In 2011, protests in Moscow threatened the very stability of the Putin regime itself. These were seen, in the paranoid climate of Moscow, as American intelligence operations.
As a result, Russian strategic leaders came to see the internal politics of other countries as a key battlefield.
Fisher points to a 2013 article, by Gen. Valery V. Gerasimov, as key evidence of this new Russian thinking. Gerasimov argued that “non-military means” had eclipsed weapons in their strategic importance. Controlling the information and propaganda environment can inflict serious blows on one’s enemies.
“The role of nonmilitary means of achieving political and strategic goals has grown, and, in many cases, they have exceeded the power of force of weapons in their effectiveness,” Gerasimov writes. He advocates using “military means of a concealed character,” including “actions of informational conflict” in order to accomplish Russian strategic objectives.
Gerasimov’s article uses the Arab Spring as a key example, which is telling. The Arab Spring wasn’t about wars between countries, but rather upheaval inside countries. Gerasimov’s ideas, then, are explicitly designed to be used in attempts to influence other countries’ internal politics and conflicts.
So it’s not just that the hack looks traceable back to Russian hackers. It’s that the strategic effect of the leak — exacerbating existing divisions inside America’s ruling Democratic party — fits squarely within Russian strategic doctrine.
The fact that Trump is seemingly inviting more Russian intervention into US politics, then, is very, very disturbing. He’s basically encouraging Russia to try out Gerasimov’s playbook in the United States."
