(CNN) — The United States has information that Russia may have delayed announcing its withdrawal from the Ukrainian city of Kherson in part to avoid handing Joe Biden’s government a political victory before the midterm elections, according to four people familiar with intelligence services.
Senior Russian officials considered the US election as a factor during deliberations over the withdrawal announcement, a person familiar with intelligence services said. Waiting until after the US election was always a “pre-planned condition” of the Russian withdrawal from Kherson, a second person familiar with the intelligence told CNN.
However, the election was by no means the only consideration in Russia’s withdrawal, the officials said. Military analysts say Russia had few operational options and had been preparing to withdraw for weeks, leading US officials to wonder when the Russians would officially acknowledge the withdrawal.
While the information is not a formal assessment of Russia’s intentions, it is a sign that Russia has a continuing interest in influencing the US political landscape, though the sources said Russia likely miscalculated the impact such an announcement would have. In the elections.
“I doubt the Americans really noticed,” said another source familiar with Western intelligence services.
President Joe Biden seemed to hint last week that the United States believed the timing of Russia’s announcement was more than just a coincidence.
“I find it interesting that they waited until after the election to make that judgment, which we’ve known for a long time that they were going to do, and it’s proof of the fact that they have some real problems with the Russian military,” Biden told a conference. press last Wednesday.
Biden also said he hopes that, once the election is over, the Russians will be more willing to negotiate the release of US citizens detained in Russia, including Brittney Griner and Paul Whelan. After the midterm elections, Griner’s lawyer announced that the American basketball star would be transferred to a Russian penal colony where he must serve the rest of a nine-year sentence for drug smuggling that was confirmed at the end of October.
CIA Director Bill Burns was in Ankara this Monday discussing US prisoners with his Russian counterpart, the National Security Council (NSC) reported, though most of the discussion centered on managing the risk posed by nuclear weapons. The NSC declined to comment for this article.
Intelligence suggesting that Russia wanted to avoid giving the Democratic administration and Congress positive news on election eve add to a growing body of evidence that Russia is betting that a Republican-led America will offer less support. to Ukraine.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy hinted as much in recent interviews, telling CNN that a Republican House would more closely monitor and control money and weapons flowing into Kyiv. Some Republicans say his public comments have been taken out of context and that military support for Ukraine will remain high regardless of who controls the lower house. Within the Republican Party, however, there remain critics of US support for Ukraine, such as Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and JD Vance, the new Republican senator from Ohio.
“While there remains a strong bipartisan agreement on Ukraine, the party that has supported it much more vocally is the Democratic Party, and in particular the Biden administration,” said one of the people familiar with the intelligence.
Yevgeny Prigozhin, a Kremlin-linked oligarch, appeared last week to confirm what the US intelligence community has known for years: that the Russian government sought to support Republican Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in the 2016 and 2020 elections because it considered it more friendly to your interests.
“We interfere, we interfere and we will interfere” in the US elections, Prigozhin, who runs the Internet Research Agency, a troll farm deployed during the last US elections to spread disinformation, said on Telegram.
According to private investigators, the alleged Russian agents also used far-right media platforms to denigrate Democratic candidates in a handful of battleground states in the week leading up to this year’s midterm elections.
However, several US and congressional officials who track Russian influence operations say that if Russia decided to time its official withdrawal from Kherson with the US midterm elections, it likely overestimated the degree of American interest in individual battles in Ukraine. This demonstrates a lack of sophistication in Russia’s information operations, these sources said.
“Despite all the fuss about their information operations and political meddling, they’re still not that good in the big picture,” said the source familiar with Western intelligence. “There’s a really fundamental cultural misunderstanding there.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin himself did not announce the withdrawal – which Russia has called a “maneuver” rather than a “withdrawal” – distancing himself from what became a profound embarrassment for the Russian military. The withdrawal has been heavily criticized in pro-war Russian blogs.
“An announcement like this – no matter how Russia tries to turn it around – it is still clear that they are giving up the only provincial capital they took during the invasion,” said one of the people familiar with the intelligence. “So that’s a ton of egg on your face.”
CNN’s Sean Lyngaas contributed to the report.