Historically, we know from their actions leading up to WW2, and their actions during the "Cold War", the Cuban crisis and the subsequent collapse of the USSR and the Berlin Wall, that the Russians would seem to have deservedly earned the reputation of being pariahs of modern "democratic civilization".
Then they harboured the "traitorous criminal" Snowden, who had fled to Russia to avoid being banged up in chokey for - likely as not - the rest of his life, for the SnowdonGate revelations published by the UK's Guardian newspaper, about the US NSA intrusively spying on what seemed to be just about everybody and in every nation and distributing information-gathering (hacking) viruses and whatnot across the Internet.
So it was not too surprising to me when I read the other day that Obama had apparently restarted the old Cold War practice of sending a bunch of Russian diplomatic officials home as punishment for some wrong the Ruskies were alleged to have committed - in this case the official reason was that they had apparently committed a "wrong" by hacking into US government-operated networks and leaking the information they had gleaned to WikiLeaks, or something, though I also gather from media reports that Julian Assange has stated the Russian government was not the source and the Russians have also denied it.
Then I read today in ARStechnica.com that:
White House fails to make case that Russian hackers tampered with election
... Sadly, the JAR, as the Joint Analysis Report is called, does little to end the debate. Instead of providing smoking guns that the Russian government was behind specific hacks, it largely restates previous private-sector claims without providing any support for their validity. Even worse, it provides an effective bait and switch by promising newly declassified intelligence into Russian hackers' "tradecraft and techniques" and instead delivering generic methods carried out by just about all state-sponsored hacking groups. ...
Historically, ARStechnica seems to have a record for its tendency, to push the politically correct line
ad nauseam, so I reckoned this take on the JAR was probably a reasoned conclusion from some investigative journalism (for a change) and someone having read the report with their critical thinking cap on.
There seems toe be something hilarious in all of this, because, in the US government making the apparently unproven and unsubstantiated allegations/accusations about the Russian hacking (QED), and trying to take retribution for same, they have compounded themselves in a classic case of "the pot calling the kettle black", and they are also being hypocritical in this when in fact it is the US government (via the NSA) that would seem to be categorically the worst hacking offender on the planet - QED as per the published SnowdonGate revelations and which nobody has denied.
So is all this apparent BS about the Russians "fake news", or "truthism", or something?
Some people (not me, you understand) might say that, either way, it clearly creates a dichotomy which has the potential to demonize, stigmatize and antagonise the "evil" Russians, in what looks to be some kind of US government political cover-up whilst pointing the blame elsewhere, and it might thereby make it even
more difficult to later reverse and give Snowden a pardon, but I couldn't possibly comment.