Today: What can democracies do about autocratic interference? Josh Rudolph on the challenges of resistance and resiliency.

+ The U.S. is on the hunt for new sources of critical minerals. & The jig us up for Gadalias and Saulos. But first …

• One of the bombs landed next to a city bus, as many of the city’s residents were going to religious services for Palm Sunday.
• The U.S. brokered a ceasefire on energy infrastructure between Moscow and Kyiv in late March, but Russia increased the number of bombings last month and started new ground offensives.
• On Friday, a senior U.S. envoy for Ukraine met with Russian President Vladimir Putin. The Kremlin said the meeting was productive, but neither side offered anything more specific.

Why these attacks, then?

• They’ve evidently angered some senior U.S. officials and Republicans, who responded with sharp criticisms of Putin and the Kremlin—and by questioning Putin’s desire to end the war at all.
• U.S. Senator Lindsay Graham, who is close to President Donald Trump, said, “Putin and peace apparently do not fit in the same sentence. … Russia’s barbaric Palm Sunday attack on Christian worshippers in Ukraine seems to be Putin’s answer to efforts to achieve a ceasefire and peace.”
• Keith Kellogg, another U.S. envoy for Ukraine and a retired general, said, “Today’s Palm Sunday attack by Russian forces on civilian targets in Sumy crosses any line of decency. There are scores of civilians dead and wounded. As a former military leader, I understand targeting, and this is wrong.”
• Trump said, “I think it was terrible. And I was told [Russia] made a mistake.” During the weekend, he also posted social-media messages inexplicably blaming Ukraine for starting the war.

During the U.S. presidential campaign last year, Trump often said he’d be able to stop the fighting within 24 hours of taking office. But almost three months into his presidency, Moscow has only scaled up its attacks. Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy accepted a U.S. proposal for a 30-day, full ceasefire, but Moscow rejected the plan. The two sides tried but failed to strike a deal to halt fighting in the Black Sea. All of which raises the question: What are the real obstacles here to stopping the conflict?

• The amendment gives more legal support for a law, approved in March, prohibiting the Pride celebration, which usually attracts tens of thousands of people in Budapest every year.
• The citizenship amendment can be used to take away Hungarian citizenship from anyone who criticizes the government and has dual citizenship—potentially giving the state justification for preventing government critics from entering Hungary ever again.

Why is the Hungarian government taking these measures?

• Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said on Monday, “The international gender network must take its hands off our children. Now, with the change in America, the winds have shifted in our favor.” Orbán was referring to the re-election of U.S. President Donald Trump.
• Talking about the citizenship law last month, Orbán said it was part of a “spring cleaning” to cleanse Hungarian politics of “stink bugs.”
• Critics say Orbán is using the amendments to restrict the rights to peaceful assembly and freedom of expression.
• These new amendments are the 15th time Orbán has changed the Constitution since returning to office in 2010.

The amendments look like more of the same from Orbán, but the situation in Hungary doesn’t look the same as it did 15 years ago. Orbán has won four national elections in a row, but polls now show that he could lose to a new political party led by a former senior member of Orbán’s own party. Hungary has the highest inflation rate in the European Union, and polling also shows that Hungarians are angry at the many corruption scandals involving Orbán’s government. Elections are scheduled for next year.

• The Federal Trade Commission says Meta repeatedly broke the law in buying Instagram and WhatsApp, by trying to create and maintain a monopoly in social networking.
• Meta says it does not have a monopoly—on the contrary, its lawyers say, the company has serious competition from TikTok, Snapchat, and other social-networking apps.

What’s at stake here?

• The FTC has what it sees as a damning email from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg in 2012, saying that he wanted to “neutralize a potential competitor” in Instagram by buying it. The FTC argues that this violates antitrust law, which protects competition in free markets by preventing dominant firms from buying up rivals instead of competing against them.
• The FTC is asking the court to force Meta to unwind the mergers—in other words, to get rid of Instagram and WhatsApp.
• This case is part of a larger pattern of antitrust suits against tech giants by the U.S. and EU.
• Last year, the U.S. Justice Department won a lawsuit against Google for monopolizing internet search. A judge in the same Washington court ruled that Google both had a monopoly and behaved illegally as a monopolist.
• The Justice Department has a second case against Google for an alleged monopoly in online advertising.
• The U.S. has also sued Apple and Amazon for antitrust violations; both cases should go to trial next year.

All these lawsuits were started by the administration of former U.S. President Joe Biden, whose appointees took an aggressive antitrust strategy against perceived monopolies in many sectors of the economy—though the tech cases were some of the largest and most prominent. But anger against tech giants is a rare area of bipartisan agreement in the U.S., with many Republicans saying that social-media platforms have an anti-conservative bias. President Donald Trump’s officials have—for now—continued to pursue the cases that were already in progress; but many leaders of tech firms have become close to the president—and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has made an offer to buy TikTok, which Trump wants sold to a U.S. buyer. So it remains an open question whether Trump will want his agencies to keep suing these companies—and whether the Supreme Court will accept the interpretation of antitrust law that won over the lower court in the Google case.

‘It’s a hydra’

Throughout the Cold War, the Soviets conducted plenty more covert influence campaigns against the U.S. and other Western democracies. In the 1950s and ‘60s, they tried to exploit racial strife in America, even forging letters to civil-rights organizations purporting to be from the Ku Klux Klan. In the ‘70s and ‘80s, they tried to radicalize Western anti-nuclear movements through front organizations, funded research, and media manipulation. In the ‘80s, Operation Infektion promoted the false claim that HIV/AIDS was created as a biological weapon at Fort Detrick, Maryland. China had its own operations. Cuba, East Germany, and even North Korea had theirs.

In the meantime, the Soviets had become masters in the arts of strategic corruption and compromising material (kompromat). Often, they’d identify and cultivate relationships with influential Westerners who had financial troubles, proclivities for vice, or ideological sympathies the KGB could work with. They’d offer bribes, business deals, or other financial incentives through front companies and intermediaries to compromise their targets. They focused on corrupting politicians, journalists, and business leaders in positions to influence policy or public opinion. In Western Europe especially, they targeted politicians and labor leaders through both direct payments and lucrative business arrangements.

It’s still not clear how strategically effective many of these operations were. But they were often damaging, and they were ongoing.

Strategic corruption by autocracies toward democracies, in other words, isn’t new. Part of what is new is the players: When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, Dubai was a small city in the desert. Now, the United Arab Emirates is the fourth-largest economy in the Middle East and a key U.S. ally. Part is the context: Since the 1990s, a hyper-globalized economy has transformed and connected autocratic and democratic societies; money tied to the Chinese Communist Party, the post-Soviet Kremlin, and, increasingly, the ruling families of the Gulf states has flowed into Western capitals; and digital technologies are now driving more than 729 million real-time financial transactions a day—not to say the virtually constant consumption of media and messaging. But no small part of what’s new are the stakes: Amid all these changes, democracies’ threat interface—the set of ways attackers can interact with or exploit a system—has become more complex and rapid-changing than ever. What can democracies do?

Josh Rudolph is a senior fellow and the head of the Transatlantic Democracy Working Group at the German Marshall Fund. Rudolph says that in the developing world, the challenges of responding are relentless, both because there are so many vulnerabilities to strategic corruption and because there’s so much opportunity for corrupt actors to interfere with investigations. But developed democracies, including the most powerful in the world, face their own relentless challenges. While some have made headway through legislative initiatives and enforcement, they all struggle to close legal loopholes faster than new ones open up. And in the United States, especially, this struggle has been complicated not only by the jarring priorities of a new administration, but also by a long-term trend among American legislators —to put partisan political advantage ahead of national security …

• The recent analysis of a 1,900-year-old papyrus, found decades ago in the Judean desert, has shown that it registers a Roman tax-evasion scheme. Two men, Gadalias and Saulos, allegedly forged documents to orchestrate fake slave sales across provincial borders, making the slaves vanish from tax records while physically keeping them: “On paper, the slaves disappeared in Judea but never arrived in Arabia, thereby becoming invisible to Roman administrators.”

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