As James Clapper, the former director of National Intelligence, put it,
Watergate “pales” in comparison to the current political scandal surrounding the White House. For the past six months, the U.S. media has followed the story of Russia’s interference in the 2016 Presidential
election—and the question of possible collusion between figures close to
Donald Trump and the Kremlin—with vigor, intensity, and the deployment
of an extraordinary amount of newsroom resources. In advance of Trump
and Putin’s first meeting, on the sidelines of the G-20 summit in
Hamburg, I decided to ask Russia’s sharpest and most experienced
political journalists and investigative reporters what they thought of
this coverage.

The Russian media is under nearly omnipresent pressure from numerous
entities: political operatives in the Kremlin, who tightly monitor what
is said in the press about Putin and the myriad arms of the Russian
state; media owners, who neuter coverage and readily get rid of overly
ambitious reporters and editors; and financial constraints, namely a
small advertising market and a tiny number of readers willing to pay for
independent journalism. The result is that the space for independent,
muckraking journalism has shrunk further. Yet, even given these many
constraints, Russia is nevertheless home to a coterie of talented and
self-motivated journalists, who produce work that is courageous and
illuminating.

I spoke to more than a half-dozen of them, all of whom found themselves
in some way bemused, frustrated, or disappointed in the way that the
U.S. press has covered Putin and Russia—especially concerning the
question of election interference—over the last months. On the whole,
said Mikhail Zygar, a political journalist and the author of “All the
Kremlin’s Men,” a well-sourced insider look at the cloistered world of Russian politics, the way the U.S. media has covered the Russia scandal
has made “Putin seem to look much smarter than he is, as if he operates
from some master plan.” The truth, Zygar told me, “is that there is no
plan—it’s chaos.”

By way of an example, Zygar narrated what he saw as the total disorder
that has marked Russia’s military campaign in Syria, which began with a
surprise incursion of air power, in September, 2015. Putin seems to
consider the intervention a success, because it outmaneuvered Western
attempts to isolate him and elevated him to the position of global
statesman; but, whatever the achievements, they came out of an
absolutely slapdash policy, according to Zygar. “Nothing was
calculated,” Zygar said. “There was no strategy, no preparatory work, no
coördination with Iran, none with Turkey either, which is how we almost
ended up in a war—not to mention the huge amount of money that was
simply stolen in the course of this operation.”

According to Zygar’s sources, Putin forced Russia’s military prosecutor
into retirement, in April, before he could deliver a report to the
country’s upper house of parliament that would have revealed substantial
financial losses in Syria due to corruption. Such cynicism and
malfeasance is more the rule than the exception, Zygar said. He retold
the story of how Putin showed Oliver Stone a video that was supposedly
of Russian forces bombing ISIS fighters—“our aviation at work,” Putin
told Stone—which turned out to be a lifted clip from 2013 of U.S. pilots
attacking Taliban positions in Afghanistan. Zygar shook his head with
laughter. “They couldn’t even film a two-minute video!”

From the beginning, much of the U.S. coverage of Russia’s interference
in the 2016 election has focussed on the hacks of the e-mail accounts of
the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign
adviser, John Podesta. There is little concrete information available
regarding the world of Russian state hackers, with reporting on the
subject somewhere between difficult and impossible. Some of the best
reporting appeared in an investigation last winter by Danya Turovsky, a
correspondent for Meduza, an online publication that is based in Riga,
Latvia, in order to circumvent the pressure and attempts at censorship
faced by newsrooms in Moscow. (Turovsky and his editors ended up in a
dispute with the Times, with Meduza claiming that an article* from a series on Russia and its projection of power abroad, which won this year’s Pulitzer Prize, were based on Meduza’s reporting and not given proper citations. After an internal review, the Times determined that the article in question was based on original reporting.) In his articles,
Turovsky identified private companies that had lucrative cybersecurity
contracts with Russian intelligence agencies, uncovered Russian
military-recruiting videos for would-be hackers, and documented a case
of Russian officials testing a DDoS attack.

When I asked him what he thought of how American journalists have
described both the composition and tactics of Russian hacking squads, he
said that the general understanding “is correct, but, all the same,
there isn’t really much in the way of real evidence.” It’s one thing to
say Russia has both the motive and, with its cyber forces, the technical
ability to hack U.S. accounts, Turovsky told me—but, after that, things
get very murky. “We can be sure that Russian cyber forces exist, that
there are a lot of people involved, that the special services are
capable of something like this—but that doesn’t mean we can say with
one-hundred-per-cent certainty they are guilty.” It appears that the primary sources for many Washington-based reporters are U.S. intelligence agencies, which unanimously concluded that the effort to
disrupt the election was directed by Putin and emanated from Russia.
That makes it possible that American journalists know more about the
hacking than their Russian colleagues do.

Still, Turovsky is suspicious of the level of specificity in U.S. reporting on Russian hackers. For example,
the way that the terms “Fancy Bear” and “Cozy Bear”—nicknames for
hacking units linked to Russian intelligence services—entered the
American journalistic lexicon gave him pause. “As I understand, there
aren’t really groups, just a lot of different people who do this work;
it’s pure conjecture to think they form into discrete, particular squads
that you could call this or that,” Turkovsky said. He told me that,
during the course of his reporting, he was struck by how technologically
backward much of the Russian state’s security apparatus appeared—a
nuance he said that he hasn’t often observed in American press coverage
of the situation. Once, a source took Turovsky inside a cybersecurity
facility run by the F.S.B., Russia’s main security service and the
successor agency to the K.G.B. As he described it, “the F.S.B. officers
had to give up their phones upon entering. There were no computers
connected to the Internet—just one for each floor. To access it, they
have to sign up in advance and get a key that was good for a certain
amount of time. They were complaining that it was impossible to
investigate anything in such conditions.”

Even as Turovsky was cautious about some of the more sweeping
allegations directed at hackers working for the Russian state, he
acknowledged that the chances of the claims being true were just as high
as the chances of them being false—that is the hall-of-mirrors reality
of reporting on Kremlin plots and intrigue. “Oftentimes, in Russia, what
seems totally absurd actually turns out to be the truth,” he said,
pointing to the story, reported in detail by my colleague Adrian Chen, of a so-called “troll farm” run out of a nondescript office in St.
Petersburg. “Who would have imagined there was a building where people
go to work and get paid salaries to sit all day and write online
comments in different languages?” Turovsky said.

I also spoke with Roman Shleinov, an investigative editor at Novaya Gazeta,
the newspaper that was home to Anna Politkovskaya, the fearless reporter
killed in 2006, and which first broke the news of an anti-gay crackdown in Chechnya. Shleinov was the Russian coördinator for reporting on the Panama Papers, which revealed high cash flows to
offshore accounts run by close Putin friends and associates. He told me
that the U.S. press was unduly focussed on the particulars of real-estate
deals surrounding Trump, parsing which Russians had purchased apartments
from Trump or lived in buildings operating under the Trump name. “It’s
hard to say for sure, but the idea that a Russian person who buys an
apartment somewhere—say, in Trump Tower—is trying to get influence over
someone, to me it seems strange,” Shleinov said.

The most important thing that U.S. reporters should remember, Shleinov
told me, is that “money is fleeing Russia in all directions, people are
trying to invest anywhere they can, to get their assets out before the
secret services or their competitors show up and try and take them all.”
On the whole, Shleinov said, a wealthy Russian—even a politically
connected one—is likely buying real estate abroad “as a place to run
to,” not on Putin’s orders.

Shleinov was more intrigued by the meeting, last December, between Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and a White House adviser, and Sergey
Gorkov, the head of Vnesheconombank, or V.E.B., a Russian state bank.
What exactly the two discussed is under some dispute. The White House
said that Kushner was acting in a political capacity. V.E.B. said that
the meeting was about business interests. Shleinov called the very fact that
the two sat down at Trump Tower “curious—now that’s interesting,
something to actually talk about.” He went on to explain V.E.B.’s role
in the Putin state: “All these state banks are not really businesses,
they are meant to carry out state functions. If the head of V.E.B. was
talking about possibly financing projects connected to the son-in-law of
the President of the United States, that was certainly discussed on the
highest levels here in Moscow.”

A notion I have heard from Russian journalists again and again is that
the U.S. media, in its reporting of the possible Russia ties of Trump
associates, can veer toward trafficking in the conspiracy theories that
define so much of Russian coverage of the United States. Elena Chernenko
is head of the foreign desk at Kommersant, a Russian paper that
started out as a respectable and independent chronicler of business and
politics but is now a rather muted one. Chernenko is among its remaining
high-profile reporters, and the paper’s international coverage continues
to be strong. She has written on Russian foreign policy and the
country’s Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, for the past seven years.
Every morning, before she reads the Russian press, she checks the
Times and the Washington Post. For years, she said, they represented a
“moral compass and a model of what I strived for.” These days, she said,
it seemed as if American journalists had lowered their standards when
reporting on Russia. “Now, I don’t exclude that this indeed was an
operation carried out by the Russian special services,” she told me, referring to the notion of Russian effort to influence the election. But, so far, she hasn’t seen incontrovertible evidence. “The
way the American press writes about the topic, it’s like they’ve lost
their heads,” she complained.

Chernenko compared the U.S. media’s fixation on the comings and goings
of Sergey Kislyak, Russia’s Ambassador in Washington, to how the Russian
media treated Michael McFaul, who served as the U.S. Ambassador to
Russia from 2012 to 2014. “The state media would take every one of his
unfortunate statements and blow it up to an unimaginable degree,” she
said. On state airwaves, McFaul was portrayed as being behind all manner
of nefarious American plots to weaken Russia, a narrative that Chernenko
said she now sees in reverse. She thought it was silly then, and she
thinks the same of it now. For her, the height of the U.S. media’s
“unbelievable hysteria” came when Lavrov visited Trump at the White
House, in May. American journalists were kept out of the meeting but a
photographer from a Russian state news agency was allowed to attend and
take photos of a grinning Trump hamming it up with Lavrov and Kislyak.
“Lavrov did what he always does, he is not guilty for the fact the White
House did not let in the American press,” Chernenko said. She told me
the resulting speculation in some corners of the U.S. media that the
Russian photographer may have sneaked a listening device into the Oval
Office was “full face-palm.”

Perhaps the most unexpected skeptic of U.S. coverage whom I talked to
was Alexey Kovalev, who runs an online project called Noodleremover, a
play on the Russian expression “to hang noodles on your ears,” which
means to knowingly tell someone nonsense. The Web site is dedicated to
debunking the most galling factual errors on Russian state media, with
RT a regular and favorite target. Kovalev described himself to me as
“one of RT’s biggest critics,” and added, “but I’m critical of what
deserves to be criticized: namely, that RT is home to conspiracy
theories, has a general disregard for objectivity, and gives a platform
to lunatics to get on air.” But Kovalev is convinced that the channel’s
reach and propaganda effect in the United States are minimal, and that
the attention it has received is “absolutely oversized” compared to its
actual power in affecting the American political agenda—which he said is
basically zero.

“Bernie Sanders gave a forty-minute interview to RT,” Kovalev said,
pointing me to comments in which the head of the channel, Margarita
Simonyan, called Sanders the “coolest” candidate in last year’s
campaign. “And nobody gave a shit. You know why? Because, in truth,
nobody really watches RT.” A 2015 investigation by the Daily Beast
showed that, on RT’s YouTube channel, “political news videos, featuring
the content by which it seeks to shape Western opinion and thus justify
its existence, accounted for a mere 1 percent of its total YouTube
exposure.” (RT pointed to more recent numbers, including the 3.7 million views that its YouTube video of Trump’s victory speech received—more views than the YouTube channels for CNN, BBC, and CBC News.)** Kovalev said that, these days, the biggest beneficiaries of
all the undue attention are RT executives, Simonyan above all. “People
in RT have been telling me it’s been six months of Christmas for them,”
he told me.

That echoes another refrain I heard from several Russian journalists:
that Putin, like a naughty kid in school, finds all this attention—even
if its uniformly critical— flattering and even rewarding, a salve for
years of feeling ignored. Zygar told me that, as far he understands,
Putin “likes the image of himself as a kind of Bond villain, that Fareed
Zakaria calls him the most powerful man in the world. That’s what he has
been aspiring for this whole time, that he is respected, on the top of
the world.” When I spoke with Anton Zhelnov, a political reporter at
Dozhd, a scrappy and creative independent cable channel, which is in
perpetual danger of shutting down, he said that his contacts in the
Kremlin can’t help but be pleased by the multiple U.S. investigations
into Russian interference, whether by the media or Congress. “Yes, it’s
unpleasant, but at the same time they like that Russia is being
discussed all the time, that Russia has become a topic in American
politics. They like this very much, and don’t try and hide it in private
conversations,” Zhelnov said.

Ultimately, among the Russian journalists I talked to, one of the most
consistent reactions is simple exhaustion with the endless amount of
Trump-Russia coverage. “I have the sense a lot of these articles are
being published without new information, that we are going around in
circles,” Turovsky, the Meduza journalist, told me. Yet he still starts
his day browsing the headlines in the American press, a ritual that
takes an hour or more. “Of course, what can I do,” he told me. “I read
this stuff every day.”

*This article has been updated to reflect that the dispute between Turovsky and the Times was over credit and reporting in one article, not multiple, and that an internal review concluded that the article in question was based on original reporting.

**This article has been updated to correct figures regarding RT’s broadcast footprint.