text: This isn't really credible.
  
  If you are talking about the Russian election monitoring non-profit that was accused of accepting foreign funds, this was unproven, and can as at least as plausibly be explained simply by the Kremlin wanting to silence a critic of its corruption.
  
  Moreover, I don't see any reason to dig deep into motivations: Trump's election clearly benefits Putin's regime, and even if Trump had lost, Russia stands to gain from the sentiment that they were stirring up.
  
  More interesting is any insight we can get into the politics of the Russian escalation. The dossier with the Trump kompromat claims was really interesting here: the Trump stuff was boring and unverifiable, but there were some detailed bits about internal backlash over the hacks, because this made some of their intelligence operations very exposed and much of the situation was handled poorly. This is also unverifiable, but the level of detail made it quite plausible.