For the United States, however, the outreach is fraught with risk, exposing the Biden administration to criticism that it is too willing to engage with a Putin-led Russia that continues to undermine American interests and repress dissent.
European officials worry Russia is playing hardball amid the region’s energy crisis, holding out for the approval of a new pipeline before delivering more gas. New footage, circulated on social media on Friday, showed missiles and other Russian weaponry on the move near Ukraine, raising speculation about the possibility of new Russian action against the country.
In the United States, it is the destructive nature of Russia’s cybercampaign that has officials particularly concerned. Microsoft’s disclosure of a new campaign to get into its cloud services and infiltrate thousands of American government, corporation and think tank networks made clear that Russia was ignoring the sanctions Mr. Biden issued after the Solar Winds hack in January.
But it also represented what now looks like a lasting change in Russian tactics, according to Dmitri Alperovitch, the chairman of the research group Silverado Policy Accelerator. He noted that the move to undermine America’s cyberspace infrastructure, rather than just hack into individual corporate or federal targets, was “a tactical direction shift, not a one-off operation.”
Russia has already found ways to use Mr. Biden’s desire for what the White House refers to as a more “stable and predictable” relationship to exact concessions from Washington.