Ahead of the Biden-Putin summit, where Russian ransomware gangs are expected to be a point of tension, a look at how Russia became a “greenhouse” for hackers
Context & Ripple Effects
The Washington Post's explainer lands mid-arc in a two-year diplomatic standoff over Russian ransomware. A month later Biden would warn Putin by phone that the US "will take any necessary action" to defend critical infrastructure (Biden's warning call), and by December US investigators had traced ransomware payments back to companies in Moscow's Federation Tower East — evidence pointing to official tolerance of the operators the summit was meant to address.
The piece also sets up the diplomatic split that followed: when the US convened 30 countries for a ransomware summit that October, Russia was pointedly excluded "for a host of reasons" (the 30-country event without Moscow). The "greenhouse" framing — state tolerance rather than state direction — is the through-line connecting the summit, the tower tracing, and the eventual LockBit crackdown.
First-order effects
- Ransomware becomes a named agenda item between Biden and Putin, putting the Kremlin on record before its peers on whether it will police gangs operating from its territory.
- US critical-infrastructure operators — pipelines, food processors, hospitals — remain the exposed constituency while the diplomatic channel, not enforcement, is the active lever.
Second-order effects
- With Moscow uncooperative, the US builds a coalition around it: the 30-country ransomware event excluding Russia and China shifts the fight from bilateral diplomacy to multilateral coordination among willing states.
- Traced payments to Federation Tower give investigators targeting data, foreshadowing law-enforcement operations like the later blow against Russia-linked LockBit — though experts note such groups regroup quickly.
Third-order effects
- If state tolerance persists, the pattern hardens into structural asymmetry: gangs enjoy safe harbor in one jurisdiction while their victims coordinate defenses across dozens of others.
- The taboo against attacking inside Russia eventually breaks — after the Ukraine invasion, Russian targets faced an unprecedented wave of cyberattacks, dissolving the off-limits norm that had kept the "greenhouse" one-directional.
The trend: Cyber diplomacy is shifting from bilateral leader-to-leader bargaining over safe harbors toward exclusionary coalitions and direct law-enforcement action against ransomware infrastructure.