Cars pass by a billboard showing US President-elect Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin | Savo Prelic/AFP via Getty Images AMERICA 2016 How Russia wins an election You don’t need a security clearance to understand how Vladimir Putin does it. Just open your eyes.

Did Russia just put its man in the White House? Americans are furiously debating the question as intelligence reports leak, Donald Trump tweets his doubts and Congress vows to investigate.

As analysts who have spent years studying Russia’s influence campaigns, we’re confident the spooks have it mostly right: The Kremlin ran a sophisticated, multilayered operation that aimed to sow chaos in the U.S. political system, if not to elect Trump outright. But you don’t need a security clearance or a background in spycraft to come to that conclusion. All you need to do is open your eyes.

So how did Putin do it?

It wasn’t by hacking election machines or manipulating the results, as some have suggested. That would be too crude. The Kremlin’s canny operatives didn’t change votes; they won them, influencing voters to choose Russia’s preferred outcome by pushing stolen information at just the right time – through slanted, or outright false stories on social media. As we detail in our recent report, based on 30 months of closely watching Russia’s online influence operations and monitoring some 7,000 accounts, the Kremlin’s troll army swarmed the web to spread disinformation and undermine trust in the electoral system.

And America was just the latest target. These “active measures” are techniques Moscow has honed for decades, continually adapting its formula to changing technology and new circumstances. All of it is in service of Putin’s grand strategy of breaking up the European Union and NATO from the inside out -- without even firing a shot.

Having shattered many Americans’ faith in their democracy, Russia now feels emboldened. And with major elections coming up in France, Germany and the Netherlands, you can bet that Putin’s work is not done. Here’s how he does it:

1. Pick close contests: In both the British referendum and U.S. presidential votes, Russia happened upon an almost perfectly divided electorate. It took a nudge of just a few percentage points in each case to achieve victory.

The final Brexit tally came in at 51.9 percent “Leave” and 48.1 percent “Remain” -- so Russia needed only to turn or rally roughly 157,000 votes across the United Kingdom to deliver a major blow to the EU.

The U.S. election may consist of a far larger number of votes, but the system, we now know, can be gamed even more easily. Russian social media influence efforts needed to pump up Trump and tear down Clinton in just four key states. Trump won Wisconsin and Michigan by less than 1 percent and Florida and Pennsylvania by less than 1.5 percent. Could Russia’s hacks of Democrats and the resulting media storm cost the Clinton campaign seven to eight thousand swing votes or repress an equivalent turnout in Wisconsin? Many will immediately point out it’s impossible to prove Russia ‘caused’ a Trump victory, and they are correct. But what if we find Russian influence correlated with preferable voting outcomes in Brexit, the U.S. and across up to more than a half dozen elections across Europe?

2. Know your audience: In 2008 and 2012, Barack Obama’s strategists conducted a surgical influence effort, mapping key votes down to the neighborhood level. Russian operatives have borrowed from this playbook and targeted audiences vulnerable to their influence across the West – largely supporters of the “alt-right” and others angered by the perceived effects of globalization, immigration, terrorism and economic hardship. In the U.S., Russia’s blending of semi-overt and covert social media accounts use common hashtags and phrases to create what appear to be conservative Trump supporters or alt-right cheerleaders. These social media personas, whose bios are littered with words like “country,” “Christian,” “America” and “military,” then push pro-Trump hashtags loaded with skewed and fake news at American audiences, helping generate organic Trump support and distrust of the U.S. government. These accounts tweet hashtags and keywords in unison at specified time intervals and carry odd follower relationships fitting inorganic, mathematical patterns. In one example from July, two Russian propaganda outlets pushed a fake news story claiming that Incirlik Air Base in Turkey – a facility used by NATO -- was overrun by terrorists, using the hashtags #trumppence16 and #benghazi to attract a pro-Trump audience.

3. Start early and be persistent: As early as August 2015, Russian English-language outlets and their social media allies were promoting Trump -- at a time when the idea that he could actually win seemed a distant fantasy. And they kept going throughout the Republican primary, surging at key times. Put differently, Russia didn’t just intervene in the general election against Hillary Clinton -- it helped him defeat his anti-Moscow GOP rivals, too. The United Kingdom observed a similar campaign. Dating back to the earliest parts of 2015, Russian media outlets incited fear of immigration and promoted Brexit advocate Nigel Farage’s accusations of American manipulation to foster popular support for the British to leave the EU.

4. Try everything. Stick with what works: Today’s Russian propagandists borrow from the playbook of

their Soviet forefathers. RT and Sputnik News push political, financial, social and calamitous messages stoking fear and conspiracy into the information environment of any democratic audience suspicious or outwardly hostile to Russia. Since the summer of 2015, we’ve observed Russian messaging pushed to groups across the spectrum, the left and the right politically. Anarchists, anti-capitalists, white supremacists and anti-government militias have all received Russian English-language directed propaganda through the targeted application of bots and person-to-person engagement from what appear to be fellow Americans with strong Russian leanings.

Some Russian campaigns didn't work. Stories predicting doom from climate change or nuclear war have gained little to no traction in the U.S. Bernie Sanders supporters didn’t gravitate to Russian propaganda in substantial numbers, either. But when Russia’s digital propagandists find a message that resonates among a disgruntled American audience, they refocus their efforts to exploit where they find success –predominantly among conservative audiences seeking damaging information against Clinton. Sputnik News spun an innocuous email from a WikiLeaks dump into a nonsensical ailment known as “decision fatigue,” a fake story further amplified by an Infowars’ video viewed millions of times. Stories implying the U.S. election results were hacked or rigged led RT and Sputnik news election coverage in the final weeks before voting – a narrative amplified by Donald Trump himself. Russia’s messaging narrowed and improved as the U.S. election approached and was so effective that even Trump fell victim to Russian propaganda, citing a falsely attributed email story hosted by Sputnik news.

5. Hack and release: Russia’s synchronization of hacking and influence operations provides a one-two punch for manipulating democratic audiences. In the old days, Soviet Kompromat, or compromising materials, were used by KGB agents to encourage Western officials and public figures to speak and act in ways more amenable to Soviet objectives, via threats to expose criminality, corruption or sexual misbehavior. Today, Russia’s hacking teams, two of which security researchers have dubbed Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear, conduct wide-ranging kompromat hacking into thousands of current and former Western government officials, media personalities and national security experts. Russia then strategically releases true, manipulated true, and false information to data dumpsites such as WikiLeaks. These “information nukes” fuel Russian overt propaganda and supply dozens of fringe conspiratorial news sites. Russia’s cyber kompromat playbook appears to have a new target. Germany, the key remaining player in the EU, has already noted Russian hacks against its parliament in 2015, along with a sharp uptick in propaganda ahead of the country’s upcoming elections.

6. Use brute force to overwhelm adversaries: Soviet military doctrine employed the principle of mass to counter Western forces -- employing three to four times the artillery of their enemies. Once the Soviets found a break in enemy lines, they’d exploit the breach, occupy a position in the rear area of the enemy and then fight from a defensive position. Today’s Russian social media influence operations employ a similar approach. After using hacked information to craft manipulated truths, Russia propagates and amplifies stories using automated bots. Series of accounts programmed to appear as members of the target audience comment, retweet and share breaking conspiracies at a dizzying pace, turning keyword hashtags into Twitter trends. When successful, this artificial volume entices mainstream media outlets to engage on the trending issue, further amplifying the Kremlin’s narrative. Even if the false or manipulated truth pushed by Russian bots is later proven false, the firehose of fake or manipulated news often drowns out the mainstream media’s efforts to correct the record. The net result is an information world in which Western electorates cannot distinguish fact from fiction, eroding the integrity of democratic institutions and the voters’ trust.

7. Win even when you lose. Russia would prefer that its chosen candidates be victorious, but losing is almost as good: Putin and company are happy just to foment chaos, confusion and doubt. It doesn’t even take much. The mere allegation that voter rolls in Illinois and Arizona had been hacked raised concerns of a rigged outcome, lending credibility to wild claims like those the Green Party’s Jill Stein leveled in Wisconsin. Even the Electoral College, historically a rubber stamp, is becoming another partisan battlefield. And now, with many Americans embittered by the nastiest election in memory and squabbling over the very question of Russian meddling, Putin can sit back and admire his handiwork. Because either way, he’s already won.

Clint Watts is Robert A. Fox Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia and senior fellow at the Center for Cyber and Homeland Security at the George Washington University.

Andrew Weisburd is senior fellow at the Center for Cyber and Homeland Security at the George Washington University.