By now, the basic facts of the case appear largely settled: hackers working in coördination with—or on direct orders from—Vladimir Putin’s government broke into the e-mail accounts of the Democratic National Committee and John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, passing the contents to WikiLeaks, which published them in slow drips over the summer and fall. Clinton, of course, lost last month’s Presidential election; Democrats quickly seized on the hacks, and the media coverage of them, to help explain the outcome. Anonymous sources at the C.I.A.—and, later, the F.B.I. and other intelligence agencies—told the Washington Post that aiding Trump’s candidacy was exactly the point of the Russian operation. Yet many important questions remain unanswered. What was the ultimate effect of the Russian hacks? Why did the Russians do it, and how, in his final days in office, should Barack Obama respond?

The first question may ultimately be unknowable. Clinton, who won the popular vote by 2.86 million votes, lost the Electoral College thanks to margins of less than a per cent in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. During a recent appearance on “Meet the Press,” Podesta avoided the question of whether he thought the election had been “free and fair,” saying only that it had been “distorted by the Russian intervention.” But was that distortion in fact decisive? To isolate the WikiLeaks e-mails to explain Clinton’s narrow loss is to elevate their importance above a host of other factors, including the Clinton campaign’s weaknesses, Trump’s genuine appeal as a candidate, as well as the diminishing power of political parties and the national press that covers them. (Not to mention the last-minute, whiplash letters from James Comey, the director of the F.B.I.)

As seen from Moscow, placing an outsized importance on Russian interference flatters Putin more than does him harm. After all, if the country he rules is essentially weak, as has often been suggested by Obama-era Democrats over the years, and was reiterated by Obama at his press conference on Friday, what imbues Putin with a legend of mystical powers more than having thrown a U.S. Presidential election?

Not long ago, I spoke with Valery Garbuzov, the director of the Institute for the U.S.A. and Canada, a research center in Moscow that advises various branches of the Russian government. He has been studying American politics for more than thirty years. When I raised the notion of Russian interference in the election, he demurred, but then gave as honest an answer as you can hear in Moscow these days. “In principle, of course it’s possible,” he said, speaking of a Kremlin role in the hacking of Democratic targets. “But this is a topic in which reality proves to be particularly ephemeral.”

Garbuzov insisted, however, that Russia doesn’t have the political reach or fine-grained knowledge needed to install a particular American President in office. “It may be possible to affect the general atmosphere, or how a particular candidate is perceived, to wield influence of a certain kind,” he said. “But that influence doesn’t lead to a guaranteed result. If it was that easy to get this or that person elected President of the United States, these instruments would have been used a long time ago.”

Of course, both the United States and Russia—and the Soviet Union before it—have long histories of trying to influence elections beyond their borders. The Cold War was full of cases of U.S. and Soviet interference in the internal political processes of countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. In 1996, Washington did what it could—including encouraging the I.M.F. to issue an emergency ten-billion-dollar loan to the faltering Russian government—to aid the reëlection of Russia’s first post-Soviet President, Boris Yeltsin, in a contest he was in danger of losing to his Communist challenger.

While Russia has not previously attempted to directly affect the outcome of a U.S. Presidential election, at least as far as is publicly known, disinformation campaigns targeting U.S. audiences have certainly existed. In the mid-eighties, for example, the K.G.B., in an effort to damage U.S. credibility and foment social discord, invented and propagated the myth that AIDS was a creation of the C.I.A. In recent years, the Kremlin has tried to do what it could to affect political discourse in Europe, cheering on the rise of right-wing, anti-establishment parties there. In this sense, Russia’s intervention in this year’s U.S. election, while unprecedented, is also not totally surprising. Writing recently in The National Interest, Nikolas Gvosdev, a professor at the U.S. Naval War College, argued that the sense of sudden surprise and urgency over Russia’s hacking operation is “the equivalent of Captain Renault in Casablanca who is ‘shocked’ to discover that gambling is taking place in Rick’s Café Americain.”

Russian officials on all levels have denied the hacking allegations, but these denials have often belied a sense of comeuppance. (“Everyone is talking about who did it,” Putin said in October, denying a Russian role. “But is it that important? The most important thing is what is inside this information.”) The narrative of the Putin era holds that the United States has engineered so-called color revolutions across the post-Soviet world, and has done what it can to undermine Putin’s hold on power. Among Moscow’s political élite and on state airwaves, the hand of GosDep—the U.S. State Department—is conspiratorially omnipresent. Over the past several months, the closest I have come to getting a Russian politician to acknowledge the hacking claims was when a pro-Kremlin lawmaker told me that if anyone inside the Russian state was responsible—which he denied—it was probably done to show American officials that they are not the only ones who can go around meddling in other people’s elections.

The official—and, in many ways, popular—view in Moscow holds that Washington is behind many of Russia’s domestic political events, from the collapse of the Soviet Union to the appearance of anti-Putin protests in 2011 and 2012. “We have done a lot less than the Americans—we should learn from them,” Igor Panarin, a former K.G.B. officer who is now a professor and author specializing in what he calls “information warfare,” told me last week. He has written twenty books; his next, due to be published in the coming months, is titled “Trump: The Collapse or Rise of the United States?” Panarin insisted that Russia had nothing to do with the hacks; moreover, he said, Russia was far behind the U.S. in its ability to wield information as a weapon. “If we look at the Russian military today—the calibre of our pilots in Syria, for example—our armed forces are an order of magnitude more effective than they were in 2008,” he said, referring to Russia’s five-day war with Georgia. “But in the information sphere, in terms of forming public opinion, creating the agenda of the day, our results have been much worse.” This may have been purposely false modesty, but Panarin’s attitude was representative of what Russia’s ruling class sincerely believes: whatever we may do, the Americans do more of it, and worse.

Even as Russian responsibility for the hacks has been established with high degrees of certainty by several U.S. intelligence agencies, as well as by numerous private cybersecurity firms, the question of motive remains less clear. It is one thing to establish the fact of a security breach through technical data, but another to explain why the perpetrator decided to carry out the attack. If U.S. intelligence agencies had human or signals sources that show Russian officials explaining or discussing the motives for trying to influence a U.S. Presidential election, that would be a different matter—though presumably Russia’s paranoid and security-obsessed officials would keep such talk away from any channels that could be penetrated. One way to clear up this uncertainty, and settle the question of Russia’s culpability, would be for the Obama Administration to declassify what it knows not just about the fact that hacking took place but why, and with what aims. Michael McFaul, a former U.S. Ambassador to Russia, told the Wall Street Journal that Obama should “focus his remaining time on attribution—that is declassification of intelligence so that there is no ambiguity about the Russian actions.”