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President Donald Trump‘s new U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth last week reportedly ordered U.S. Cyber Command to “stand down from all planning against Russia, including offensive digital actions,” according to multiple reports.
Covering the development, the New York Times reported “former officials said it was common for civilian leaders to order pauses in military operations during sensitive diplomatic negotiations, to avoid derailing them” before characterizing The Trump-Hegseth “retreat” as a “huge gamble.”
The cyber security news publication The Record reported of Hegseth’s order: “Outside of internal challenges, the order could derail some of the command’s most high-profile missions involving a top U.S. digital adversary,” stating perhaps obviously that this meant, “including in Ukraine.”
Note: In December 2024, Air Force General Timothy D. Haugh, commander of U.S. Cyber Command, director of the National Security Agency and chief of the Central Security Service, told the Times reporter Julian Barnes that every day Cyber Command is ensuring “[“]U.S.] European Command in its role today in support of Ukraine.”
He added, “My role is to make sure that from within the Department of Defense and within the nation, we’ve got an ability to deliver signals intelligence in a unified architecture to ensure that we’re getting maximum value for both military commanders and our policy makers.”
Since Haugh described Cyber Command’s operations and goals, Trump took office and has changed the course of U.S.-Russia relations, beginning a bilateral negotiation directly with Vladimir Putin‘s government ostensibly to end the war, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio leading talks with Russia to which Ukraine was not invited. In an encapsulation of the U.S.’s new foreign policy stance, Trump said this weekend that the U.S. “should spend less time worrying about Putin.”
Former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton replied to news of Hegseth’s Cyber Command order with six words: “Wouldn’t want to hurt Putin’s feelings.”
Wouldn’t want to hurt Putin’s feelings. https://t.co/rK69K8RCBD
— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) March 2, 2025
Hegseth replied to Clinton’s aspersions with a photo (below) taken in March 2009 of then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in Geneva presenting Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov with a ‘reset button.’ The two are laughing as they discover that the label in Russian had the wrong word (“overcharged”) instead of “reset.”
(Note: In Saudi Arabia last month, Rubio also conducted his talks with Lavrov, who has been on Putin’s team for decades.)
— Pete Hegseth (@PeteHegseth) March 2, 2025
Below is an AP video of the exchange. Clinton presented it to Lavrov and said that the gift “represents what President Obama, Vice President Biden and I have been saying.” She added, “And that is, we want to reset our relationship.”
With both of their fingers on the button, Clinton said, “We will do it together.” Lavrov thanked Clinton and pointed out that she and her team had the wrong word. Clinton laughed and said, “Well, we won’t let you do that to us, I promise.”
(Notably, the Clinton “reset” attempt that Hegseth shared predated Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea — then part of Ukraine, a U.S. ally — and its subsequent invasion in 2022.)