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“This is the new ruling elite – the GRU military intelligence, which was the spearhead on the ground in Ukraine and the defense ministry,” says Sikorski, referring to Russia’s largest foreign intelligence agency, which commands its own special forces. “The removal of old elites has not started yet, but that’s the next logical step. … They have unleashed patriotic euphoria. They made this happen by exploiting the psychological and sociological resentment of the all the new and the old intelligence and security services toward the hated class of billionaires with their yachts and their mansions in London. That’s why they are so committed and loyal.”

Help me please make sense of that phrase.

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I believe the first "the" is a typographical error; it's definitely a grammatical error otherwise, and one that should be easy for any author to avoid. Eliminating that, we are left with:

They made this happen by exploiting the psychological and sociological resentment of all the new and the old intelligence and security services toward the hated class of billionaires with their yachts and their mansions in London.

This is a rather unwieldy and verbose way of phrasing this, in my opinion. The author's trying to say that both old and new intelligence and security services were made to resent the "hated class of billionaires." Even simpler, he might have just written "all intelligence and security services."

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    Presumably the author wanted to make clear that he was referring to both the old intelligence services and to the new intelligence services. I don't know enough about Russian politics to know what those are, but whatever.
    – Jay
    Commented Oct 20, 2014 at 19:30

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